 Obviously, firstly, just to say thanks to the Institute of European Affairs, to Rory and Peter and Alex and Oshin and all the team for the invitation here today. The Institute gave me my first professional start in life with an internship back in 1996, so I'm eternally grateful. Thanks, of course, also to the ESB. In fact, the ESB has been one of the European investment banks best customers in Ireland ever since we started financing projects in the country back in 1973. And in fact, if the statistic is correct here, it says here that we've signed almost 30 loans with the ESB across transmission, distribution, and power generation. And in fact, that would make the ESB not just our best customer in Ireland. I think one of our best customers anywhere in the world, in fact. And these aren't small loans. Obviously, the average loan the EIB does is about 100 million. In fact, the most recent loan that we signed with the ESB was just a few months ago for the O and any wind farm in Northwest Mayo to the 90 megawatt power project. They're a special purpose vehicle between ESB and board Amona. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. I should step back and just explain a little bit who the European Investment Bank is. We're the EU Bank, the Bank of the European Union, owned by the 28, still 28 member states of the European Union. And together with the European Investment Fund, which is our subsidiary, which specializes in SME financing, our group is essentially the financing arm of the European Union. So we're a taxpayer-owned public bank. We're essentially your bank. And while we operate on a commercial basis, in other words, we don't receive budgetary contributions from the taxpayer. The taxpayer has only ever put money into the bank twice, once in 1958, when we were established, when six billion of gold bullion was sent by the original six member states by train to Brussels. And then we got a substance capital injection in 2012 at the height of the financial crisis. Aside from those two capital injections, we've never taken a euro of taxpayer's money since then. We essentially finance ourselves in the global capital markets and use that financing, obviously, to finance the projects that we invest in. And our financing terms, so while it's not grant-based, we're not providing free money, I mean, it's true, our financing terms and indeed advisory supports can be very attractive, obviously, for project promoters. And our mission in life is to use the attractiveness of that financing, as well as our advisory supports, to strengthen and facilitate projects that support EU policy goals. We're based in Luxembourg, the bright lights of Luxembourg, but we have set up an office here in Dublin in 2016, three years ago, led by Cormac Murphy, who's amongst you. So for any of you who are interested in getting money out of the bank, Cormac is the man to talk to. Our aim is not to compete with the private sector. And this is an important message, but rather to complement what the private sector does in financing projects, particularly to address what we call suboptimal investment situations that arise from market failures. So investment promoters tend to like EIB support, not just because of our low interest rates. The interest rates of the EIB are, do tend to be below market, although actually in the current environment, low interest rates are available from more than one place. So that's not necessarily the biggest attraction of EIB financing. More often than not, it's the long tenors that the EIB offers. So the fact that we can offer loan maturities of 15, 20, sometimes even 25 or 30 years, consistent with the life of the assets, this goes along beyond what most commercial banks can offer. That can be extremely attractive to investment promoters. What's also attractive to investment promoters is the fact that we put projects through a pretty tough due diligence. Now that can be difficult for project promoters, obviously having to answer an awful lot of questions, not just about their credit worthiness, but about the technical, economic, environmental, social standards of the project. The advantage of that though is that once we approve a project, it sends a very powerful signal to other potential financiers that it's received an EIB stamp of approval and it helps mobilize other sources of financing. We're just over 60 years old and our priorities and products and instruments have evolved over time in line with the priorities of the European Union. I mean all the way back from post-war reconstruction back in the late 50s and 60s, infrastructure connectivity to help complete the single market through the 70s and 80s, a big focus on convergence and cohesion with the major enlargement of the 1990s and the 2000s, fighting the financial crisis over the last decade, with a particular focus on under the so-called Junker Plan, the FC initiative on improving access to financing for SMEs and industry. These are all remain important goals for the bank. So all those things I mentioned we continued to do, but there's no doubt that the most urgent challenges facing the European Union right now are environmental and obviously in particular the challenge to slow and adapt to rising global temperatures. The IPC reminds us in pretty stark terms that the world is nowhere close to meeting the targets agreed under the Paris Accords and that on current trends we face potentially catastrophic risks. The EU is of course the world's pioneer in the energy and climate transition and it is on course to deliver the 2020 targets for next year, but as has been well articulated by others over the course of the day, the challenges are only going to get much, much greater. The new 2030 EU climate and energy targets, as agreed as part of the Clean Energy for All Europeans package, the so-called winter package aims for at least a 40% reduction in GHG greenhouse gas emissions and I do expect the new European Commission is likely to revisit that target and make in fact go even beyond it. It targets a 32% penetration of renewable energy and final energy demand and a 32.5% improvement in energy efficiency and energy savings compared to the baseline forecast. Indeed the European Commission has gone further and supported by so far 24 member states including Ireland, proposes that the EU commit to net zero emissions by 2050. Now these targets require not incremental geometric increases in our efforts but clearly an exponential one. Current greenhouse gas emissions will need to be cut by 50% over the next 10 years to meet the existing 2030 target and then on the basis of a linear pathway towards 2050, another 50% over the course of the 2030s. The energy sector is going to have to lead the way, at least under most of the models and energy related investments are likely to have to at least double to over 400 billion a year. This is just in the European Union in the 2020s compared to this decade and to over 550 billion a year in the 2030s in order to basically take all greenhouse gas emissions out of the energy system by 2040. Perhaps a better way to grasp the scale of the investment and financing challenge is to understand that the net zero target by 2050 basically requires us to replace if not most then certainly probably about half of our physical capital stock that we have in our economies between now and then over the next 30 years. You think of our physical capital stock, our housing, our buildings, our transport assets, our energy systems, our environmental and waste systems, our agricultural machinery, our industrial plant, but half of that will have to be replaced over that in order to meet that net zero target. So it's quite an extraordinary and unprecedented challenge. It's clearly to deliver on these ambitious goals we need action on many levels. Let me name just four priorities for the for the European Investment Bank as EU Bank. Firstly, as the largest multilateral financial institution in the world, this is often well known where we don't do a lot of press releasing the IB, but we are in fact by twice the size of the World Bank in terms of annual financing volumes and our balance sheet size, but we should use the power of that balance sheet as well as our expertise to strengthen and facilitate projects linked to climate mitigation and adaptation. Now while we've already become over the last decade the largest multilateral provider of finance for projects supporting climate action and other environmental objectives in the world, we can and must do more. And with June 2019 conclusions the European Council in fact explicitly asked the IB to further step up our climate action activities and in our own proposal to the European Parliament in July the Commission President-elect Van der Leyen has proposed to turn the EIB into what you described as the EU Climate Bank. So what would being the EU Climate Bank mean for the European Investment Bank? Well, most obviously it'll mean a significant increase in the percentage of our annual 70 billion or so investments for projects that address climate action and other environmental goals up from the 25% that you mentioned from last year and some countries have called for us to commit to a 50% target by 2025. This is something currently under consideration. How would we do that? How would we find the projects? There's no doubt for example we can significantly step up our advisory and financing support for energy efficiency projects in particular and building energy efficiency retrofits. Buildings built today or after will only represent about 10 to 25% of the building stock in the EU in 2050. So that means the overall energy performance of the existing stock of the stock of buildings then will largely be determined by the capacity to renovate and improve the energy performance of existing buildings. The availability of attractive financing conditions can help encourage people to make the investment decision. We can help by working in partnership with cities, municipalities, ESCOs or energy savings companies, housing companies, equity funds, corporates, as well as through our partner banks and other financial intermediaries with local retail networks. Typically we can do this by sharing the underlying risks contained within a partner's portfolio of energy efficiency loans. But in our experience I should say cheaper debt alone does little to boost energy efficiency investments. Many investment opportunities, even those offering a relatively short payback period, are not taken. That's why together with the European Commission, the European Investment Bank has developed the European Local Energy Assistance Facility, the so-called Elena facility, which helps promoters prepare and implement bankable energy efficiency projects and programs. And this is something we're rolling out here in Ireland in partnership with the SEAI and other partners in Ireland. And for example, just as a small example, a 1.5 million Elena grant is helping Tipperary Energy Agency prepare energy audits and feasibility studies that will lead to hundreds of renewable energy renovations in private homes. And the grant signed in July of last year is helping install insulation in homes and replace dirty solid fuel heating systems with modern heat pumps that use electricity. Clean power will also, of course, remain another priority for the EIB, and we can do more here as well. Renewable electricity capacity needs to effectively double across the European Union, including in Ireland in the next decade, even as we move from a system of state guaranteed supports to a more commercial footing. And while EIBs long, loan tenors and project due diligence remain helpful to renewable energy promoters, as in the O and INE project, the RE market would also need increasing amounts of equity finance for development and power price risks. The EIB can help here too. Last year, for example, we provided an 84 million backing for NTR Renewable Energy Fund to a Dublin-based 500 million fund that will provide equity finance for greenfield, onshore wind and solar projects, as well as energy storage schemes across Ireland and the EU. But the deployment of existing energy technologies will not be enough, particularly for the 2050 targets. We will also, in cooperation with EU budget supports from the European Commission, finance large-scale demonstration and commercialization of new energy technologies in areas such as hydrogen, other power techs, technologies, battery storage and manufacturing, demand flexibility, and carbon capture storage and utilization. This is important not just for the energy transition, but also for Europe's future technological capacity and industrial competitiveness. For example, we've recently approved a 350 million loan for a company called a startup called Northvolt, which is Europe's first battery gigafactory to supply a new generation of European electric cars. And we also have a couple of energy or technology demonstration projects under appraisal here in Ireland, and I look forward to making announcements in that space soon. And given the challenges of decarbonizing heat and transport, we expect to support increased electrification and sector coupling, particularly for European projects of common interests like interconnectors between countries, such as the North-South interconnector and the proposed Celtic interconnector between Ireland and France. So if stepping up our investments in climate action projects is the first challenge, the second will be to work out how the rest of our portfolio is aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Being the EU climate bank is not just about what we do more of, but also about what we stop doing. Even as we continue our work with other international financial institutions to agree a definition of what Paris alignment is going to mean for banks and other financial institutions, we have already proposed to our board of directors that the EIB become the first multilateral financing institution in the world to stop approving all unabated fossil fuel-based energy projects from 2020. And this will cover exploration, production, transportation, and storage of non-renewable energy sources for the purposes of energy supply. I should emphasize that we recognize the role that gas in particular will play in the energy transition. While short-term fluctuations in renewable energy supply can be mitigated by batteries, hydro, and demand side flexibility and all of which we will support, it's also true that for the moment gas remains the lowest cost source of backup power to deal with seasonal imbalances between energy demand and the supply of renewables. And that's why we have proposed to retain the eligibility for EIB support of gas-fired power generation projects where either the power generation from traditional methane is combined with the production of heat using best available technologies, so-called combined heat and power, particularly for district heating, or else where the traditional methane is blended and ultimately replaced by low carbon or renewable gases such as hydrogen, synthetic methane, or biogas. And we will also continue to support carbon capture and storage. Now we recognize that these technologies are at various stages of development and commercialization, but a significant increase in the numbers of these types of projects can be expected as a result of the support of the EU innovation and modernization funds as well as the big increase in the price of CO2 under the reformed emissions trading system. While decarbonization of our economies need not lead to any reduction in living standards, a major imbalance between the costs and the benefits between countries, regions, and social groups could undermine political support for the transition, as we have seen in some countries quite recently. And that is why the third priority for the European Investment Bank will be to support projects related to the so-called Just Transition. The EIB is already committed to offering extra help to those EU countries, particularly the newer member states, who are further behind in the shift from fossil fuels to clean energy. But a just and fair transition must address not just the energy needs, not just energy needs, but also the employment needs of populations in regions across the EU most affected by the phasing out of fossil fuels. In some coal regions, the bank is already supporting integrated regional plans across sectors, but we must do more. And then we have committed to bringing our advisory services and financing power to support the European Commission's recently proposed Just Transition initiative. I think the possibilities are illustrated, in fact, by the O&NI project that I mentioned, where a site once used for peat harvesting by Board Namona to provide indigenous fuel for ESB, the peat-fired power station in Bellacoric now provides sustainable jobs and clean electricity to 50,000 homes. The fourth and final priority for the EIB is, as a public bank, with deep experience in sustainable finance, to help mobilize others, particularly the private investors, into green and low-carbon investments. With this aim in mind, we're working with the European Commission in the technical advisory group in sustainable finance to agree a common international taxonomy on what economic activities are indeed sustainable. As the first-ever issuer of green bonds back in 2007, and the largest issuer since then, the EIB has become increasingly concerned by the threat to green finance from the proliferation of differing definitions of economic sustainability, the multiple competing labels, as well as differing disclosure, reporting and auditing requirements. A draft EU taxonomy for climate mitigation and adaptation was published by the European Commission in June, and I'm glad to report to this conference that power transmission and distribution was, after some debate and discussion included in the definition. The EU taxonomy will act as a compass for investors, and aims to facilitate a significant behavioral change in the decisions of asset managers and other financial intermediaries. It will provide a clear legal framework initially within Europe, but perhaps eventually across the world, that sustains growing retail and institutional investor interest in green finance, including in green bonds, green mortgages and green investment funds. It will also generate the transparency that can help investors to manage the financial risks stemming from climate change, environmental degradation and from social issues. A final observation in conclusion, there's a lot that banks and other financial intermediaries like the EIB can do to help finance the decarbonization challenge. I mean, we need to change our own policies as I have mentioned, our products, our technical expertise, look at our risk models and our marketing efforts, but we are at the end of the day dependent on project promoters presenting investable projects. As with water flowing downhill, money will eventually find its way to them. But good policies are essential in this regard, adequate carbon pricing, effective regulation and good regional and urban planning. Let me give you two examples that have been essential for the EIB. I estimate that the energy performance of buildings directive back in 2013 basically quadrupled the amount of energy efficiency financing that the bank was able to do by imposing a new standard, the NCEP standard by a certain deadline, and bringing forward massive increase in the number of energy efficiency projects. That was an excellent example. We increased our energy efficiency financing from 1 billion a year in 2013 to about 4 billion a year last year because of that directive. Another example is the emissions trading system. I mean, the recent increase in the price of carbon from about 8 euro a ton two years ago to about 30 euro a ton now, we're already seeing is leading to a resurgence in the number of renewable energy projects that we're being asked to finance across Europe. We went through a serious dip in 2015 and 2016 in terms of demand for our financing in the renewable energy area, but that pricing system, the reformed pricing system, which is effectively in the minds of a lot of investors put a floor under the price of carbon has led to renewed interest again. So policy is absolutely crucial. This intersection and understanding of the relationship between finance and policy is something we want to spend a lot more time on in the coming years. And now that governments have prepared these draft national energy and climate plans, we what we have now proposed to our member states, to the 28 member states, that every year in every member state, we will host what we call a national energy finance workshop to look at that intersection between finance and policy to see what needs to be tweaked in terms of policy, what we need to change in terms of our instruments so that the actual plans that the governments have set out can be implemented in practice. Thank you very much for your attention.