With a Ron Sagon and from London and Gerard read from Berlin. This is
redefining energy minutes. This is a special redefining energy life. From Athens.
We are in the You're Electric, you'ly submit and my guess is charge your
stasis the see of PPC. Good afternoon, thank you for having me.
Well, first we got a message from Gerard which I'll receive. Sorry,
guys, I missed my plane, so it's just going to be long.
Thank you very much. So your Electric are friends of the show and once
you're they organized this great submit we're in. I mean it's a great success.
Five hundred delegates and were your prime minister this morning and all this is
organized by Leo bion Bon, the se of Ion which we call Leo the
Great. We love him very much. Yes, but before we start talking
about PPC, the company you are the CEO off and such an extraordinary success,
we'll start by a quiz, all right, And the quiz is every
time you've got your Electric summit, they come with super flashy titles. So
the quiz is going to be your Electric or ac DC. So I'm going
to tell you a title and you're gonna say if it's a euro electric or
a CDC already right, Okay, Number one is power up a CDC good
one point game changers. That's your electric, yes, excellent, could be
also ey DC, it could be, it could be. But okay,
number three I voltage a CDC ac DC and to finish lights on. That's
your electric. That's your electric exactly, exactly. Maybe Georgio's before we enter
in the debate world about PPC, because you have done a remarkable turnaround the
past five years. Yep came the company in twenty nineteen. The company was
not in the best shape, in a very bad shape actually a financial at
that period, because of a series of choices of the company and of the
country in the past, in the sense that there was a delay in adopting
to the energy transition. So I came back in Greece, in my country
with the challenge to lead PPC. When we put on the tracks of the
energy transition the company. We developed a three pillar strategy. First of all,
the first pillar was a de carbonization, so we are doing the fastest
lik Night phase out, while in parallel we invest significantly on renewables. A
second is about digitalization and cross all business lines and as particularly in the network.
And third has to do about customer centricity, news services, advanced energy
service, many other things that I can explain, but just to sum it
up. Since then, from twenty nineteen adopting the strategy, we have had
our numbers improvingignificantly. So I think this is important because going on the journey
of the energy transition, we're doing it for climate regions, but we're doing
it also for economic regions. Nowadays it's cheaper to deploy solar and win for
instance, and new technologies. So as we were unfolding the strategy, we
saw our numbers improving year by year. Year by year, we started becoming
stronger and stronger, and we went out of Greece. We'll talk about that
later. So you take a company which is kind of a bit of a
public dinosaur, losing money and if I look at last year your result you
made like one point five billion positive. Yeah, and you've been privatized,
if I understand, Well, so there's probably less interaction. Yeah, there's
always interaction with the government, probably not on a day to day business.
So really I'm interested, how do you have managed to turn around so brilliantly?
If I would choose one element is again the beauty of the energy transition.
I mean, our sector is evolving significantly. A lot of other sectors
are moving through electrification to our sector, and this is a fascinating journey.
Is very fascinating to imagine these new services of the future. For instance,
we did immobility, a new business. We are doing fiber aloud, we
are doing a demand response. All this new stuff, when adopted inside an
organization, makes the people inside the organization excited about this new purpose, this
new vision, so they follow the vision with great enthusiasm. I would say
women to arrive where we are today because of enthusiasm and the vision of those
people to follow and make this new stuff that we're doing. Now, you
discover something that your processor did not figure out. You discover that Grice was
sunny and windy, hich s extraordinary. But you're really you're the first figure
it out. You see. My point is not such a big brain,
and it's just that I dare to say that it was also the correct timing.
The technology got cheaper, Yeah, technology got cheaper. Actually. PC
was one of the first companies worldwide to do the first wind pack in the
eighties, but then nothing, so PPC lost the train of the first big
boom of renewables after two thousand twenty ten, but we definitely didn't want to
lose the train of renewables now becoming below GRET parity, and this was the
fuel giving us fuel in our balance seat to do more and more and more
and more with the cheap renewables becoming very competitive. And then again when you
take out lignite, because lignite as opposed to hard coal is open minds,
open minds. It means that we have an unplavailability of land the size of
a city. Just to give you the dimension of the land we had before
mining was in the size together of the Saloniki, just to make an example.
So immediately you can go there. What do you have there? You
have interconnection points from the old power stations, You have land, and you
can put solar very easily because you have the land already laid in front of
You need to rehabilate a bit, but not a lot. Then you have
like holes in the ground that you can fill with the water and do pumping
hydro just for example. You can do ancillary serviceistion the old power plants.
So there's so many things we can do when you take the decision that it
is the time to go in the next day to do and push the bottom.
Yeah, repurpose because also there's something that is very clear when you're in
Greece is that well, first there's a lot of mountain, a lot of
islands, so it means that the old transmission system, I mean, it's
not that simple. It's not that simple, right, And Greece has the
so called non interconnected system, which is the islands which are isolated a stand
alone bases and then the transport operator IPTO has his own plan to interconnect them
with submarine cables and this is developing. And the last islands that will remain
we will tackle them with distributed generation in combination of batteries and solar and wind.
But this will be the very few ones. Greece is working through IPTO
to connect the island. So it's a complicated environment because of this geography.
But in every country has plus and minuses. Here we have more sun.
We don't have the wind of the North Sea, but we are working more
on the sun. That's why we are working on technology diversification as well.
We do a lot of solar, but we also do hydro. We also
do some gas. Gas is a transmission that fuel. The role of gas
is changing, it's just only for peaks now, but it's still there in
a certain extent. And the big volume is from wind and solar. And
we also need to do geographical diversification, which was what I was telling you
before. Yeah, what became is clear for or not in Greece, is
that as you got better, there was this connection toward the Norse Pulgaya than
of course Romania, which somehow extended your zone of influence. And at the
end of last year you did this extraordinary operation where you bought a Romania,
which was beyond the money. It meant that the mood inside PPC a change,
that you feel confident enough to go beyond your border, but not like
crazy everywhere. To also that it makes economic sense because it's part of people,
say Balkans, I would say southeastern Europe, so which somehow create regional
integration. So can you be elaborate on this regional integration and of course your
Romanian operation. Yeah, it was clear on my mind early on that because
I had the experience, I mean, this field down twenty years, we
are in a single European market. The markets are interconnected, they are settling
in the day head market, all of them together in the same timing.
So Greece, which is a market which was an NT importer, was important
just to give you a practically from the northern borders, and this is through
Bulgaria to Romania and so on and so forth in the central Europe. Since
we were important anyhow, it why not to grow and build our own physical
presence in other countries. In our markets. One has to have a European
view because the markets are complicated and interacting one to the other. So it
was clear from the beginning we couldn't do. In the start we were because
we had our own problems and we had to put some order in our house.
But later on that we managed to become healthier financially. We clearly said
to the market that we're focused on growing in the north, and when we
say in the north, in places that we have interconnections in order to use
our trading capabilities also with physical assets. We found the opportunit end Romania.
We thought for this and we managed to get it in a very good valuation
and we are operating a very big company in Romania. As well. We're
very happy for that. Romania has its own energy transition story anyhow to do
so also on a stand alone basis is very attractive because it's twenty two million
inhabitants with a lot of needs, that demand needs growing in the coming years.
So we are also building significant new renewables there, not only the ones
we found. Just to give you an idea, we build something like more
than four gigaba in Greece and another one and a half gigabat in Romania,
and we want to do another half or one gigab in the remaining countries Bulgaria
included. So we don't want to go I mean, I said in the
past and with investors talking, I might have a wonderful opportunity in the UK
of a good solar park, but for me, a solar park in the
UK is on a stand alone basis. Somewhere else I cannot deploy our trading
synergies. So we are particularly focused on South East Europe and on countries that
are interconnected one to the other. Because you have the generation, we have
also the supply business. We are a vertical integrated operator and we want to
have supply business also in the countries. We go well in San Romania,
and we also bought the supply business. At the end, this is about
portfolio management. You have generation, you have supply. You have years with
very low commodity costs. Because the only constant and known thing that we will
know for the future is that we will have volatility in the markets. That's
pretty sure. This is absolutely sure. So with volatility, we will have
years with very high commodity costs, years with very low commodity costs. So
what do you do. You need to have also the supply business, and
sometimes you make from the supply and you lose on the other or vice versa,
the right pocket, left pocket strategy. You need to have geographical diversification
because of managing and hedging yourself because sometimes you have more rain or wind or
different weather in different low aass first point. Second point, you need to
have technological diversification. I talked about this and solar and wind and every country
wind is more in Romania, for instance, so we are pushing a lot
for wind in Romania. You combine all these things to subject of Romania.
Does the wind blows at the same time in Romania and Greece not always.
You might have also this, but not always. Generally the wind blows better
in Romania versus someplace in Greece. Of course, we have the GM for
the offshore in the future, which is maybe one of the best, but
not deployed right now. You need to take the average of the country.
Okay, the average of the countrys of wind in Romania is a little bit
better, but Chris enjoys more irradiation from the sun. So we're trying to
combine all forces. So it means that those inter connections were almost daily in
and out, in and out. Yeah, you change in the hour,
Yes, change especially now lately since we talk now, in the last weeks,
we have witnessed and negative prices in Greece where we balance with the northern
borders, and this is part of the market line. Now we are managing
the torch. But we need to enjoy the pictures. Well, absolutely,
you're enjoying, if I may say so, the beauty of interconnector on the
show, we love interconnector. Also let's talk about the future a bit of
interconnector. Also probably first Europe, what vision do you have, Yeah,
the best example for interconnectors in Europe is what we experience with the Ukraine War
because Europe managed to survive because of using primarily the interconnectors supporting one country to
the other. The unity of Europe was the real example, and that's why
many times there are limitations to how much renewables, for instance, you can
do. And this is where the interconnectors are very crucial. In order to
do this flow of energy north and south west and the east inside the European
unions, it's very important for the new Commission to push a lot on the
new interconnectors and the countries to manage to develop more and more inside Europe.
Then again, if you look not only Europe but also the other continents and
think there is a lot to be expected from northern Africa, there is a
project that is about to be developed, and there are several times. Actually
one of them is Egypt de Greece a cable and that would make sense for
the future to build Why not to build a more renewables there and pass them
over. On the other side, everybody is doing digital like literally everybody.
So when you have a digital strategy, so how does it work? Like
you look at what the other guys from your retric are doing, or some
guys have ideas, So how do you prioritize it and how do you execute
it. We started the transformation nineteen and we arrived where we arrive today and
we are becoming a regional champion in the Southeast Europe. So we are always
trying to find ways how to do. Also, technological leaps take us further
in front, and digitalization is one of the most important elements. You might
have solutions which are playing Vanilia. I would say then that would be automations,
GIA systems, the systems in the network, but you also have new
technologies like IoTs trying to be able to monitor your network all the elements of
it, because the more you monitor, the more you can manage it better
and be reactive on your operation. But then we feel that it is our
obligation to look on the front front of the technology. We are actually developing
a fiber network as well as part of our business. For every home we
will be reaching three and a half million households passing this fiber. We are
deploying an international some marine fiber from Greece to Saudi Arabia and then further tog
up to Singapore and all this at the end work together because for instance,
we are starting the construction of a new data center in Athens, twenty five
megaba data center. The AI will play a significant role in changing everybody's business
as well as in our sector. In particular in our sector both in the
way we do energy trading, so we are trying to pile We do a
few pilos there, but also as an infra. Let me be more specific.
We are entering the data center possibilities because I've started talking about the formlignite
areas and what we have there. And if you think what the data center
needs, it needs land, it needs an interconnection, and it needs renewable
in order to be green, it needs cooling. We need water like the
older thermal power plants, we're using water. So we are trying to synchronize
this stuff to make big data centers for housing AI activities. And we are
two years now that we are trying to find the best way to enter in
this market. Lately we did the first move with Dramac and we're making this
first data center in Nothings. We are considering enter more actively on this field.
Wow, very interesting. Just before we conclude and we had him on
the stage. We like us podcaster your electric continue to tell our support for
t Tech, Maxine Teaching COO and the people of Ukraine who are shelled every
day by Russian thugs. They have all our heart and our support. And
I know for the fact that the European energy industry has been helping a lot
your pretive keep the lights on. And this is very important. It's not
just politicians. Goes back to the unity went yes, exactly exactly. We
are a united industry, Okay, Jeorjoe, thank you so much, thank
you very much, thank you very much. Thank you for listening to Redefining
Energy. Don't forget to rate the show and subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify
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