Although Europe has been the global leader when it comes to greening its economy, recent challenges may be a cause for concern.----- Transcript -----Rob Pulleyn: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Rob Pulleyn, Morgan Stanley's Head of Utilities of Clean Energy Research in Europe. Jens Eisenschmidt: And I'm Jens Eisenschmidt, Morgan Stanley's Chief Europe Economist. Rob Pulleyn: On this special episode of this podcast, we'll be discussing the future of Europe's energy transition, including whether its clean energy goals are realistic and the implications for investors and Europe's broader economy. It's the 30th of August, 10 a.m. in London. Rob Pulleyn: Europe has long been a global leader when it comes to greening its economy. Strong societal and political support has bolstered the region's transition to clean sources of energy, with a European Green Deal and climate target plan aiming to reduce CO2 emissions by at least 55% by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050. While substantial progress has been made over the previous decades, the region is now facing several challenges. Jens, can you give us the backdrop to Europe's energy transition and some of what's changed recently? Jens Eisenschmidt: Yes Rob, I mean, you have explained it already. There are big change targets, climate change related targets to the energy transition that Europe has subscribed to. These targets were in place already before the 24th of February in 22, when we saw the Russian invasion in Ukraine that changed the European energy set up profoundly. Now, why is this important? It's important because these targets were done in sort of a plan that relied on a certain energy source that is no longer existing. So let me give you an example. Let's take Germany, which was anyway already quite progressed in its journey onto increasing the share of renewables in electricity production. If you take Germany, they have been turning their back on nuclear power generation, which is another source of emission free power generation, and have embraced as a flex load provider, so as a provider of electricity when renewables are unavailable to natural gas. Now this natural gas supply from Russia is no longer available, as we all know, and of course, that implies that the Germans and other member states of the European Union as well have to change the plan by which they transit to a carbon free economy. And, you know, this is very complicated because it's not only switching one energy source for the other or exchanging one for the other. You also have to look about the infrastructure, you have to see what is essentially giving your energy mix the stability, as I said before, when we don't have sun shining and wind blowing, you need to have a source that's about the question about storage technologies, that's not entirely independent of the energy sources that you have available. And so the last year provided a profound challenge to the way Europe had planned its energy transition, so they have to replan it, and the complexity of that is huge. Essentially, it's something you want to ideally plan at the European level in order to harness all the comparative advantages all the countries have, given example, you have a lot of sun hours in Spain, less so in Germany, so ideally you want to put solar for Europe somewhere south and not so much somewhere north. But that of course means something for the grid, you have to deploy around it. So all that complexity is huge, all the coordination needs are huge and so this is the new situation we are in. Rob Pulleyn: Yeah, that new situation clearly puts increased pressure on Europe, if electricity prices remain elevated, Europe's large industrial base and you mentioned Germany would continue to shoulder this burden. You know margins, pricing, competitiveness would all suffer and the region's place in the global value chain might be at risk. Now, renewables are increasingly cost competitive, but even when the solar power is still very int