One year on...

First of all, the organisation has grown... and fast! We launched at the turn of 2019/2020 with a team of around 30 employees. Even though not everyone on the original team made the transition from the preparation phase to the operational phase, Invest-NL now has over 60 employees on its payroll. An impressive – and in many cases young – team of enthusiastic professionals: precisely the combination we are looking for. We want our people to be fired up by the urgency of our mission, but also to keep their cool as professionals with expert knowledge of venture capital or solar energy or heat networks or green gas... ideally all of the above, although even for us that perfect, all-round combination would be a rare find!

With such a fast-growing organisation comes a steep learning curve. Not least because we were breaking new ground in the Netherlands. And just when we had hit our stride and found our focus, COVID-19 came along and shook everyone’s world to the core. As a result, the past year was also characterised by ups and downs, trial and error, and sometimes progress has been slower than we would have liked. Through it all, we remained convinced that the second half of the year would give us wings. And our conviction has been rewarded. Major studies on the financing of Wind at Sea and the business case for various heat storage technologies reached completion, a coalition of the willing on sustainable inland shipping was formed and, in collaboration with the European Investment Fund, the Dutch Future Fund was launched. And these are just a few of the landmarks achieved by our Business Development Team. The number of transactions brought to a successful conclusion also took flight in the second half of the year. We started Invest-NL with three financing projects in our portfolio. By the end of Q3 we had five, by the end of Q4 we had ten, and at the moment of writing we are up to thirteen.

A final highlight well worth mentioning is the recalibration of our strategy. Of course, every new venture needs to have a strategy in place from day one, and we are no exception. But any strategy developed before an operation is up and running is bound to fall short in some respects. At the very least you need to keep an open mind and try to learn from experience as you go. That is something we have focused on intensively over the past year. And all of those experiences and observations have been channelled into strategic adjustments. The result is a highly effective set of principles to guide us through the next five years. In terms of priorities, I believe our most important step has been to widen our focus on the energy transition to encompass the transition to a carbon-neutral and circular economy. This represents a significant shift in objectives underpinned by three very conscious choices:

• One: the climate transition is broader than the energy transition and takes in other key issues such as changes in feedstock.
• Two: alongside the transition to a carbon-neutral economy (the climate transition), the transition to a circular economy is at least as important.
• Three: we need to take an integrated approach to both transitions and so we will not finance circular initiatives that have a negative impact on the transition to a carbon-neutral economy; nor will we finance climate initiatives that have a negative impact on the transition to a circular economy. Anyone who has followed the recent debates about battery technology and rare metals knows how easily these two objectives can collide.

To sum up: our work has only just begun!

Wouter Bos

CEO Invest-NL