All right, we are going to get started. Depending on where you're joining us from, good evening, good afternoon, or good morning. My name is Lance Dickerson. I'm a Field Marketing Manager here at Erwin by Quest. All right, a couple things to know before we begin. First, type any questions you have in the chat. We'll answer those at the end of the session.
Second, we are recording this session. I will send a link to this recording within the next couple of days, so if anything happens technology-wise, if you accidentally get dropped, whatever it may be, I will send you a link to this recording. You'll also be able to share that link with anyone else you would like to share it with.
With that, I'm going to turn it over to Susan Lane. Susan is a DI Thought Leader, and she's also a Director of Solutions Strategist here at Erwin by Quest. Susan, you can take it away.
Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, Lance for that introduction. And I'm sitting here in London with Romina Pyplacz, and she is the Head of Data Management and Governance at E.ON. And it's a really interesting data day for us today when you consider the energy crisis that's going on right now.
Energy is no longer a commodity. We cannot predict the price of energy. And for the last 10 to 15 years, we have been able to always predict what's going on, but today it's a black box, and you just don't know. And at this time in history, this one moment in time, data is so, so important, and it's a game changer at E.ON. For E.ON during this crisis, data has become a point of awareness not just internally but also to the masses as to what is going on. And bringing data, knowing exactly where you stand is helping them speed up the transition to sustainability and also help them scale within the organization to meet the crisis.
So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Romina. Romina has been implementing a data program inside of E.ON for the last five years, and we're so excited to have her here with us today. And over to you, Romina.
Perfect. So thank you very much for the opportunity to share some of our insights and obviously our experiences. And Susan has just given already quite a very good overview about why it matters so much and even more than before for us to work properly with data. And before I actually go concretely into the journey that we have gone through in the last five years and giving you all the insights and learnings and stuff, hoping that it will help you along your way, I would just give you a short understanding of our organization because it is important to understand the complexity of our organization, the size, the different cultures, and so on to get a bit of a feeling for how complex it also is to create such a change in such a big organization. So starting off from there.
We are basically the biggest energy provider across Europe as E.ON, so we do have around 72,000 customers that we are serving at the moment. And at the moment, the number is growing because smaller companies unfortunately get into problems through the energy crisis. And obviously, if there's one characteristic that is attracting right, now it's sustainability. That you can rely on someone, you will get your energy. At least you will get it. Even if it's expensive, but you will get it.
And then we do have around about 900,000 renewable energy plants decentrally installed in the grid. That means that our customers have, for example, the solars on the rooftop or other installations like CHP if it's a B2B business. So we have quite a lot of them in the grid already that all put energy into our grids, right?
Then in the end of the day, we do have 51 million customers that are relying on us as an energy provider for getting energy. And as Susan already shortly mentioned, it used to be normal that you just get electricity, and you will always be able to predict how much it costs. It will always just be there. And that dramatically changed.
And now we are not just any longer an energy provider for the 51 million customers, but we are a partner in a difficult situation trying to help them as much as it's possible for us, to go through the crisis without a too dramatic impact on their, simply, finances in the end of the day, I would say, but also just mental health and everything. So we are way more than just an energy provider, and since the energy crisis, that got very, very clear.
And then last but not least, the fundament for everything we are doing is our grid because it transports our electricity, and we have 1.6 million kilometers of grid across Europe in different countries that we are owning and operating at the moment for Europe or for our customers in Europe. So you can see we are quite a big organization. We do have also overall 13 countries that we operating in on in Europe, which means also 13 different mindsets, cultures, and it means also different strategies and ideas where we actually want to go, right? So of course we all work somewhat together, but we all know that in reality, these are companies by themselves, and they have also their own target.
And what is also extremely important to understand also, why we are investing so much into data, is actually the key targets that we have set for ourselves before energy crisis, actually, for what we want to be seen. What should be our key characteristics that we are known for? So obviously, I think one that is not surprising, because a lot of companies are stating