Good afternoon, everyone. Now presenting will be Erica Bearss from Stardust Solar.
Thank you very much. Hi, everybody. Thank you very much for joining today at 4:00 on a sunny afternoon. I hope you haven't had enough SUN while you were here in Nevada, because I'm about to talk to you a little bit more about SUN. Our ticker at Stardust Solar is, in fact, SUN. I was reading an incredible stat this morning using AI, which probably many of us use, and that'll come in handy in a moment when I start talking about why this investment opportunity is a good one. In Vegas, the average day is about 30 million-40 million KWh of electricity usage. In the peak season, the summer days, is 70 million-80 million KWh in just this Vegas city.
As I was walking around Vegas, all I could think about is how can I put solar panels on these buildings? Because that would be a really good feat for our organization. We are Stardust Solar Energy, and our intention is to try to bring solar solutions, not necessarily just solar installation, to communities, to franchisees across North America. We've recently moved into the Caribbean as well as Zambia. We're trying to bring our organization to a global perspective. Here's our tickers, you'll probably see those later as well. We do training development in solar installation and PV voltage. We do all the training and development. We are NABCEP certified for our installers, as well as we've got a lot of recurring revenue streams that I'm going to talk about today.
I'm hoping to go through, just asking a quick question out to the audience, how many of you in the audience actually think that energy will be the most important, valuable commodity in the future, let's say 3-5 years, with a show of hands? Okay, good. Good to know that the audience sees energy as something that we need to figure out the gap as we move forward. I had AI take some information and look at a structure of what the money makers have been in the history of time. In the 1900s, you had coal being sort of the big money maker. Then as you moved into the 1800s, then you moved into the 1900s, you had oil being the big money maker. In the world we're living in right now, it's that information era.
In the next few years, we're seeing a lot of development towards renewable energies in the green space. We are trying to capitalize on this, but we have been around for a long time, it's not something we're jumping on. It's something that we've been doing since 2017 and recently put our franchises in on 2021. The reason I'm saying this, it's for context. This is an investment opportunity that you would get into now, but it may take a little bit of time to get to where it needs to be. But I can tell you with confidence, as I'm doing my doctorate in this space, that the economics are here now, and renewable energies aren't just something to think about anymore. They're something that we actually need to put into the world.
That gives us just a little bit of the overall picture of the industry and why there's a reason to consider it as an investment opportunity, or even just to look into the space a little bit further if you're not already doing so. Just quickly, is anybody investing in this space right now, in sort of the ESGs or the environmental space? Not yet? Okay. Hopefully, this will be the day. Another piece that I want to point out is that the economics of solar are outstanding now. I wouldn't be standing up here five years ago and telling you the same thing. What's happened is the cost of the panels themselves and all the components have come down exponentially, and the technology has come up exponentially. We're looking now at a profitable and an economic process that we can actually bring online.
The other piece is the deployment of solar is so quick and efficient in comparison to things like nuclear. I love nuclear. I think it's awesome, but it takes 15-20 years to put it into practice, whereas we can deploy a commercial scale project anywhere from eight to 12 months. It's not something that takes so long to actually bring into scale. As far as the efficiency levels, they've increased about 58% in the last decade, and those solar cost reductions are about 74%. The numbers are maybe a little bit off, but very close right now. Let's move on a little bit further here. Are there headwinds in the PESTEL? For those of you unfamiliar with PESTEL, how many of you know the PESTEL analysis? Anyone? Environmental analysis.
When we study the market areas in the space, we're always looking at what's happening politically, what's happening economically, what's happening socially, environmentally, ethically, and legally, and those things change constantly. As an organization, any of us in this room that run businesses or working for businesses, we're constantly keeping our eye on this space. One of the biggest questions I always get from shareholders is, "Has the stuff in the America affected your business?" The answer is yes, of course, it has. It doesn't mean that we can't diversify and take action in other ways. The reason I'm bringing this to the point is that, yes, there are headwinds, but I'm going to show you a grid just now, just on the United States, because we're in the United States.
I could show you the grid on Canada as well, but on where the America stands in this space, so that you can see that regardless of the headwinds, the tailwinds are too fast in solar to stop it from moving forward. If we look at residential-- I wish I had that little clicker thingy. Hold on one second. I'm just going to grab the little Can you guys see the red? Can you see the red bit? If you look at residential, it did come down, and it came down because the grants and some of the rebates have gone away. Some states and provinces are bringing them back. Commercial actually went up in 2026. Utility scale, up also. Even if you look over here in the EV charging deployment, it's gone up exponentially in 2026.
Again, with fast charging ports also, our company also does EV charging stations as well as battery storage. It's not just the solar panels. If you look at the 5-year predictions, you're looking at 9-12 gigawatts, 7-9 GW for commercial, and 60-75 GW for utility scale solar. There's a market here. There's a future here in this space, and I hope you can come and join us for the ride. Again, with the fast charging, same increase in those areas as well. The only one that we've been working on is trying to support the residential markets, and we've been able to find rebates and find other ways to structure the finances for those people that want to put solar on their homes.
This just shows you that even with the political and the economical changes that are happening, there's still solar being deployed across the United States as well as Canada. If you look at China, they've already got it covered. India's got it covered. Australia right now is actually giving 3 hours back of free energy usage to their communities because they've deployed so much solar that they can now give back to the communities. There's the space, but now I want to get into us and why it's important. I felt it important to sort of just lay the land and give you a little sort of play on solar if anyone was in the room and wasn't familiar with the space. Now that we're there, let's talk a little bit about Stardust Solar. Stardust Solar is a North American-based company.
We have our offices in Burnaby, British Columbia. We also have an office in Nevada for tax reasons, and also for the deployment in our North American units. We support with PV energy storage as well as EV charging solutions. We did our CPC in October of 2024, so we're relatively new to the public space. That being said, we have been technically around since 2017, and I'll share that story with you in a moment on how we got to where we are today. Last year, we did CAD 5 million in revenue. We were 20% revenue CAGR, we have 40% approximately gross margins. Our forecast for this year is to be at sustainable profitability, doing CAD 8 million-CAD 10 million in revenue. That's just sort of a snapshot.
If you have further questions on that stuff, you can surely talk to me after or at my booth. All right. Where did we start? Let's go through the story of Stardust Solar. I don't know why I keep walking back. Sorry. Just give me a sec, and then I don't have to click back and forth. We started off as a renewable energy training platform. This is where Mark and Evan put together a training platform because there was a need for people to understand how to install solar. Solar is not something like roofing. It's something where you need to have sort of an electrician background or understand all the elements of putting it together. Our team created a big curriculum, and we are now the number 1 solar trainer in North America.
What I mean by that is we don't just train our franchisees. We actually train other companies in how to install solar. We're supporting multiple people in this space. Our margins on the training are 80% because we've got everything set up so when students come to our classroom or when they do our classes online, that money comes into our company, and they in turn get their certifications. We have a network of about 3,000+ trained right now. In our office space, we have a classroom that you can come and take classes, and now we've moved into remote options as well. We also do curriculum development to make sure that we're on trend and on point. What do we do with this network? This franchise network, what is it, what is it about, and how does it work?
Essentially, it's like the McDonald's of franchising or the Tim Hortons if you're from Canada, but we are that in solar. What we do is when a franchisee comes to us, we provide them with a business for CAD 50K, and we provide their branding, their marketing, their certified training through the curriculum courses that we have. We support them with global partnerships, and I'll be talking about a large one momentarily that we recently brought on. Proposal generation, we do all their quoting, all their engineering quoting, as well as, in some cases, their customer financing. We do the supply chain.
If you want solar on your roof and you meet our franchisee, we will quote you, we will give you the information, and we will also have all the panels and the components shipped to that residence, and that residence will install for you as a client or a customer. Each of those panels have a 25-year warranty, so they actually have warranty on those pieces and products as well. This is what the model looks like, and I think it's probably the most important piece of who we are and how we define ourself, and it is our bread and butter. It's the pillar of who Stardust Solar is. You come in, you pay CAD 50K for a franchise fee, and we take 5% of all sales. That's royalties in perpetuity. We provide the education and training system as well, where our gross margins are 80%.
That's also a reoccurring revenue into the company. We also have products and services that we provide to clients, customers, and our franchisees, where we have solar PV panels Energy storage, EV chargers. We also do the proposal creations, which I already mentioned earlier, when a franchise comes on, all the things that we offer them. So far, is everybody clear on where we're at? Yes? Perfect. Let's keep moving. Okay. The other thing that we love is partnerships. Partnerships really help to make any business flourish. Collaboration, working with other companies can really support the growth of your organization, and we have a partnership with Tesla. Some of you may cringe, and some of you may love this. I drive a Tesla, and I think it's amazing, but it also helps us with lead generation.
When we install a plug for a Tesla, that is somebody that is interested in the space and may potentially want to put solar on their home. Our Tesla leads are very strong, very helpful, and we also get recurring revenue from these products as well. They also have an innovation tool that allows people, when you become a customer, if anyone's interested in solar, that you can sort of decide on how your energy usage is going to be used, which is really helpful for the customer and the end user. This is my favorite topic. If you can't tell, I'm wearing Africa earrings, and there's a reason for this, but we have a franchisee in the United States, and he owns three territories. Ochas came to us one day.
He was born in Zambia, and he had a large property that he wanted to put solar on but wasn't sure how to do it. That's where Stardust Solar came in to support. We built a franchise in Zambia. We negotiated a PPA for 20 years with the Zambian government, and we also made an agreement with the local utility people in Zambia. We made sure that we had all the people that were needed to be involved to have this project work. It has been de-risked on so many levels. We've done everything we possibly can to make sure that this project is going to move ahead, to the point that we've recently announced the building of the transmission line where we have bought it, and we will be in control of how the energy is moved through the grid. This project is massive.
It's a 30 MW, not massive, but it's big, 30 MW utility scale project. That 20-year PPA, the projection is it will amount to CAD 100 million, and that's over the 20 years, obviously. We will retain 50% of that recurring revenue from the project. It is 50 hectares, and we have the opportunity to expand that to 100 hectares. But right now the project is only on this big size here. With this one here, this is a pilot, and I will say that since we've signed this pilot and announced this news, we actually have received calls from other countries, and I've had a couple of conversations out here with people that have land and the need to do something like this in Kenya, in Peru. We have one right now that we're working on in Oaxaca, Mexico.
You'll most likely see a franchise opening up in Oaxaca, Mexico, very soon, and that one we would do the similar type PPA agreement for that. That's kind of the buckets that we have. I hope we're at a space now where you would all agree with me on this particular piece here, that the demand for energy is projected to continue to grow in the future, driven primarily by economic expansion, population growth, electrification of our world, and the emergence of new technologies. Lots happening in this space to go. All right. I'm going to get into some graphs and some numbers. Are you ready? Yes? We've got some information. This one here just shows Stardust Solar is not jumping on the bandwagon, like I said. We have our footprint in many different locations. Our brand is being spoken about in all of these locations.
We have relationships with all of these areas as well. We have over 3,000 solar installers, 106 territories now, and we have seven training operations. We do have a lot of ground. We've got the base and the structure to move into these global transactions, whereas in the past, we may not have had all the sort of baselines that needed to be there. This is what our franchise growth has looked like. It's a very organic growth, and you can see we've been growing Y-o-Y in this space. Started with 16, moved to 25, moved to 24. At 110, 2025, we were 106. We're very close. We're hoping to sort of expand that brand more in this year. The reason we can make those numbers bigger is because now our brand is more recognized. We do ad campaigns, we have referrals.
A lot of electricians will buy a solar franchise. A lot of roofers will buy a solar franchise. As you can see, the world moving into this space, the need or the desire to open up a business in solar is becoming more prevalent. Here's just some of those things. I've already said most of these stats. I don't want to repeat too much, but I will go over a couple of them. Usually, in the deals that we sign, they're usually about 15 to 25 each year for those franchisees. Like I said, we're going to try to get to a 140 + by the end of this year. This is what our sales look like. Again, organic growth.
You can see that each year we get better and better and better at what we're doing. We start to grow little by little, but you can see us kind of upward trend. I wish our stock looked like this, but in essence, this is what our sales look like. We're seeing in Q2 even some more sales because we've moved into commercial projects. Those commercial ROIs are much better than residential, and so we've started to move our franchisees into that space, thinking about commercial projects and trying to land those projects. Our team. Our team is amazing. We have all the expertise that you would need to really run a strong solar focus, but also sustainability-focused group of individuals.
I'll only go over a couple of them just because I want to make sure that I'm being conscious of your time and your energy, no pun intended. Mark Tadros, he is our CEO. He has already run two major businesses, and both of them were successful. He is a sustainability advocate. He's a strong leader. He's a visionary. He's driven, and he perseveres. When he has an idea, it rolls through, and he's an incredibly good negotiator and really believes in de-risking all the projects. He's a very great CEO. We have Eamonn McHugh, he's our COO. He's actually a certified electrician, so really understands the technical side of the business and is doing a lot with the Zambia project to make sure it's de-risked and moving forward properly and with all the things that we need. Vitaly is our CFO.
Paul Barluch actually is one I would like to talk about. How many of you have heard of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? You've heard of it? Okay. He ran that organization. He was the starter of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. He's on our board. He runs power hours with our franchisees so that they can understand how franchise models work and how to sell. Last month, he did one on the rule of 27, which is everybody needs to see your brand 27 x before they actually think about you. He did a whole power hour with all our franchisees. He's an incredible resource, incredible board member, and a great person to have on our team. We have Dan Larson, our Head of Sales. Eduardo is one of our senior engineers and so on and so forth.
I think it would be weird if I didn't say anything about myself. I did use an AI feature for this, and it made me look like an alien. I thought I might show you guys that because it was pretty funny. I'll tell you why I'm using AI, because every time I use AI, I think another megawatt, because AI is one of the reasons that solar is going to be needed, as well as the data infrastructure and so on and so forth. I am Vice President of Corporate Communications of the company. I'm also an instructor or professor at BCIT and Adler University, and I am doing my doctorate on the economics of utility scale solar across North America. China already understands it, India already understands, North America doesn't really have a great financial structure for deploying these large-scale projects.
I've been doing my research on that for the last two years and currently writing my thesis in the space. I love sustainability, but I also understand that it's never going to happen unless the economics are there, and it truly is now, and now would be the time to consider it as part of your portfolio. Here's just a little bit on our market cap. In fact, actually, this number is a little bit lower right now, but I think it's CAD 7 million. Our stock price trading between CAD 6 and CAD 15 in the last 52-week range. We recently did announce a private placement, which put the stock down a little bit. Those of you that are in the stock market understand that. In general, for the last year, we had been trading between CAD 0.10 and CAD 0.15.
We have CAD 88 million out right now, and available working capital is about probably CAD 900,000 right now. Our total debt is lower than that because we just paid some of it off. But the goal is to be debt-free by the end of next month. We have a lot of insider ownership. Our CEO, Mark Tadros, owns about 25% of the company. He's in it to be a big part of it. The recent tranche that we just did are all people that are long-term shareholders that want to be part of the project as well. Our catalysts are the acquisitions, the new franchise territories, continuing to bring them on. That will always be. We do get the question of, are you diversifying into global because the franchisee network is not working? That is not the case.
We've signed six on in the recent time that we've been working. We just signed Phoenix on. We just signed Atlanta on. We continue to make that part of our process. We would be remiss if we didn't take advantage of what's happening in the world right now globally, because there's a lot of opportunity in the solar space. It's a solar coaster, right? Hey. Was it Nick? Nick gave me that yesterday. We were talking, and he said, "Are you on the solar coaster?" I said, "I've got to use that in the talk," but I will give him cred. He's got cred on that one. I thought that was good. Although creating those partnerships is a really big part of our projects. Can I get to why invest? Because that's part of the reason that we're here.
Many reasons to be a part of Stardust Solar. That's our little system there. We've got education and training, products and services, as well as the franchise network. Now I need to add in a fourth one for the utility scale projects. Eventually I will do that when it's turned on. We will turn those 2 MW on this year is the goal to get them running. We have high growth potential. Our margins are great. We have revenue. That's always a good thing. We've diversified what we do in order to make sure that the shareholders are not stuck with one story and one reoccurring revenue coming into the company. We want to make sure that we have multiple things going on because we understand that the world changes, trends shift, and we need to be part of that movement.
That being said, we're staying in the space of renewable energies and going to continue to thrive in that area. We have a really innovative product portfolio. We have strong partnerships with many different suppliers that supply in the panel world and all the little pieces and parts that are required for solar installation. We have a strong distribution channel, we have operational resilience, and we definitely have scalability on all of them, residential, commercial, and utility scale projects. We have an experienced team. I only went over four of them, but there are a lot of other amazing members on our team that are part of the strength of our organization. We have a positive regulatory environment in some spaces and some subsidies.
I just want to add on that, even though some of those policies have changed to the negative, some provinces and states have actually gone the other way, and they've provided really strong incentives. I'll give you an example. In B.C., BC Hydro just offered an incentive to give back for commercial scale projects. They're now offering CAD 10,000 for anyone that does a smaller scale commercial project, and they have three different levels. There's small, medium, and large for the levels that they give rebates on, which is one of the reasons we started to push commercial projects. ESG alignment, if you're into that piece, then that's something that you could consider as part of your reason. How to get a hold of us. Mark Tadros is our CEO.
We flipped a coin to see who was coming, I don't know, did I win or did I lose? Who knows? I can't tell. So far, I feel like I won because all you beautiful people in this room, I really appreciate you coming today. Again, I'm Erica Bearss, and we are in Canada. We are Canadian based. How many Canadians are in the room? Only two. The rest are from the U.S.A. or somewhere. Who's from international? Okay. Oh, we do? Okay, sorry. I'm going to wrap. I'm almost there, I promise. Okay. Thank you for your time and energy. Any questions, please feel free to ask. I am at Booth 623, and I also wanted to just have this one up at the end. That is my LinkedIn profile.
If you do want to connect in any way, shape, or form, you can use the QR code there to connect, I can leave that one up there and the alien version of me. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate all of you coming, I really do. Again, 623 is my booth if you have any other questions, we can talk at the networking session as well, if you want any more detailed answers to anything I've talked about today. Do I have time for one question or no? Okay. All right. That's okay. Thank you very much, guys.