Thank you very much. Thank you everyone. Welcome to our first of many to come, I hope, Investors Day. I know many of you were disappointed because we had to postpone the first one due to the COVID situation. We were more disappointed than anybody else because we wanted to meet with you and tell you our story, where we are and where we are going. To begin, I just want to introduce our Chief Financial Officer, Doran Hole, and she will go through the agenda today, and then I will come back and talk a little bit about Ameresco, where we are, and hopefully where we are going. It's a great opportunity.
I want you to take the time and meet the great management team that we have in this company. The tremendous bench strength. You will see about 11 individuals, of which 10 they manage P&L responsibilities. Thank you very much for coming. Doran?
Thank you, George. Welcome everyone. It's great to see everybody here. I know I've met many of you before, sometimes at conferences, otherwise on telephone calls, and I'm really glad that we can do this live. Thanks, George, for the introduction. You know me as the CFO. And of course, my first step is to throw up the safe harbor statement. I'm going to try to do the least amount of talking today because, as George mentioned, we've got a lot of really, really deep bench leadership talent in the room that's gonna be going through the agenda today and hoping that you can walk away from here with a really, really good understanding of our business, where we're going and why we're going there.
Following this little welcome, we're gonna have George spend some time with Leila talking about the market opportunity, talking about the company and where we are. We're gonna have a short break around 3:45, and then we're gonna invite a couple of our clients here. First of all, we've got a sustainability rep from Bank of America who's gonna talk about the C&I work we've been doing there. That's a very, very good design build customer of ours. We've done a lot of work on solar installations for them. Secondly, we have a customer from the federal government, from GSA, who's also gonna talk about some of the comprehensive projects that they look at and where Ameresco fits into the story.
As we get into the heart of the afternoon, I think the important parts of the session, we're gonna see a number of our folks come up and talk about new markets, new business models, and new opportunities for the company to grow. I think that that's gonna be a really exciting segment that I'm hoping will resonate with you all as you look at the broad landscape of sort of clean tech and clean tech integration. We'll also touch on, Leila and I, some ESG metrics that we're chasing for ourselves as well as our customers. I'll spend a few minutes just talking about the SoCal Edison project. Everyone's thinking about it. I want to give you an idea of where we are, what we're thinking about there, how that is coming together.
Lastly, we'll hand it over to George to talk a little bit about our future financial goals, and then we'll open it up for a larger Q&A. Notably, after that larger Q&A, we will be having about an hour-long cocktail reception in the next room. All of the executives that are speaking here and some of the others that are here along for the day are also gonna be in there, and we really invite you to go and interact with them on a one-on-one basis, to get to know the deep bench that we have. Speaking of that deep bench, here they are. In addition to myself and George, we have business unit leaders up and down the organization. Finance, capital markets, legal, technical, they're all here.
We want you to be able to see them, we want you to be able to interact with them, and we're very much looking forward to a great day here. With that, I'm gonna turn the mic back over to George. Let him run through.
Thank you very much, Doran. Again, good afternoon, everyone. You know, some of you know me way back. When we started this business, I said, Ameresco, we want to be the number one in our space. I'm delighted to tell you today that you will see some of the marketing studies that are out there, Ameresco was indeed the leader in this space. The other thing that I wanted to point out to you is who is really Ameresco and what differentiates us from the rest of the group. Ameresco, we are the leading cleantech integrator and developer of owner and operator of renewable assets. We develop those assets either for ourselves, our own balance sheet, or for our customer.
The greatest strength of Ameresco, and this is what you're gonna hear today and what you see, our people. We have tremendous bench strength, not only in our senior management team, but in the second and third tier teams. You know, I've been in this industry for over 50 years. One of the things I focus a lot, building the organization behind in order to execute what you have undertaken. I'm proud to say that we have executed. They demonstrated this very well the last couple of years. This group has a culture, not only to be entrepreneurial, not only to have the passion for this particular business that we are in, but more importantly, the resiliency. The resiliency in the last couple of years, we managed the company, coming out on the other side, much better shape than we were when we got into it.
To me, I, you know, I'm forever indebted to the people that we have in the company because they stepped up, and they executed very, very well. The other thing that Ameresco has that differentiates us, again, from many competitors, a great franchise. We have over 60 offices across North America and three in U.K., and we will expand more in Europe. We have a great franchise because this business, in order to execute, you have to be local. Otherwise, if Boeing is gonna hire you better have some people in Seattle in order to execute that particular contract. Then the rest of it, the numbers speak for themselves. We have implemented over $11 billion of projects. Over 99.9% we have on budget and on time. That's why when you see big projects like the Southern California Edison, don't get paranoid.
We have executed before, and we will execute again. You know, the other thing that is great about Ameresco, and that's why we came on the other side of this COVID-19 better than when we got into it, great visibility. You know, even right now we have $5 billion of backlog. $2 billion of which, of those billions, they come from recurring revenue base. Half of it comes from the O&M, the other half comes from the assets that we own and operate. Then the other $3 billion comes from projects that we have on the backlog, so it's very, very great. We say you have great backlog, great visibility, and then what differentiates us in the marketplace from the competition, and why we win in more projects than the other people?
We have spent the time basically to broaden the capabilities of the company to address various needs of that particular customer. That's what you see here. Each and every time we step up to the plate, we wanna deliver the best value for our particular customer. What is that value? It's not always price. The customer might be looking for a comprehensive and advanced technology portfolio. Otherwise, he might be looking for resiliency, battery storage, microgrid, smart sensors and so on. Over the years, we've built the capability to deliver that, so that helps us a lot. Might be the best technical expertise. Many companies.
Let's say the biomass project that we built in Savannah River for the Department of Energy, we were selected because we were the only contractor making a presentation that could take the project from the development to the implementation. Otherwise, we did the engineering, we did the construction management and so on. Many other companies, they had a subcontractor to do that particular work. At the end when we were just starting up operations, the contracting officer for the DOE, he says, "George, would you like to know why you won the job?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, everybody else, they had different. Another engineer and so on. You guys, you were fully integrated." We said, "If anything goes wrong, we'll look at George.
The other guys will point the fingers this way." That, that's a great value proposition for us, and that's why we win in many projects. Then the other thing that has helped us a lot, and has tremendous traction in the marketplace with technology agnostic, we are supplier agnostic. Otherwise, supplier may supply electricity, okay. We approach the solution from the customer's perspective. Whether it make sense for that particular customer, that particular superintendent, that particular utility, as we going right now, and we have the expertise across the board so we can do that. Then what's happening today, the customers are looking more just an implementer, let's say, of an energy-saving solution. They're looking for a sustainability partner.
We have developed the software to establish the baseline where they are right now on the carbon footprint, and then we can develop, finance and implement the plan to get them to whatever carbon reduction they need. We have done some, like the Arizona State University was one of the universities going out. They wanted to achieve carbon neutral by 2035, and we won that particular job. That's helping us a lot, another driver. Then of course, flexible financing. Many of you know that we have the energy savings performance contracts, and that's basically it's a third party financing, and we guarantee that the savings will be there.
They pay for the debt, so the customer gets what we call budget neutral or sometimes positive cash flow, but they upgrade their facilities, they reduce the carbon footprint and so on. Lately, you will have heard energy as a service. It's no different. The only difference is that if we get paid over time rather than the percent complete. What does that mean? It is that many times that can go off-balance-sheet financing for the customer. Or it might be design-build, where the customer pays us on a percent complete, or any hybrid solution of all the above, and we are flexible enough to say, "That's great." Lastly but not least, because we have great footprint across North America, we can address national accounts.
Because we are in U.K. right now and expanding in Europe, it will be international accounts as well. Ameresco, if you look at our business, basically we have three complementary lines of business. One is the projects, and you're gonna hear a lot about the projects from Nicole Bulgarino, and how that market has expanded, but the project is a great business because it gives us great cash flow. In addition to that, remember what I said earlier, investing in assets can be a capital-churning business, so you have to generate that cash flow somewhere else. In addition to that though, we have the operation and maintenance come in about one-third of the contracts that we have on the project. We get some kind of an operational maintenance contract.
That's where you say we have a $1.1 billion of operational maintenance contracted backlog. Some of those contracts, they're as long as 25 years. It's great recurring revenue baseline. Of course, we have the assets. Many customers we have done work for them, like take for example, Newton Public Schools. We did all the schools for the energy efficiency, then they wanted to have renewables, they wanted solar. Guess who won that particular contract? We did because we had the relationship, and we have the capability on executing for that particular one. Mike will talk a lot about, and then Jonathan Mancini much more about the assets, but they give us a great recurring revenue baseline. Well, what's driving our business? I think we talked. You have the old drivers.
Basically, cost savings. You get infrastructure upgrade. Of course, you get better comfort level. That was the traditional ones. Now we're beginning a lot of help. I don't know where you wanna start. I have six here, but I think yesterday we heard the seventh one. Right now, the SEC will require climate change reporting. Decarbonization is becoming a catalyst. Many customers are looking how to reduce their carbon footprint, and we can help them. ESG, the same thing applies. Policy and incentives, again, it's a trend, and we're taking great benefit from it. Of course, the resiliency because of climate change and because the more solar renewables you get, the more wind, the more PV, ultimately, weather takes both of them out.
The utilities are looking for backup. Battery storage is a key. Down the road, it will be more effective mechanisms. Again, it has become a new business line for us. It's helping a lot. Grid stability. I mean, the Southern California Edison project is a great example of the grid stability. We were playing a lot, what I call, on the customer side of the meter. You're gonna see us playing quite a bit on the other side of the meter as well. The market is expanding. We talked about it a lot. All the people that you will hear, they will talk quite a bit about how we're gonna accelerate our growth, primarily advanced three categories.
Advanced technologies, whether it's energy efficiency, whether it's renewable energy. You can read the bullets yourselves, but each and every one of them is contributing tremendously, and you will hear much more about it. Geographic expansion and mergers and acquisitions. You know, like I said before, we have done over 20 acquisitions, primarily to establish the franchise across North America because we wanted to be local and acquire the talent. We did that, and we did that very well. Don't be surprised that where we're weak, like southeast part of the U.S. or Europe, that you will see us do some acquisitions in those particular markets because they are growing, and we have the capability. The other thing, we have the reputation.
Each and every time that we get evaluated by the federal government or customers, we score number one on execution, number one on technical capabilities, and number one on customer satisfaction. That's where you wanna be at the end of the day. I'm paranoid about customer satisfaction. I keep telling our people each and every time I want to exceed those customer expectations. That has paid off a lot. We have made mistakes. I said, "I don't care. Go back, fix it." Bob can talk about couple examples where we ended up winning the customer over, and now we have done seven, eight more projects with that particular customer. We will expand that. We'll capitalize on our reputation. Then, of course, we always were doing infrastructure upgrades. Now that infrastructure, we have new ones, like the electric vehicle charging stations.
Each and every project that we are doing right now for the colleges, universities, military bases, bus terminals, and so on, they want electric vehicle charging stations. Guess what? You know, we will install them for them. Then, of course, the smart cities, we talked about that. Many of you have heard about the Chicago Streetlight project, but we're getting to be one of the number one competitors in that particular market. Smart cities, smart colleges, smart universities, and so on. The other one, the utility modernization and reliability and stability. You see us play that little bit on that. Basically, that's what we have. We have, I think, a great opportunity in front of us, but also great capabilities that the company has.
The other thing that we did, because too many things, too many strategies, too many technologies, and so on, rather than have what I call, used to call ad hoc strategic planning for the company, we wanted to institutionalize that. We asked Nicole Bulgarino to lead a group of other strategic assets in the company to every year to come up with a particular strategist and then have a common, marketing or value proposition for the particular customer to go ahead. Associated with that, we wa nted to pick one of the brightest and smartest people in the company, and he's here, Jim Bishop, who is gonna be our Chief Technology Officer. Some of the very creative projects that you have seen with Nicole's group, he is the primary instigator behind all those.
With that, I will turn over to Leila to tell you why we're number one.
Okay.
Thank you.
I have one minute to do it. Let's see here. Okay, great. Many of you I've met before, some of you I haven't. Just to give a quick intro, my name is Leila Dillon. I head up the marketing and communications here at Ameresco. What is my job? It's to track where we are, where our competitors are, and what is our total addressable market. One of the actually two key themes that you're gonna hear today throughout all of the sessions are the following. The first is that we're accelerating our position as a leading clean tech integrator. You're gonna hear throughout the day how we're doing that and why we feel uniquely capable to continue to do that. The second thing you're gonna hear about is how we're expanding our addressable market.
That's through a number of investments in people, in technologies, and solutions that we've made over the years that enable us to have a much larger addressable market, not necessarily this year, but next year, the year after, and the year after that. How do we go about that? First of all, we used an outside market research firm called Guidehouse. They're an analyst firm, and they're excellent at really covering the energy services space. We worked with Guidehouse in the beginning of the last few years so that they can come back to us with a really objective understanding of who our competitors are and how we match up to them in the marketplace. What I like most about this slide, if you start over here, is that we certainly are leading the market.
If you look at the 2020 data that Guidehouse produced, we have a good piece of the pie, the leading market share at 8.9%. We're a few tenths of a decimal point away from our competitors. If you fast-forward just one year, what you see is that we've gained in market share. We're now at 11, almost 11.5% of the market, and now we're a couple percentage points away from our competitors. I really love to see how we're pulling away, and we're really owning more and more of this market. Now, this is just the ESCO market. This is the $9 billion ESCO market. If we jump forward here, you're gonna see our total addressable market.
While $9 billion was the ESCO market, we're now looking at a total addressable market going from $80 billion up to $109 billion or $110 billion. How is that possible? Well, over the last few years, Ameresco has made a number of investments, as I said, in people and in solutions. Today you're gonna hear a lot more about our Smart Building Solutions and what we're doing there. You're gonna hear about EV charging infrastructure and that capability that we've brought in-house. You're gonna hear a lot about Mike's RNG plans and the pipeline associated with those plans. You're gonna hear about our utility works that we're doing and why that's added a big chunk to our total addressable market, and so much more.
What you don't see up here, and I've captured this, is a whole another category that I couldn't even fit on the screen, and that's hydrogen. You're gonna hear from Mike a little bit later on the expertise we've developed in-house and what that capability of blowing this chart even off of this chart, actually, blowing these numbers off of this chart. With that, I'd like to hand it over to Nicole Bulgarino. For those of you that haven't met Nicole, let me give you a little bit of a background on Nicole. I think most people know about her here. Nicole heads up our Federal Solutions group. Obviously, she's Executive Vice President and GM of the Federal Solutions group. She also, as George said before, heads up our corporate strategy group and has launched that this year.
Prior to that, she also last year launched our Center of Excellence, which is all around training the rest of the company on all of the advanced technology solutions. Nicole and her team are responsible for some of the company's marquee projects. I know you've heard of them before. Parris Island, for instance, Petaluma, you're gonna hear about today, and even some of the market's favorite project, the floating solar at Fort Bragg. Nicole has certainly pushed the envelope in so many of the things that she's done for the company, and now she's gonna dig in on our strategy and also our projects work. I guess I have to give this to you.
Thank you, Leila, for setting that high bar of an introduction. Good afternoon. It's really an honor to be able to share with you our strategic vision on how we see creating opportunities and leveraging these mini-market dynamics and drivers to accelerate growth in our projects and O&M business. For us, and looking at these drivers, and George mentioned a few of them already, drivers for the need for resiliency, the drivers for deferred maintenance backlog that's driving requirements for modernization of infrastructure. Certainly, for all of us, the urgency with the global call for accelerated climate action and decarbonization.
For us, aligning those drivers with our expertise and with our experiences allows us to be well-positioned to continue being a leader in developing and bringing these comprehensive clean technology solutions to our customers, solutions that have meaningful impact to them by responding to their urgent needs for infrastructure, but also being able to provide a long-term solution to address their sustainability goals. What does this really mean, and how do we see this in our project business? Why we see such an opportunity for transformative growth on this.
I wanna step back a little bit and talk about the evolution of our project business and how we've been able to, as a company, adapt and integrate these changes in technology, the advancement of this technology, but also bringing in the right resources as we've been developing these to align with that changing technology and making sure we have the right people on our team. Most importantly, to maintain our nimbleness. This is really what distinguishes us from our competitors, is being able to be nimble to develop solutions around customer drivers, customer needs, rather than trying to develop a solution around a particular technology or even for a certain type of product. George mentioned our differentiators being technology agnostic, being independent, again, drives that nimbleness.
Just looking at this, I thought this would be a great way to kind of buildup , and this is going back for some 10, 20 years ago and some of our projects, earlier projects. When we used to go develop projects, we would look at doing standalone measures. What this means is we might have a project that does simple lighting replacements, or maybe we go in and we do a one-for-one replacement on a chiller. We would gain some efficiency because they're usually 20, 30 years old and there's a newer technology out there. What it didn't do, it was just standalone on each one of these. This provided energy savings. What happened in the past 10 years, or maybe even longer now, we saw a great advancement in smart controls.
This really changed how we could look at projects. What this did was then integrate these solutions together. We now have the ability to be able to take the lighting project and to take the heating and ventilation upgrades and really tailor them to the occupancy of the building and be able to then right-size the actual central plant systems like the boiler and the chiller. By having that smart controls element in there, it really pushed the envelope to a new concept called deep energy retrofits. Instead of going in and maybe having a 5% or 10% energy savings, we now saw numbers greater than 30%, even at 60% in some of our key projects that we did for GSA. This really changed the way of how we looked at projects.
What it also allowed for is us to start bundling on-site generation in. What happened with this is we could now afford to bundle into this scope of work on-site generation. We started installing solar on rooftops, solar in parking lots, geothermal systems, even looking at doing cogeneration where some of our customers had the thermal load. Again, from our perspective, our scope increased. We are now not just looking at the building scope, but also for the scope of the energy supply. This also created a new opportunity because we're bringing in these new technologies, this new solar system, this more complex integrated systems in the building, the need for customers to have an ongoing operation and maintenance service.
In most of our projects now, not only are we doing a project solution, but we're also providing usually a 20-year service contract that maintains, operates and maintains these systems for them, providing the performance assurance, providing the savings reality each year. This has given us a whole new way to look at our project business, and what it can do is produce the recurring revenue on the operations and maintenance side. This is great, and customers are now realizing energy savings, emissions reductions, but new drivers occur, and we see the need for resiliency. The last two or three years, we all have experienced the need for flexibility in how we live, how we work.
This kinda drives us into our next stage of this, where we're looking at how we can have deploy fast-reacting new systems like battery energy storage systems like microgrid, so that we can truly be interactive in what we're doing inside the building with our asset management as well. This created another opportunity for us, and then also extends and connects us from what we're doing in the building into the supply side, and that's the distribution systems. Now our scope is increasing to tackle challenges with the electrical distribution systems or steam line systems, going in there and having ability to replace or add substations or connect it with that while we're doing some of these other measures. Again, growing our smart approach.
What's really exciting now for all of us and where we are now is how what we're able to do with this data. Now what we have in technology is the ability to bring in all of this data and analytics and the power of what those analytics can do. Bringing in the data from building management systems, bringing in data from our plant, central plant data systems, our solar system, also bringing in utility meterings from the different building levels, putting this into one central energy platform, and then tying that with also utility inputs and how the utilities that are supplying this energy are interacting, and also weather, creates a whole new way of looking at energy and creates a true smart infrastructure solution.
This data and analytics then allows us to do true off asset optimization, allows us to seamlessly control when solar will be deployed or storage. We're using our battery storage to be able to find the best time of use for that storage in conjunction with the solar to maximize that output to the load of the customer.
It enables us to do fast load shedding in buildings, taking off non-critical loads in a building to be able to react and respond to a peak rate from the utilities charging us. What's also even more exciting is this brings us back into the maintenance space because now we have this intelligence, this AI capability to really do predictive maintenance by recognizing patterns in equipment and then having an actionable feedback to be able to respond to this. Again, it creates this true energy at its best. For us, we're really excited about this opportunity, and we can use this as a blueprint for several different customer sets.
Taking this approach, whether it be for a college campus or for our military customers or even for an enterprise of our healthcare facilities, this is something that can be applied and have significant results on decarbonization, on sustainability, on reliability and resiliency. What does this really mean for us at Ameresco? What are we doing? As part of our corporate strategy team, what we are trying to do is make sure that we're continuously going and looking at new technologies and advancement of technologies, because this is what we've been doing, not just in what's coming, on the distributed generation level, but also back in the building level, continuing to follow best new technologies in air quality. There's new products coming out all the time now to be able to provide higher quality indoor air.
Ventilation strategies, looking at smart controls even. I mean, you can sense almost anything right now, but being able to capture that in the most meaningful way. Also looking at even, like, water conservation. I mean, we typically I didn't mention this in the first one, you know, do simple faucet aerators in bathrooms, but now being able to actually look at the advancement in that technology and how we treat water and how we reuse water is an important part in the energy solution as well. Then on our distributed generation side, continuing to look at the advancement in the battery storage market. We're all excited to watch this market grow and come out with, you know, more solutions for a longer time duration of storage, and again, provides energy transformation opportunities with that. Then getting into the EV infrastructure.
This also opens up a whole new place for us in our solutions to now take vehicle emissions and look at opportunities to create part of the whole energy demand management for our customers. Certainly in the on-site generation, this is probably one of the ones, I know Mike will talk about this too, is just the need for firm clean energy. Solar is great and wind's great, but it's also intermittent, even with battery solutions. Having firm, renewable energy on-site using biofuels, using hydrogen, is an area that we will be watching, that we're hiring resources for to make sure that we're ahead of this and ready to be able to do it with our customers.
The other approach that we've done very well as a company, and we are continuing to do, is making sure we're identifying the right opportunities to try these new technologies. George mentioned one earlier and about our Savannah River plant. Well, that stemmed from doing a very small $3 million project about 20 years ago for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It was just a demonstration of being able to use forest residue in a heating boiler. That project gave us the experience, it gave us the resume to at least start to be able to do other ones, and led to us winning our large project, marquee project for the Department of Energy at Savannah River. That project turned into a 20MW generation project using all forest residue, and this is our 11th year of operation on that.
Again, looking for those opportunities. Same thing on battery technology. We were able to do a project for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, where we were able to demonstrate battery and microgrid concept on a smaller scale, but then that launched our resume and our experience and our credibility and talent to be able to do it in several other federal projects, and even gave us a resume to help compete on our large Southern California Edison project that Britta and Doran will talk about later. These are the things as part of our strategy group to make sure that we're doing that. Another technology too, is just starting the small street lighting project in the Northwest.
Having that knowledge, again, working with the different vendors, becoming lessons learned that we have there on a smaller scale, was able to give us the credibility needed to win the big City of Chicago street lighting project. These are all important parts of our strategy, monitoring the advancements in technology, bringing on the right opportunities, but then bringing on the right team to be able to have it at a corporate level that can help all of us in our business segments stay up, stay trained on this. George mentioned Jim, who's been here forever with me too, having Jim evaluate these technologies with our group. Also, we've already made a new hire this year, someone that's an expert in EV infrastructure. We hired a person last year that has hydrogen experience.
Having these resources that can be used throughout the corporation and provide the training and materials, again, sets us up well and sets us up to be able to do this comprehensive smart energy approach. The latest one that we've also been hiring is our cybersecurity, because looking at this, you see this fast collection of data that's coming through and a lot of very secure data. It has to have the need now for the cybersecurity play. That's another part of our strategy, is making sure that we're setting up not just at the project level, but the company level, to be able to meet the stringent cybersecurity requirements that our customers have, but also that we have as being that developer.
This is our approach, and again, blueprint that can be provided across our different customer segments. To really make this real, I thought we could walk through one of our most recent projects because this ties in nicely, the information that I just delivered into one project that we did the groundbreaking for back in January. This is for our project that we did for the U.S. Coast Guard at Petaluma, California. One great thing about this project is this is the fourth project we've done in the Coast Guard. They haven't chosen anybody else but us four times in a row, which is always good to know. Why we won this project, this is thinking about the customer driver and with how we developed the solution for this.
This is a customer that's in Northern California facing frequent rolling blackouts, losing power for peak safety shutdowns because of all the different events in California. They wanted a resiliency solution. They are the first line of response for this community from the fire department side. Losing power for them is just not acceptable to them or to the community. We came in with a solution that first built upon their efficiency, their energy efficiency, because again, the best way for resiliency and for emission reduction is the cleanest technology of all, which is energy efficiency, reducing their load. Continued to do that, and we're able to put in some more lighting, some more additional building controls. We were able to match this with a new asset here.
We are putting in about 5 MW of solar. We're putting in another, a little over, close to 3MW battery. This will enable the Coast Guard to have green energy for their entire load throughout the year, but also gives them that resiliency, so that when they do lose power, not if, when they do, they're able to shift to this microgrid that will enable the battery to let their solar power run then, and then at nighttime, it goes to the battery. This is game-changing for the Coast Guard because, again, it allows them to have continuity of operations. It's also a great project because it shows how we bring in our skill set.
This project also included an innovative financing structure where we were able to do an energy as a service agreement within the project contract. Why is this important? Because this one, we will actually own the solar system and the battery and the microgrid over the 20-year period. This, we are able to leverage the investment tax credit, leverage other utility incentives, and that brings value to the project. In this particular case, this allowed the Coast Guard to add EV infrastructure into the project solution. It allowed them to also do replacement of some aging transformers that are critical in their reliability solution and their electrical distribution system. It again addresses the customer, expands our scope of work, aligns all. It really demonstrates our ability as a company to have a great project solution.
It brings in our O&M business and also our experience and expertise in the asset business. This project should go online in late 2023 and set to be carbon neutral in 2024. With that, I just want to end the last bucket of our strategy, and that's the policy. Because this is also really exciting right now to see another alignment in this time right now in industry, having you know we're actively engaged with legislators and advocacy groups to make sure that we're utilizing policy and federal funding to further accelerate this clean energy transformation.
We're particularly excited about how this federal funding that's in the current infrastructure bill to stimulate the R&D needed for technologies like hydrogen to be able to fund and bring money into our projects for much-needed transmission line upgrades and for other EV structure and this drive for electrification. That's just another way we think this could further accelerate our growth in this already exciting time. Certainly, mentioning just from our recent Executive Order 14057, this gives us a driver to encourage agencies and government agencies to use performance contracting, which allowed that great comprehensive scope that we just showed, and to be able to really use that as a mechanism to get to clean energy solutions, to get to decarbonization. This, again, we're excited about this.
It's a lot of information to digest in the past 15 minutes, but we'll pause here and answer any questions at this time.
Thank you, Nicole. If anyone has a question, just please raise your hand. We have a few folks with mics around the room. Any questions from the audience? Great. If not, Mike, why don't we roll on?
Great. Now
Sorry. We good. Oh, okay. Here we go. Get a mic up.
Sorry.
Nicole, when you're trying to get a contract like this one.
Mm-hmm.
Who are the competitors? Who's losing?
Well, for this particular project, you know, is against our federal competitors. You know, who's losing? Everyone's losing but us. I mean, we won. That's an easy answer. Yeah, no, I think, again, I think for us, what helped us win this project opposed to some of our competitors, like some of the controls companies or some of maybe the utility companies, is again, the technology agnostic differentiator. Because we were able to come in and actually provide a solution to them that wasn't set to what they were trying to offer. The Coast Guard, this customer particularly, very much valued that. I think that's one point without naming the list of the competitors. In our space, you know, I think there's two differentiators, that independence, but also just our deep bench of expertise.
Most of our competitors that we see don't have that they have to bring in outside people to this. Being able to go to the table immediately and be able to talk to our customers directly goes a long way, especially when they're trusting you to be able to do something like this, that they're depending their operations on for 20 years, that goes a long way.
Next we have one more question.
Thank you, Nicole. I'm not asking you to respond to this, but I understand your score is the highest at DOE for performance contracting, right? The score is a very large part of how the customers, both in DoD and in the rest of the federal government evaluate competitiveness. Instead of responding to the fact that you're the highest, can you maybe discuss a little bit about what goes into the scoring process and why Ameresco scores so highly versus others like our friends at Johnson Controls that screwed up on the uh-
Oh, okay.
the Smithsonian contract and things like that. I mean, why do you score so well?
I think that's an easy answer. You're referring to our major IDIQ, that's our contract umbrella opens up the world of performance contracting in the federal space. One of the reasons that we are is just past performance. Being able to have projects that encompass all these technologies and have the deepest impact goes a long way when we're being evaluated for these large IDIQs, and being able to have success in meeting our savings and our flexibility in that when something does go wrong and there is an issue, we respond right away and we make that replacement so that there's not this long shortfall in savings. The reputation and the résumé of experience, I think, are two of the biggest things that drove those scores.
Looking at the numbers, historical infrastructure investment, $550 billion over five years in new spending. Is that part of the investment totally addressable by your products and services? How is that related to your $80 billion addressable market in that kind of a context? If I do the simple math, if it is totally addressable, that means it's going to double your addressable market, more than double. I just wonder, I mean, these are big numbers. We just wonder.
They are big numbers.
Thank you.
It was a historic spend, and I think for us, watching how they're setting up these new programs and making sure we're doing what we need to do to advocate how this money can be spent in real project opportunities at not just the federal level, but also at the state level. I mean, we're meeting with state energy offices to really drive and bring that money into solutions that will have the most impact in this. As far as how that integrates into our addressable market, I think there is some certainly some overlap because there would've been other avenues of money that might have come into that play. This is why we think this is another way to accelerate our growth, is because this has potential to even drive these projects and bring in money outside of our typical savings model.
Being able to bundle that additional funding with the savings leverages, I mean, you're already leveraging the sunk cost of developing a project, and so you can just make it a bigger project for our clients that has bigger impact.
Does the previous expansion of the market size already incorporate this $550 billion?
No. No, 'cause that was done before this passed, so.
Before the bill passed.
Before the bill passed, yes.
Thank you for questions. We're gonna move on to the next presentation.
Yeah.
to stay on schedule, and there will be other opportunities for questions on that.
Thank you, though. Now I'm excited to introduce Michael Bakas, my counterpart and partner who heads up our biogas asset, and has kind of been the pioneer in this green gas space. Look forward.
Thanks, Nicole. Thank you. Hey. I'm gonna take a little trip down memory lane to give you some more color as to how and why we got into energy asset development. About 22 ± years ago, when I was at home during the weekend and my phone rang. I picked up the call and it was George. About three weeks prior to that, George had made a decision to step down from running an organization that he had founded and ran for a number of years in the energy services industry. George said to me, after a few niceties, he said, "Hey, look." He said, "I think I'm starting to annoy Kathy." Kathy being his wife. She just told me I need to go get a job.
Let's all get together and let's talk about some things I've been thinking about. Shortly thereafter, a few of us got together at a small pub outside Boston, and for the rest of the night, fueled by a few bottles of wine, George sketched out on cocktail napkins his vision, which would ultimately become Ameresco. His concept was, "Hey, look, I'm gonna take some capital and I wanna go out and I wanna buy a few platforms." We were just a few people with nothing. We need the licenses, we need the talent. Let's bring that in-house. We'll create an energy services business that will create a tremendous amount of cash flow. From that cash flow, we're gonna take it and reinvest into the company by investing in energy assets that we will own and operate for its life.
George had three real main purposes for that or reasons behind it. One, it was a differentiator. It gave customer options. At the time, many customers, and it's relevant today, are faced with tremendous capital spend on infrastructure improvements, you know, boilers, chillers, cogen plants. They, in some cases, A, don't have the capital, or B, they have it, but they don't wanna invest in non-core business. They wanna invest in their core competency. In many cases, they wanna transfer risk on their balance sheet of an operating asset like that to a third party, like Ameresco. In his mind, this was a big differentiator 'cause no one at the time was doing this. This was truly energy as a service before that got coined. The second reason was, it was recurring revenue. Now George felt that was valuable.
He'd say, "Hey, look, can you imagine if in a number of years, at some point, we can get off the treadmill a little bit and 30%, maybe 40%, maybe 50% of our EBITDA will come from these recurring streams?" If you look back in 2021, we actually hit 65%. Now knowing George, he's probably increased the bar a little bit more. That's what he tends to do. Yeah, but we won't give him any ideas. The third is a very important one. It's extremely relevant today, and that was control the asset. George felt over time, as advanced technology improved, if we own these assets, we could continually actually generate additional output with less input by improving the efficiencies.
More importantly, by controlling the asset as new opportunities evolve, and he felt the energy industry was ready to be turned on its head, that there's gonna be a lot of other opportunities that those assets we could be mined for that we haven't even budgeted in the pro forma models. I'll show you not only have we been doing that, but this was also just accretive uptick on our return. Not only have we been doing this, but coming down the road through the, I think, the EPA, we'll see some changes in our addressable market, which will expand, and we'll be able to tap those operating assets that we've been owned and operated since we started the company to extract additional value.
As you see in the chart here, we started early on developing assets as simple as peaking plants and wholesale power generation to district thermal plants, moving on to cogeneration, renewable natural gas plants, solar, battery storage. Last month, you heard we announced our first hydrogen pilot. You'll continue to see these advanced technologies progress as the timeline moves along. I think the most important takeaway for you folks today on the asset side is that we are truly an organic growth story, both historically and moving forward. Look, it's really easy to take a blank checkbook and go and buy a bunch of assets, but that's not a long-term sustainable business plan. Our history shows that we've grown organically, and we will continue doing that.
We will have selective acquisitions, but ultimately, the growth will come from organic. The two of the great catalysts in our organization on the asset side were obviously green gas and solar. Jonathan Mancini is going to be up here at the next session, and he'll talk a little bit about the solar. I'm gonna spend the next few minutes really focused on the green fuels. We have four RNG plants that are in operation. We took our first one commercial in 2010. We've actually been operating biogas plants for 22 years. We've been operating the RNG plants for the last 12, so we're not new to the industry. More importantly, on the last earnings call, you heard George mention that we have three years visibility with 17 plants in various stages of permitting and construction.
In addition to that, we have probably another two or three years beyond that on early-stage development projects. They're in the pipeline. They have more progression to go before we wanna add that to our backlog. That gives us about five or six years of visibility on the pipeline for the asset side. To support this effort, historically, if you look back, we had a great foundation of technical talent. We kept growing that. To support this kind of growth, to get to a point where we can bring five to six new RNG plants mechanically complete each year, in 2021, we doubled the size of our engineering construction talent. We didn't just do it with bodies.
We did it with people that had been in the industry for years, specifically permitting and building, and engineering renewable natural gas plants, so that we could hit the ground running. We also added to the sales staff, the development team, the finance team, and the legal team. All this ultimately culminates into that growth model I was talking about. It builds a great foundation. You'll see, I think George mentioned that, we have a number of plants will be coming online over the next few years. In 2022, this year, we expect to bring a 22 MW equivalent online, or mechanical, I should say. Just keep in mind the time from mechanical to the time you actually start seeing revenue is typically three to six months. Those assets probably won't be showing revenue until next year.
Look, I mentioned in 2010, we took the San Antonio project commercial. That was our first RNG plant. But we weren't sending it to the transportation sector. We were actually transporting it through the interstate pipeline to Southern California, where we were injecting it into a cogeneration plant owned by a municipal light department, who was producing green electricity and green thermal. That went on for quite some time until the RFS program started to develop. And then we, like others, started moving more of our gas to the transportation sector. What I would suggest to you today is that in the long term, the real growth story is gonna be in the non-transportation sector. That is 440 times the size of the current addressable market for RNG.
What I love about it is that Ameresco is has been fully entrenched in that market since we started the company. We work with universities, healthcare, the municipal market, C&I customers. Those will be the buyers of the RNG, of the green hydrogen. They'll be using carbon sequestration. Our team has been doing it from the get-go, and they've been doing it with no upfront capital through energy savings performance contracts. We're able to help customers reduce their consumption, save energy, and yield positive cash flow. Our focus is net zero, and these things will add to that benefit for the clients. Look, the market trends are obvious. The sustainability train has left the station, and it's picking up a lot of steam, and it's not gonna slow up anytime soon.
As George mentioned on Tuesday, we even saw the SEC propose some rules regarding public companies having to report the risk of carbon on their balance sheet. I think that's a given. What you heard from Nicole is that on the projects business, we've seen an incredible uptick in on integrated microgrids for resiliency purposes. True resiliency is defined typically as the ability to withstand a multi-day outage. As what she mentioned is to be able to provide that kind of resiliency is unlikely to come from intermittent resources such as solar and wind, even with battery storage attached. You're gonna need baseload dispatchable fuel, period. To do that, you're likely gonna use natural gas, because that is really the one form that's out there that people are using for that kind of a baseload fuel.
Now we have a conundrum. We've got customers, our customers, that they want the resiliency, but they also have sustainability objectives, and the two are kind of opposing each other. That's where our, again, our addressable market for green gas is gonna explode because, again, RNG and green hydrogen are all baseload dispatchable fuel sources that will provide the multi-day resiliency that our customers are looking for. Other growth drivers, a lot of activity at the state and municipal level with the PUCs. You heard about California just implemented the first thermal RPS in the country, so 12% of all the gas going through the pipes in California is gonna have to be RNG. All the utilities are putting out RFPs now to decarbonize their pipes with RNG.
I just had another one issued to us yesterday by UGI, which is public. So that kind of activity level continues to drive the market. We've got public and private companies trying to meet their ESG goals. You put all this together, and it actually presents an incredible amount of new opportunities for Ameresco beyond business as usual. You know, first and foremost, we're gonna be able to expand our green fuels business that is based with landfill gas and wastewater treatment biogas and slowly transition it into the non-transportation sector. We're gonna start developing dairy and swine projects to ultimately provide to the transportation sector. We're already evaluating carbon capture technology. We've got actually pathways we're finding to the commercial markets for the carbon. Hydrogen, we announced our first pilot in February.
It's interesting. I'll talk a little bit about it in the next session, but you keep hearing about electrolysis, of course, which is expensive, and we'll be able to actually use some of our assets for electrolysis. 95% of the hydrogen produced in the U.S. today is through SMR, which is essentially using high-temp steam and a catalyst to break down the CH4 molecule to create hydrogen. We'll be able to do that with some of our existing assets. Where there's opportunity for organic diversion because of legislation like SB 1383 and obviously an interest from the communities and stakeholders, 'cause you really need that to make organic diversion work, we'll selectively develop some projects.
Going back to my original statement at the beginning, we're gonna leverage our existing assets to extract additional revenues that were unbudgeted and not accounted for in our models. We'll take our green power plant assets. You know, look, we're awfully optimistic that the Biden EPA will shortly approve additional pathways, possibly for eRINs, possibly for hydrogen. If that happens, again, our addressable market expands and blows up. Ameresco will leverage our power plant assets to potentially provide additional revenue resources for eRINs, and we'll leverage our RNG assets as potential feedstock to create green hydrogen. Our competitive advantages are simple, going back to what Nicole had mentioned about the projects business. We have a proven track record. Look, we're not a roll-up of a multiple, a number of different companies.
This is the same team that did the first project back in 2000, and we've continued to grow that team and add the resources. You know, as a side note, one of our first biogas plants was a BMW project at True energiey-as-a-service that is now in its 20th year of successful operation. We have a deep bench. Look, you're only as good as your people, and I think the industry would agree and support us stating that our development and technical talent is some of the best in the space. The most important one is the position we enjoy in the market. I mentioned that the non-transportation sector is the future growth opportunity of this marketplace, and Ameresco has been entrenched in that space since we started the company.
We're helping customers address their carbon footprint and get to net zero, and whether it's RNG or green hydrogen or carbon sequestration or anything else that comes up, those are additional measures that we will bring to bear for the customer's benefit and incorporate into these 15 and 20-year agreements we already have. I leave you with the simple message that when you think about energy asset development at Ameresco, we have historically been, and we continue to be growing organically, which I think is a very successful business plan. I think at this point now we're gonna transition to a panel on renewable on our assets. Mark?
Good afternoon, everybody. It's good to see a lot of familiar faces out here. My name is Mark Chiplock, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. I've been with the company about eight years. I'm responsible for the company's global accounting operations, taxes, FP&A, and SEC reporting. I think you're really gonna enjoy this next discussion. We're gonna focus on the company's investment strategy related to its energy assets business. We're gonna talk about how the company makes its investment decisions, for various asset classes. We're gonna talk about how we compete and win in different asset markets, and we're gonna talk about how we'll continue to grow our asset portfolio, both organically and through some opportunistic M&A. We've got a great panel assembled. I'm gonna just do some quick introductions. Got a chance to hear from Mike Bakas.
You know, Mike's an incredible member of the team. He goes back to the beginning of the company in 2000. Clearly a giant in the green fuel space, and so we're just lucky to have him here. Many of you know Joshua Baribeau. Josh is a Vice President of Finance, and many of you probably know him from various investor events or other corporate communications. But Josh also plays a big role in project finance, M&A for the company, as well as strategy around corporate finance and capital allocation. Jonathan Mancini, who's our Senior Vice President of solar development, relatively new addition to the team. Right, Jon? About 2020?
Yeah.
You know, Jon's team is responsible for originating distributed and greenfield solar projects for the company, primarily in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. I've assembled some questions for the panel. We're gonna go through that, and then we'll open up to Q&A towards the end. Mike, we're gonna start with you, and I'm gonna pick up on something that from your last presentation. You know, as the sustainability market continues to evolve, how do you think the non-transportation sector customers are going to evaluate these alternative fuels?
It's a great question, and I think you gotta go back a little historically. When we first got into the biogas business, a lot of our customers were really looking, you know, what's my premium of green versus brown? We saw that in the solar business, too. You know, what is it on a dollar per kilowatt-hour basis? What's changed for us is that it's the whole idea of the carbon footprint and the carbon risk on the balance sheet. Now let's just take a typical university that says, "All right, I got 100,000 tons of CO2 on my balance sheet.
What's the optimal way and the lowest cost to get it to zero?" People are starting to evaluate technologies on a dollar per ton CO2 reduced, and that's where green fuels has a big advantage. Look, RNG ultimately replaces one-for-one methane in the natural gas, which is 25-30 times more potent than CO2 reference gas for global warming. When you look at costs of RNG on a per ton reduced basis, it's anywhere from $55-$300 per ton. When you compare it to other things like electrification is $550-$800 per ton. It's not to suggest that electrification isn't part of the carbon neutrality puzzle.
We believe that actually there's gonna be a lot of different things that'll be part of the portfolio mix to get to net zero.
Great. Thanks, Mike. Jon, I'm gonna come to you. Solar is clearly a competitive industry. Can you talk about what differentiates us, ourselves in the solar space?
Yeah. Thanks, Mark. I would say that one of the biggest differentiators for us that gives us a strategic advantage is our history. We're not just a solar company, we're also an energy services company. A lot of our competitors are solar companies. That's what they do. Here at Ameresco, we can offer a multitude of solutions for our customer base, whether it's behind the meter, in front of the meter, carports, pair it with batteries. We do have a lot of different advantages to be able to attribute to the solar space. One of our other biggest advantages is our vertical integration. Not only are we originating sites for greenfield development, but we're also designing the sites in-house. We're also constructing the projects with our in-house construction team.
One of the more important aspects of this is our O&M group. We're able to efficiently operate our projects to squeeze out as much profitability as we possibly can and minimize any downtime. It gives us a great advantage in the marketplace.
That's great. You mentioned that we're vertically integrated. I mean, does that have a direct impact on profitability?
It does, yes. Yes, it does. Every little bit helps in this market.
Great. Thanks, Jon. Josh, I'm gonna come to you, and I wanna continue on the profitability point. You know, as someone tasked with making capital allocation decisions, you know, how do you think about profitability? Importantly, how should our investors think about that?
Sure. There's not one key metric that defines profitability for us and how we allocate our capital. Any capital project that we invest in, whether it's an energy asset or even M&A of some sort, that can produce pretty strong EBITDA. We also make sure that all of our investments generate strong net income by the time we factor in the depreciation of the asset, as well as the interest expense. We certainly take a look at the P&L metrics, but we also take a very hard look at the cash metrics. Cash on cash return, simple payback, the internal rate of return always has to be above our cost of capital.
When we're choosing to invest our scarce resource, this internally generated equity, we always direct it towards the projects with the highest returns from those cash perspectives.
Sure. How about operating leverage? I know that's a metric that we tend to focus and talk about quite a bit. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about operating leverage? I mean, obviously, we wanna generate, you know, more gross profit dollars and generate them faster than we're growing our OpEx. Maybe you can just talk about that a little bit.
Sure. I think the best way to answer that, first and foremost, we're a customer-focused company. We have the opportunity and the option to invest our own equity in projects, or if the customer wants to own that project, we can perform that as a design build for them. How we're able to do this is we've got all the same people, the same teams implementing these projects, such that if the customer does want to own that, we don't have to hire new staff, we don't have to invest in more overhead, et cetera.
We can implement these projects on behalf of the customer, and all of those gross profit dollars, even though they might be at a lower gross profit margin, they flow straight down to operating income and then a large portion of that into net income.
Thanks, Josh. Mike, I'm gonna come back to you, and this is again, something that came out of your presentation previously. You touched on the hydrogen pilot. Can you talk about how you think Ameresco is positioned to take advantage of the hydrogen opportunity?
Yeah. I think you saw from Lila's chart that the markets would be pretty robust. I think what we're gonna try to do is focus on where our strengths are. Where we have our strengths is essentially in the assets that we have been developing on the biomethane side. We're gonna try to leverage our assets to our advantage. The pilot's a great example, right? We have an RNG operating asset in Phoenix. We're developing one now in L.A. The I-10 corridor connects Phoenix to L.A., and that's really where the long-haul, heavy duty vehicle sector is rich for us. That's the best market for hydrogen.
What we intend to do is ultimately connect it to bookends and create hydrogen fueling stations, again, using SMR with our renewable natural gas as the feedstock to create that hydrogen along that whole corridor. I think those type of projects will bode well for us because we'll have a competitive advantage versus just greenfield development of hydrogen against-
Sure
you know, folks that are maybe looking for more utility scale.
Are you willing to tell how big of an opportunity it could be for Ameresco?
Well, I think it's, you know. There's no ceiling. We don't put a ceiling on it for us. I think the opportunity is tremendous across the entire space. At the end of the day, this industry is gonna require baseload dispatchable fuel, whether it's for transportation, aviation, end use devices, and that's where I think that's a sweet spot for Ameresco.
Super. Thanks, Mike. I'm gonna come back to you, Jon. Batteries. Can you talk a little bit about batteries? Where's that market headed? What do you think our strengths are in that market?
Yeah. It's the battery side of the equation is starting to come into focus for us. We have started to pair battery storage with our solar projects in certain markets where it makes sense. That's given us a great advantage to be able to maximize the profitability on those projects by playing in ancillary market streams. We're also looking at pairing battery storage with some of our customer base behind the meter, where there's high demand charges. We're also looking at working with utilities and helping along resiliency and being able to help some of the smaller utilities, manage some of the demands around their customer base. We feel that it's a very exciting opportunity right now.
We're just getting into it, and we think it's gonna be a strong market for us.
That's great. I'm gonna ask you the same question. Can you tell about how big that opportunity could be for Ameresco?
To Mike's point, I think it's limitless. At the same time, right now, in the certain markets we're looking at and working in, we're estimating right now it's about a 25 GW hour market for us in the small markets that we're looking to get in.
Wow. Super.
So...
Okay. Thanks, Jon. Mike, I'm gonna come back to you. You know, we continue to see many developers who are looking to secure third-party monies or are interested in investing at the project level. Can you talk a little bit about how that impacts Ameresco's competitiveness in the market?
I think it makes us very competitive. Look, you know, when third-party equity, first of all, the transaction cost to raise it is, you know, not cheap. It's not inexpensive investment dollars. The fact that Ameresco self-generates its own equity is tremendous. It allows us to begin development immediately. We don't have to wait for capital to start getting into development. It allows us to be selective in how we structure deals. Look, when George started the company with his own capital, part of the reason was he wanted to be able to do long-term solutions for the company and growth and not be beholden to someone that was dictating how he grows the company for the long term. It's the same thing with the asset business.
You wanna be able to structure a particular deal one way, and you might structure it differently another. We might wanna go more fixed on our offtake and less fixed on another. As you can appreciate in the fixed space for especially green fuels, right now the discount factor is huge. So why do that? I also think that, you know, you're able to over the life of the asset make strategic decisions that a third-party equity investor might not want to do. Because it might not necessarily be in their best interest, but it's in the best interest of Ameresco as a whole. Josh, you and I have talked about this at length and batted it back and forth because you're always trying to optimize the best way to finance these projects. What do you think?
Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head. There's probably two key reasons or two key benefits not having to source significant external equity. One is the restrictions they place on you. I think even private equity tends to be short-term focused, where we tend to be very long-term focused. When we control the asset, we can make decisions based on the long-term value and the various multiple value streams that can come out of that asset, things that we haven't even really thought about yet. That gives us an advantage that we don't have to just meet short-term metrics. The other part is time to money. It's extremely difficult to raise equity.
I know a couple of deals were printed recently, but I can assure you, those were pretty challenging to get done, both on the private side and the public side. Time to money, time to investment decisions. Folks in this room, you're basically looking at our investment committee. You'll bring a deal, Doran and I will look at it, then it goes to George, and then we're done. There's no bureaucracy. There's no sort of external partners that control the timing and the flows of that equity.
I think it's also a competitive advantage in that we found early on some of our business partners were concerned over all right you guys are here you do a deal. Are you still gonna be sitting across the table from me in three years? I mentioned the BMW project all right? I signed the contract. I'm still here. I'm sitting across the table. We're renewing the contract. Customers like that. They don't want someone to come in and potentially be gone in three years. They want that long-term marriage. I think it gives us a competitive advantage.
That's great. Thanks, guys. Josh, I'm gonna wrap this up with you. You lead our M&A efforts. Can you talk a little bit about how the company thinks about and approaches acquisitions?
Sure. Exactly the same as I described a couple of minutes ago. It's we have a scarce amount of capital, and we allocate that scarce capital to the highest returning investments. We wanna make sure it's always accretive from both an EBITDA, but more importantly, net income perspective. Then we also look at the cash-on-cash returns. Ameresco, George had mentioned, Ameresco has been very acquisitive over its 22 years. We were founded 2000. We wrapped up a bunch of companies as the utilities were divesting them and some other strategic businesses around the country and even internationally. We always make sure there's a strategic fit as well as a financial fit, and we're very disciplined just as much as we are on the asset side with the M&A side.
It has to be a good fit for us.
I know you guys are always busy on the M&A side. Do you have a specific target for M&A growth?
We don't, and that's I think one of the advantages. As you saw in Lila's presentation, Mike talked about it, you'll see some other market sizes a little bit later. Our addressable markets are growing pretty significantly. We're gaining share within those markets. We don't need to bolt on, other businesses just for the sake of growth. Now, when we see something that's interesting for us and the valuation makes sense, we'll certainly take that down. But we don't have to acquire companies to grow. It is very opportunistic.
Sure.
Yeah.
How about Europe? You know, a lot of the M&A the company has done in the past has been towards geographic expansion. What, if anything, are we doing in Europe?
Yeah, Europe's a very interesting market. I think, they've been way ahead of us in terms of, energy consciousness and, the price of energy. Obviously, the tragic events out in Eastern Europe are, I think, just even heightening people's focus on energy resiliency, energy security, et cetera. We're definitely keeping our eyes open for that in that market. What's interesting is that we don't have to acquire a business that's already number one in its space. That tends to be where you have a lot of, where the valuation might not make sense for our own metrics. We have the opportunity to even take on maybe smaller businesses and transform them with our culture, with our infrastructure, and our resources to turn those into a stepping stone or a platform within potentially a new geography.
A great example you might hear about a little bit later from Britta. We acquired a small energy consultancy in the U.K. five to seven years ago, and under her leadership, it's now the number three energy services company in all of the U.K. We were able to take that small business as that steppingstone and turn it into something, I think, really, really impressive.
Great. Thanks, guys. That was a lot of great information. Eric, I think you said we're gonna open up some Q&A.
Thanks, Mark, for that fascinating panel. We have time for just a couple questions, then we're gonna roll into a break, after that. Let's take our first question over here.
Hey, thanks for the presentation. Nice job, Josh. I guess if I could just ask a little bit of a prickly question here. You know, a lot of what you've talked about, if I looked at it from a few months ago, I would say, you know, is excellent. The world changed on 24 February , and you know, a lot of what's being discussed is, you know, what's more important, 440 parts per million of carbon versus a 500 Mt warhead. You're seeing, you know, we have experienced a historic low of defense spending as a % of GDP. Literally, it's 4.5%. As that goes up, there's a risk in terms of where does the money come from?
If we look over the past 10 years, we've increased debt as a, you know, four times the rate of GDP, which has allowed us to tap into, you know, I think of it as like a bigger straw going into the [uncertain] to bring out more natural resources. I guess one of the questions that I have is I don't see nuclear anywhere in terms of and would think that particularly on the project business, that would be an area of potential expanding. I've heard a lot of green hydrogen. That's an 80% round-trip energy tax in terms of the production. I'm curious how you're thinking about the relative value of these different technologies, is there's probably going to be more focus on, you know, in a tighter, inflationary environment.
I know it's a, you know, not sort of the rah-rah, but I'd like to kinda hear the, you know, how you might respond to that.
Sure. I'll start, and maybe Mike-
Definitely.
Certainly anyone else's opinion too. I think just maybe first and foremost, most of what we do doesn't require any government funding at all. I know Nicole concluded her presentation with some additions to our total addressable markets and maybe some catalyst to spending. The core markets that we operate in, and this is what George was trying to drive home, are driven by energy savings. It can be as simple as turning these lights off, right? That saves energy or replacing old lights, old infrastructure with new infrastructure. Very little, if any of our projects business comes from any government funding whatsoever.
Whatever happens to the government funding side, you know, if dollars are shifted to defense spending or something else, customers are still going to be able to save money and upgrade their aging infrastructure based on the things that we do. Mike, do you wanna talk on maybe some new-
Yeah. Well, I wanna jump on what you just said, and I'll talk about the green fuels for a minute. If you go back historically into the efficiency market, when times get tough, our business got better. When people looking to cut costs, we help them do that by reducing their consumption levels. Our business, I know you don't wanna use the word as, you know, inflation proof or is resilient, but it really is. I mean, people looking for us to help them reduce their operating costs. As far as the green fuels business, it was President Bush who actually really jump-started the RFS and was all about energy security. It wasn't about actually green fuel.
His position is, "Look, we should be using every drop of domestic fuel we have before we have to go out and outside the U.S." That's the beauty about what we're doing, is everything is sourced locally. In the process of doing it, we're helping the local emissions, the local economy. We're investing in, you know, these assets, which puts a lot of people to work. It's not just for the construction, but the operations side. I think, you know, as far as the hydrogen, look, you know, we're not gonna get over our skis, but like green gas, we're getting into it. We're valuing technologies. Over time, when there's visibility like solar and battery storage, we will see costs come down for execution. You just need to have visibility.
Great. Thanks, Mike.
Thank you.
We have time for one more question.
Thanks, Eric. Gentlemen, just curious, on the battery side, you mentioned a sort of two-part question. One is, can you talk about the types of battery, the technology that you're looking at and/or using? Two, how does the battery storage impact the size of a potential solar plant?
On the solar sizing, what we're doing in markets where it makes the most sense is we're oversizing the DC, and then we're putting in batteries that are able to take that extra generation and then deploy it in off hours. That's one of the ways that we're doing pairing the solar with the storage. As far as the technology, we're using just lithium-ion and basically some of the known names that we, you know, that are in the marketplace, that's who we're buying our batteries from.
Great. Thank you, everyone. We're gonna take a quick 10-minute break right now, but be back in 10 minutes because we're gonna kick off with our great group of customers who will be speaking to us.
Great.
Okay, we're back, everybody. Thanks so much. That was a quick break, but we still have a lot to get through. We're gonna move forward here. I'm delighted we have two customers that are going to be speaking today. Both of these customers have been with us for a long, long time, and we both are really excited to have them with us. They were not able to join us in person, but they are here virtually, so you will be able to see them. The first one up I would like to introduce is Lisa Shpritz. Lisa is an Environmental Operations Executive. She's with Bank of America. We have been fortunate enough to work with Bank of America now for over three years. We have a number of different solar sites with Bank of America across the Northeast, Arizona, and Texas.
Lisa is the SVP of the Global Environmental Group, and this group is responsible for the bank's global environmental sustainability strategy. Without further ado, I'm gonna welcome Lisa.
Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here with you virtually. Hopefully we can all be together in person. I'm very pleased to be here with Kevin as well. Ameresco is a great partner, and I was hoping I could share with you some thoughts about our sustainability journey and strategy. Hopefully after Kevin provides some remarks, we can have some time to do some questions.
I thought it might be for those of you who might not be familiar with Bank of America and the work that we do in terms of sustainability. I was gonna do just a little bit of a review of some of the climate leadership and significant milestones in our journey that really have been a part of our you know path to getting to where we are here today. I won't go through all of this, I promise you. I don't even know if, in the room, if you can really see all of the detail. The takeaway here is really that we in true earnest started our sustainability work in 2003 when we became a founding member and signatory of what was then the Carbon Disclosure Project.
We came out as one of the first financial institutions to say that, you know, climate change is an issue that we need to address and that we have a responsibility to really tackle. You can see here through the years, we've done a lot of really significant work that we're really proud of, but we're not there yet. I will note that we have worked really closely with GSA, which is how I know Kevin. We have a commitment to green building, which is a very important part of our program. We started in 2007 with an environmental business commitment of $20 billion. We thought it would take us 10 years to deploy $20 billion towards a low carbon economy.
That was right before the crash. If you look at the trajectory, it's quite amazing. You don't even see the recession in this trajectory. Here we are today, you know, fast-forward many years, and we actually just last year announced a $1.5 trillion commitment by 2030, and $ 1 trillion of that is focused on environmental business, and the balance is social. It's for all of the UN SDGs, sustainable finance. It's a total of $1.5 trillion by 2030. To be having the kinds of conversations that we're having and to have the momentum we're having is incredible. The work that we're doing is fantastic, but it's not even close to enough.
I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the work that we are doing and ways that we're helping to hopefully show a signal to the market and to really get the momentum going. The message that I'm hopefully leaving with you here is urgency and that there's still much more to do. Having GSA also as part of the conversation is phenomenal because they're an incredible entity that buys a lot and has a huge impact. Hopefully, between the two of our companies, we're maybe helping to drive the conversation. I'm gonna go here and step back for a second and mention that overall we have a net zero before 2050 goal. We are working not only to address our own operations.
We've been working for a very long time, as you can see from the timeline, to help address our impact as a company. That's where we work with Ameresco, that's where we work with a lot of our partners to really reduce our emissions. We're setting reduction targets. Also it's our responsibility to work with our clients. We're helping our clients to transition as well to a low-carbon economy and to give them tools to be able to do so. All of this, we're utilizing a foundation of risk management and really assessing and managing climate-related risks. We now have a Chief Climate Risk Officer, which is fantastic.
Her group is really leading the way, and it works really closely with our chief risk officer, is a direct report to our chief risk officer. What that means is we need to understand what risks climate change really presents to our business today and in the future. It's being integrated into our risk framework in a way that honestly, I never even thought would happen this quickly because I think for so long, environmental work was often thought of as cutesy and nice to have and fluffy. I would always say the fuzzy bunnies and rainbows that we were always trying to, you know, work to overcome, if you will. Now it's a conversation about risk. It's a conversation about resilience.
It's a conversation about being a stronger business that can really weather the storm, literally and figuratively. When we look at this overarching climate strategy, and when we're talking about getting to net zero before 2050, we have this approach that covers our entire business. I think this is where, as a financial services company, we're really unique. We do have three buckets of environmental impact, and particularly greenhouse gas emissions from our operations, and that's what I was speaking about our commitments to reduce our impacts from our buildings and our employees and our operations. We have supply chain and reducing those emissions, and then we have our financed emissions. Those are the ones that result from our clients, the money that we lend to our clients.
You can see here in the middle, the green icons indicate those high emitting sectors that we're really focused on first. In fact, this year we're going to be releasing interim targets for some of the high emitting sectors, including power and energy, that will give us an opportunity and a pathway to reach net zero for those industries. I think it's also significant that as we're doing all of this, we're really embedding it into the way that we do business. You know, it's no longer let's just do whatever we're gonna do and then come behind and try to fix it. We're really starting from the beginning.
When we sit down, we're working with our bankers to have conversations about the work that they do and how we can help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and the environmental impacts from the start. I know I have just a couple minutes left, but there's one really significant achievement that happened in this year, just in February, that I wanted to let you all know about. We announced 11 February , 2022, a goal by 2030 to support the financing, production and use of one billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel by 2030.
When we think about really sending a signal to the market, and we think about those things that we as a company can do to really address our environmental impact, sustainable aviation is one that we feel is really important. Aviation accounts currently for 2.5%-3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 98 billion gallons of jet fuel were used globally in 2019. Right now there's only something like 70 million gallons available. We really need to increase the amount of available fuel, and we really need to work with partners. We're working with the State Department, we're working with a lot of our peers, and we're working with a lot of other companies and corporate users to really address the emissions from travel and from aviation.
We look forward to continuing to work with Ameresco and to continuing on this journey. Thank you for everything that you have done to help us reduce our emissions and being our partner in that. With that, I am going to pass it over to Kevin, and then I think we have time for questions after.
Thank you, Lisa. See if I can advance these slides without going through all of your slides again.
We're also pleased to have Kevin Kampschroer join us. Kevin's been the Chief Sustainability Officer for the GSA, one of the probably the largest commercial real estate owners across the U.S. . Kevin has been there for over 40 years, so he's a seasoned veteran in this energy market and also in the sustainability play. Under his leadership, he created this deep energy retrofit program that we referenced earlier in the presentation. I think they've completed five rounds of this type program that's encouraging deep energy retrofits throughout their buildings. Most recently, Kevin has been involved in leading the draft and the implementation of the Executive Order 14057, the one that we talked about earlier as well, and working with the White House to coordinate this.
I'm very excited to have him speak to us and share his perspective on this market. Thanks, Kevin.
Thank you, Nicole. I appreciate the introduction. I'm trying to make the slides advance, and it was working for a minute. There we go. A little bit of background about the General Services Administration. It was established in 1949 by President Truman, and since 1949, GSA has been the sole organization within the federal government with authority to buy energy, utilities in particular, but across the board. We share that role by delegation to the Department of Defense and a little bit to the Department of Energy for their internal operations. As it stands right now, GSA buys about half the energy for the federal government, and the Defense Logistics Agency buys the other half for the federal government. We buy energy for some military bases and vice versa.
It's a very joint approach to the purchase of energy. A piece of that is why we are buying the energy, which is for buildings. We have about just under 10,000 buildings. You know, roughly, we house 1 million people in 320 million sq ft, 360 million sq ft of space. In addition to that, we are in the marketplace for $75 billion worth of procurements of various kinds.
The last slide, I just want to mention deep energy retrofits since Nicole did that. First of all, the deep energy retrofit started with an idea. The idea was developed by us in conjunction with the Rocky Mountain Institute and with a little bit of help from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Mostly the help came from a charrette of 18 different firms, including Ameresco, multiple agencies, not so many. What we are doing today in the federal government is a result of those charrettes of working together as a partner with you with Ameresco and your colleagues in this field. That is pretty much it for my prepared slides because I really am more comfortable sort of talking a little bit from notes.
What I did want to mention was that in 2020, right at the tail end of the Congress, they passed the Energy Act of 2020, which required federal agencies to undertake energy savings performance contracts for any ECM, any energy conservation measure that they couldn't fund directly. We have a requirement in statute to do an energy audit of every major building every four years and identify the energy conservation measures associated with that. Those are the energy conservation measures we're talking about here. Now, what's the difficulty with that? 'Cause I'm not gonna leave you with a rosy view. I'm gonna leave you with a couple of challenges because I think that'll be more interesting.
The challenge of that is that energy conservation measures are usually put together by people with blinders on who are looking at a building in its as-is state and saying, "We can make this as-is state better by improving this chiller or improving these lights," or so on. It's very difficult to get people to think about, well, if we improve the envelope and we improve the windows, and those things don't pencil out very well at all, you know, 40 years for envelope changes like that. We could actually reduce the chiller by 50%, which pencils out really, really fast, and then combine all of those two into an integrated design. And I think that's the key thing, is to integrate all of that and get people thinking in that regard. The statute and the accounting on an ECM basis makes it difficult.
We're looking to Ameresco to come up with very creative solutions that will sort of combine these and say, "Not only, but also. Not only can we do these ECMs, but we can do more, or we can do fewer ECMs, but come up with an even better event overall." Secondly, we have Executive Order 14008 and Executive Order 14057, whose titles I'm not even going to read because, you know, you can look them up. Basically, they set out some really, really tough challenges for the federal government. 100% carbon pollution-free electricity sector by 2035 for the federal government.
We're looking at, in all of our work that we're doing, how to get in electrification and decarbonization into our projects. That may mean that a particular, you know, again, looking at one thing, it may mean replacing an existing boiler with, actually a ground source heat pump or an air source heat pump or something else like that, which may not be the cheapest solution, but will be the better lifecycle approach. We're looking at lifecycle approach across the board, and we're looking for decarbonization no matter what. Electrification. The friend of mine who is recently been appointed says, you know, basically, the goal is to electrify everything that there is in a building. There's a really great example of taking an all electric building and make it go crazy efficient with a project.
I'm gonna conclude my sort of opening remarks here by almost with a mention of the New Carrollton project that Nicole in particular was hugely involved in. It's the flagship deep energy retrofit project because it was more than 50% total energy reduction in more than one building. It's been in place for six years and is performing better now after six years than it was six years ago. It is the flagship project for GSA in energy savings performance contracts. I think it's the flagship. Basically would be the flagship for anybody. It's just a great example with everything integrated. You know, ground source heat pumps and using the existing water pond for multiple uses, incorporating solar, putting shades over the parking lot.
Because even though it was slightly more expensive to build a structure, boy did it make the customer happy because they could park their cars in the shade. In Washington, that really matters. If you look at it from an overall energy standpoint, you're looking at, you know, going out into a car that's been heated in the sun during eight hours of work to 190-200 degrees internal temperature in the car. You open the door, you stand outside, you reach in, you turn on the car, and then you wait for the air conditioner to work before you even get in. All of that energy savings just because and by the way, from something that produces energy. It's that cumulative effect that really makes the difference.
The last challenge that I lay out is that the federal government in particular, and I would imagine corporate clients as well, sometimes the real question is, I have a fixed budget, and I have a possibility of doing a lot more than the fixed budget. How do I extend that fixed budget through the energy savings performance contract method, through private capital, through this cooperation with the private sector? That becomes more and more important as we go forward with the president's infrastructure plans for the country. Thank you for having me and, let's have some questions. Oh, no. Lisa's moving. Sean's not moving.
I hear you, Kevin. I can't hear anyone else.
I think it's just you and me, kid. I didn't get any hand signals from Sean saying, "Oh, the audio's gone dead.
Oh. Maybe I can check.
Yeah, I can't hear Sean. Can you?
Mm-mm.
No, he's talking, but we can't hear.
You mentioned that. If you could...
Oh.
They can't hear.
They can hear now.
Now we can.
They can hear now.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes.
I can hear me. We good now? Hello?
We can hear you.
Okay. Okay. Got the thumbs up.
There we go.
Kevin, this question was for you, and it was, as you're analyzing and vetting a lot of companies to work on your buildings, could you speak to how Ameresco compares to other firms in terms of their technical expertise and this edge that you're looking to provide in your projects with more advanced energy conservation measures and more integration of new technology?
Sure. As you know, federal procurements in particular are competitively bid, and I'm a little limited to, on what I can say about Ameresco relative to the entire field, except for a few things. Number one, what I'll do is I'll talk about the things we're looking for and just remember that Ameresco is not the only company that can provide them. A breadth of technical expertise that goes across the energy sector and the building sector. We're looking for grid integration. I was listening to the previous panel, and they were talking about battery technology. Definitely, I have a pet project that I think is ideal for a pocket nuclear reactor, but I don't think that the public is ready for that yet.
I'll just say that's probably the part of this presentation that should be like, you know, let's cancel that at the end. It's looking at all the different technologies, and I think that's one of the things that Ameresco does particularly well. Integrated design, we're looking for people who can do that. There are other companies who can do it. The fact that Ameresco has our, you know, our single project in the New Carrollton Federal Building and several other buildings that they've done gives them certainly a leg up. Although, you know, there are other companies who are pretty good too.
I mean, there's that company that I won't mention out loud who did the work in the Empire State Building, but everybody knows about it, so you guys can joke with yourselves about that. The other thing that we're looking for that we find with Ameresco is the idea that time is money. Speed to decision, sticking with decisions that have been made and follow through on project management, those are really crucial because we did a little calculation and found that in the six months that we were spending in what I would call excess procurement time, just dithering over small details, those six months actually cost us in energy savings, 20% of what was the potential. Because, again, time is money and upfront before you get to the decision, before you get to the deal.
The last thing that I'd say that we're looking for in a company is one that comes up with ideas in a collaborative environment. We prefer to have the company in the room helping us make decisions, recognizing that together we fail or together we succeed. I think Ameresco recognizes that and has been extremely good to work with in that regard.
Thank you very much. We have time for one last question.
Hey, Julien Dumoulin-Smith, also with Bank of America, as it turns out. Kevin Kampschroer, admittedly, I've got a question for you if you can. If I can just kind of frame the opportunity here first, obviously energy prices are clearly elevated nationally. I'm just curious on how you're framing the opportunity here and how much larger it's become and how much more pressing it's become from your perspective. You can kind of sort of tailor it around, especially the various sites nationally. Like, there is obviously a pie, how much quicker are you going towards that pie? As well as if you can articulate what the size of that pie that's eligible for procurement in kind of the medium term is.
I think the pie is growing in agencies other than GSA that have not done a lot of this work to date more than in GSA. The pie is growing in GSA, but it's growing at a relatively steady state because we're systematically working through the building. A countervailing factor is the fact that the pandemic has taught us that we don't need as much office space as we used to have. There's going to be a shrinking of total office space needed at the same time that the office space that remains will be more intensively used. The challenge here, and I didn't throw this one out on the table before, is how do we do energy savings at the same time that maybe we wanna use the building more intensively?
How do we do energy savings in a building where we wanna double the population in the building from what it was before? The answer is we can do that because when you double the population in the building, we have a couple of studies that show a twofold increase in population results in about a 4% increase in energy consumption. It's a huge disparity between how many people you put in the building. Just, if you think about it, the lights are on all the time anyway. The air conditioning is pretty much on all the time anyway. You save a little bit in heating in the winter, and you cost more, a little bit more in air conditioning in the summer.
Basically, the only thing that really changes when more people move in the building is machines, cell phones, computers and so on, that consume electricity. Servers are getting more and more efficient. We're moving a lot of that to the cloud. That's working to ameliorate that. Increased density and Yeah, I would say that the pie is growing, but not probably as fast as you would like, and certainly not as fast as I would like.
Great. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Lisa and Kevin for your participation in this event. We really appreciate hearing the customer experience, during this for our investors and our analysts. With that, we'll move on to our new markets and new models panel.
Thank you. Gotcha.
That's right.
Right. Okay, thanks so much. What a wonderful to hear from two fantastic customers. Okay, now we have the new markets and models. You've heard a lot about new markets that we're addressing, as well as new business models, energy as a service, the new old business model, actually. We're really excited for this session. We have an all-star lineup here. Three people you have not heard from yet, so let me introduce them for you. First off, Bob Georgeoff. Bob Georgeoff is an Executive Vice President. Bob, do you want to stand? Bob runs our South Business Unit.
Now look what happens.
He runs our south business unit. He's been growing that unit. He's been with us now for 11 years. He came to Ameresco by way of acquisition, and he's still here, having so much fun. He does both projects and assets and has really grown a tremendous team. You're gonna hear from Bob today on one of the new markets that we've been focused on. His team has been very successful in the C&I market, and so I'm excited to talk about that. Next up, Britta MacIntosh. Britta is a Senior Vice President of our Western and our London operations. Britta has been with Ameresco now for six years. She started out running our U.K. business and has since come back and taken over our Western business as well.
She spans the globe, essentially, and is quite busy and has some very exciting things to share today regarding utilities and also European expansion. Then, Louis, we're saving the best for last here. Louis Maltezos. Louis is an Executive Vice President with Ameresco. He runs our central business unit as well as our Canadian operations. Louis has been with Ameresco. Can I say it?
Sure.
18 years. Quite a long time. Came also by way of acquisition and has had tremendous progress, most recently, building out sort of the new version of energy as a service, as well as focused on integrating Smart Building Solutions into our overall portfolio. Where shall I begin? Let's start with Bob and Lou. Quite some time you've been here since being acquired, and you're still here having fun. Bob, can you talk for a few minutes about why that is, what keeps you here, and what keeps you excited at Ameresco?
Yeah, sure. By way of background, I've been in the industry, excuse me, almost 30 years, and half of that is approximately with this group here. As Leila mentioned, we joined the company, August it'll be 11 years, and it's pretty special. The answer, I think, is pretty simple. I like what I do, I like the way we go about our business, and you know, I like the people we do it with, you know? I think as a management team, you got to see some of the folks on our management team, and I think we all excel in it. An environment where the mission is clear and leaders are allowed to lead. George has created that environment for us since the beginning. I've been at a couple other energy companies. I think it's unique.
I think it's kinda special that we get to run a decentralized business model that is close to the customer and values the customer experience. I think there are three intangible pillars that, I think, excite everybody on our team, and you've heard it over, throughout, maybe in a different format today. It's talent, it's teamwork, and it is just an entrepreneurial environment that we have that I haven't seen in many companies this size with 1,200 people. You know, I'm always amazed, throughout the company, we are able to recruit people from the top academic institutions, military institutions, hiring, you know, Nicole just brought on a battery specialist who's, you know, recognized in the industry.
The fact that we can attract that kind of talent and the collaboration here is pretty unique as far as what I've seen in other aspects in the industry. You heard from Michael Bakas. Mike, we've got two or three projects jointly we're pursuing in Arizona right now, which is where I call my home in Phoenix. Lou, we've got two or three, and Nicole and I talk probably weekly just on business at large. I think when you have that kinda environment culture, and a focus on a customer, which maybe I'll hit on as we talk through some of the other C&I examples, it's easy to stay here 11 years, right?
Great. Okay. How are you gonna match that, Lou?
Yeah. Well, I don't know that I can add much to what Bob said, but I do think I can underscore the point on the culture because, you know, George really has created an entrepreneurial environment. It's a word that's so overused that it, you know.
It almost means nothing when you hear it, but he means it when he says it, and we're all empowered on the executive team to make decisions, to stretch the business model, to put ourselves out there, and we do the same with our teams. I think that shows when we're in selling situations. When we were negotiating the procurement with the Northwestern University energy as a service partnership, you know, we rolled our sleeves up and customized our approach to what they wanted and needed. I think a lot of other people that they were dealing with were a little more stuck in their ways about the way the contract had to be structured. That's why we became their partner, and that happens over and over again.
I think we really do have that kinda spirit here, and that's what makes it a fun place to work.
We work hard, but we have fun doing it too.
Yeah.
Right? Okay, great. Lou, while you're up-
Yeah.
Gonna keep you on the hot seat.
Sure.
Okay? Energy as a service. Let's talk about that. What is this newfound, old found thing we're doing?
Right. Well, I have to point out, when Mike found out I was talking about it, he put it on his slide so he could take credit for it 10 years ago. Energy as a service, quite simply, it's the idea of delivering our solutions under a service agreement framework rather than under a project delivery agreement. What that means is that the customer pays for us to provide an outcome over time as opposed to deliver stuff upfront. What's nice about that, of course, is we've got a long-term relationship, we have the opportunity to invest in and own those assets instead of the customer owning it, and that creates some of the optionality that Mike talked about with his assets.
There's gonna be ways we can probably use those assets down the road that maybe we haven't thought about yet or that we can't do right now because of the current state of regulations. It's an exciting way to grow our business and to do the things we've always done well, but maybe in a different way.
It's the buzzword right now. As you said, we had the framework of these kinds of agreements way back when in 2002 when shortly after the company was started. Can you talk a little bit about how that helped us with sort of the current contract structure and how that framework has been applied to some of your recent projects?
Yeah, sure. It's kinda like what Nicole said with her federal projects. You know, one project leads to the next project, leads to the next project, so we're always learning and adapting. We did a project up in Canada with the John Paul II Catholic Secondary School, which was the first carbon neutral school by retrofit in all of Canada under an energy as a service agreement. That preceded this deal by, you know, four years, I suppose, in the pipeline. A lot of the lessons learned with that, a lot of the lessons learned from Nicole on her projects, a lot of the lessons learned from Mike on his asset projects all informed how we put together the Northwestern University energy as a service project. Because it has all those elements. We own the assets, we operate the assets, we're making an investment.
There's some central plant elements, there's some in building retrofit elements, so it all kinda comes together into one piece.
Great. How, given that it's such a hot topic right now and there are a lot of procurements coming out around energy as a service, how do you differentiate Ameresco?
Well, I think it's the same story you've been hearing all day. We have two major points of differentiation, right? It's the depth and breadth of our technical capability, whether the customer wants microgrid, battery storage, central plant work in building efficiency work, renewable energy, we have all that capability. And then secondarily, we're structured in a way that we can move quickly. As Kevin mentioned, we don't waste time during the procurement. Bob sits in the room, I sit in the room, Mike sits in the room, Nicole, Britta, we make decisions as we're going with the customer and get the contract quickly. And they like that because they're responsible for somebody on their stakeholders, and they need to show that they're making progress. So I think those are really our two big differentiators.
Great. Excellent. Thanks, Lou. We'll come back on that. Britta, you're up next.
Okay.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Okay. You have had quite some success most recently in the utility space. Would you care to share anything about that?
Yeah. Some great success in the utility space. The utility space really has never been known for being super dynamic or exciting, but there are a lot of exciting things happening in the space right now, and I think that that's due to a couple different reasons. You know, there's a lot of technological advances that are happening in the industry right now, and you've heard about a lot of them already today. In the utility space and in particular parts of the country, the utilities are dealing with grid resiliency, and capacity problems, and challenges when that's due to aging infrastructure or, weather events. Where I live in California, it's wildfires. That season's coming up in a couple of months.
you know, you have some really smart customers out there demanding more services from their local utility. The project that, you know, you're referencing, there is a large battery storage project at Southern California Edison, is gonna help SCE deal with a number of those challenges. You know, they're gonna be able to demonstrate a really large scale implementation of battery energy storage, for decent duration that they're gonna be able to utilize to help serve their customer base far more reliably, especially in times of need, and when they have challenging, like I said, weather events and so forth.
It also allows them to play in the market, and better serve and provide better products to their customers as their customers continue to grow, as their customers continue to electrify, as their customers continue to need the local electric utility more than they ever have before.
Great. One of the things, Britta, you shared with me, and I think it's very much sort of a guiding principle for Ameresco, is how you started with Southern Carl Edison, where that first began and how that developed into something very different. Could you speak to that for a minute, and then I might actually toss that around to you, Bob, and also Lou.
Sure. Yeah. It started with a small project, you know, that started a relationship and the development of trust between parties. It also allowed us to understand how they contract projects. I'll tell you that contracting with a utility, one as large as SCE, is fairly complex and comes with, you know, with its own challenges as well. As we developed that relationship and got to know each other, they felt that they had a perfect opportunity to really take a leadership step out in the utility industry and implement this large-scale project. We were invited to bid on the project along with a number of other folks.
I think that, you know, we had a great opportunity to be successful in the project, not only because of the relationship we had developed with the utility, but also because we have long-standing relationships that we developed with our suppliers. You know, coming up with 500+ MW of batteries, all in one place, all at one time is quite a challenge, and you really need to have those relationships with the vendors, with the suppliers, so that you can actually accumulate that large capacity and be able to deliver it to the project. You also need to have established relationships with the people who are going to actually build the project for you, the civil contractors, the electrical and mechanical contractors.
Having them be able to also step up and make commitments, you know, that allow to be successful in the project allowed us to be able to bid on this project and then be successful. Louis just mentioned, you know, being able to deal with contract issues very quickly and very nimbly. Because we had already done a very small project and had gone through the contracting process with SCE, that also allowed us to go through the contracting process for this particular project a lot more quickly than if this had been the very first time we had seen a master agreement from the utility.
I think it allowed us as two partners to come to a successful conclusion and sign the contract in a much quicker time period when time is really of the essence on this project.
That's great. It's building trust and building that credibility.
Yeah.
Sometimes it means starting with a very small project, which we're willing to do.
Absolutely.
Of course. Bob, talk a little bit about that. I, as I think about it right now, I look at Salesforce every day.
I know.
Right?
Yeah.
I know you know I do. I often see in your group phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four, phase five of the same customer account. Clearly, this is the way you're working as well.
We are. You talked a little bit at the onset of our focus on the corporates or C&I, commercial industrial spaces. I think it also threads into some of George, your comments at the beginning of this, the focus on the customer. I think we like to lead across the board, and this isn't unique to our region. I think everyone on the management team has this same approach to take care of the customer. I want our customers to think that we are sophisticated enough to get anything done, financially stable enough to get anything done, but small enough to care, and that's how we're building these one-offs. Go to the entrepreneurial spirit.
Seven years ago, Mike and I, our teams teamed up on a large healthcare chain in California, and it started out with a beta project in Hawaii. We kind of built the field of dreams. Like, we put engineers and construction and dedicated resources and scaled the contract docs, and that's how we get to the one, two, three, and four. That particular client that Mike and I are working on together, we've probably installed 55 different solar. We've done a microgrid battery storage on all of it, and we've taken that model, and we've replicated it. In our case, we focus on a fair number of commercial and industrials, but we've replicated that enterprise account is what we call it, and we've incorporated into the banking institution, the healthcare institution.
As an example to your point about scalability and repeatability, which is what we're trying to do, we are in conversations or have active projects with five of the 10 largest banks. Of the 40 largest healthcare chains, we've got conversations or projects active with 20 of those, and that represents 2,100 different hospital facilities. You know, I think if we focus on the customer, we do the right things, and we put standard contracts, negotiating partners, personalities together, that's where we're getting to scale.
Great. Lou, do you wanna touch on that?
Yeah. I would just maybe add, we see the same thing, of course, in my region. When you talk about the multi-phase accounts, one of the things that helps us with is in planning and staffing. Because you're all probably very familiar with our contracted backlog and our awarded backlog, there's also a lot of things that are earlier in the pipeline than that. Because of the amount of multi-phase work we do with customers, it gives us a lot more confidence about where that work is gonna ultimately come from and when it's gonna develop. It's really important to us on the business side to have that visibility.
Great. That's great. Okay, switching topics a little bit. The tough thing is my screen is not working up here to see how much time we have, which is a real problem for everybody in this room, 'cause I definitely like to talk. We will. We'll switch topics here, and I'll try to keep us on track as much as I can. Bob, I'm coming back to you. C&I, we have talked quite a bit about how we feel very excited about that market with some new pressing drivers. We can't be remiss in saying that we haven't been working with C&I over time, and of course, Mike would absolutely kill me if I didn't mention his project with BMW from way back when. All that being said, we do feel really excited about what's happening in the C&I market.
You have had tremendous success with financial services as well as healthcare and a number of other verticals. Can you talk to that a little bit?
Sure. I think the group that presented just before us, Lisa from BofA, put the exclamation point on that, you know, there are some trends that give me confidence in the long-term viability of these markets. One is unfortunate, but climate change is real, and we're in a unique position.
To combat that, right?
Two, we are seeing not only in the banking industries, but decisions around ESG being made at a board level, being driven to initiatives in the field. That didn't use to happen. It used to be a discussion, and you're seeing people with sustainability titles getting more prevalence in that decision-making process. I think the other part that just gives me optimism about the future is not everywhere in our 12-state territory or across different pockets do we have grid parity, but we're competitive with the utility with our green solutions. I would tell you, three years ago, we had to convince our customers that renewable energy was a viable solution. Today, they don't need to be convinced. They just need to be convinced that we're the company to get them to their destination.
You think this is a long-term play, something that we're gonna see with the new drivers, ESG, et cetera?
Yeah, I think, and George alluded to it, Monday the SEC proposed a set of rules that'll go through a 60-day comment period. They're linking, you know, your climate risk against your business. I think there's momentum, and I think Lisa said it's happening quicker. I don't think it's a short-term thing based on what we're seeing and the kind of behavior from our customers.
Right. Yeah, it was fantastic to see Lisa's timeline. I mean, that says it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Right. Britta, back to you on utilities for a minute. Of course, being very excited about SCE and that. Can you talk a little bit about how you're using that sort of as a blueprint as you think about all of the other utilities out there that are suffering the same sorts of challenges and problems, and how you've already started to move toward them with this type of approach?
Yeah. As you could probably imagine, there are a lot of other utilities watching SCE and watching this project. Partly just because it's big and exciting to watch. I think also because, as you mentioned, they also have a lot of these same issues that they're dealing with within their customer base, within their particular geographic region. This kind of project is very scalable. It's scalable to meet a lot of different needs. We have this great opportunity to work together with other utility companies. Over the course of our history as a company, you know, we've been working with utilities since day one, when we used to implement demand-side management programs for utility companies.
We have this excellent base of existing relationships where we can be talking with those partners of ours about how we can support them, whether it is to build a project like we're doing for SCE, where SCE is gonna own the asset, and they're gonna dispatch it the way that they wanna use it. In cases where we're going to build the asset ourselves, own it, and operate it on behalf of the utility and dispatch it according to what they need, you know, to meet their customers' demands. We have this excellent opportunity to really work with the largest and the smallest utilities across the country, with this kind of a project.
Well, everyone's gonna be watching you.
Yeah.
Just saying.
We already know that, yeah.
Okay, Lou, now suddenly the clock is working and it's telling me I have to hurry. Shocker, right?
Two-minute warning.
Right. Exactly. I have two big things that I still need to talk about. Lou, can you talk a little bit, you championed the acquisition of the Smart Building Solutions group and have done a tremendous job sort of implementing that and integrating that across the company. Can you tell us a little bit about why that was so exciting to you and what your future plans are there?
Sure. Well, I think Nicole had a great slide in her presentation that showed the different elements that went from the single ECM kind of project to sort of the smarter, integrated, smart building project. All that is built on the idea that we can collect data, we can manage data, we can infer things from the data, and we can act on the data. The Smart Building Group really has that brains and expertise for how to acquire that data and pull it together, both physically in the field with sensors and smart meters, but also through the technology and the IT in the back office. It was really important to have that in-house.
What we're trying to do, like we've done with a lot of other initiatives, at Ameresco, is we've created a Center of Excellence out of the Smart Building Solutions team. We've created a new group that's company-wide with representatives from all the different business units that get together once a month now to discuss best practices, the different types of value propositions that we can build on top of the Smart Building Solutions capability, and how to go to market with it. As we did with solar from Bob's team or battery storage from Nicole's team or the landfill gas work early on from Mike's team, try and take that expertise and then get it spread throughout the company.
I think that's great, and you're exactly right. That's something that we've done quite a bit at Ameresco. We started with the Center of Excellence around battery storage and got many people from across the different business units involved. Same is true with microgrids. Same is true now with the Smart Building Solutions group, and it's just a great way for us to educate the whole company.
Mm-hmm
with some of the expertise that we've developed. Great. Excellent. Okay, Britta, back to you. Everybody wants to know about Europe. You took a small consultancy and in a handful of years, turned it into one of the three largest energy services companies in the U.K. How did you do that, and what are the plans? If you can do that in a few years, what are the plans for the future of Europe?
Okay. Yeah, it's been a real exciting journey in the U.K. You're right, Leila. We started with a very small energy consultancy firm. The priority really was to build that capability, that center of capability in London so that it could perform all of the same services that our teams here in the U.S. perform, so that we could originate, design, develop, construction manage, operate and maintain, measure and verify savings. We do all of those things with our team in the U.K. as well.
We focus really closely on entering the public sector marketplace, build a portfolio of projects, and then be able, you know, at that point in time, we were able to really look to expand to other parts of the European Union. It's given us an opportunity now to look and at other countries. We are working with partners in Italy and in Greece. We're also looking at expanding into Northern Europe. I think there's some great opportunity there. You know, the European Union and the U.K., they've been a little bit ahead of the U.S. in really making a very hard stance on climate change, and then also putting the funding behind that to really drive action. We're seeing a fantastic opportunity to build on that.
Particularly in the marketplaces where we see entire cities, villages, communities looking to figure out how to decarbonize, how to move into a much more modern green economy, and also provide green power resources to their communities of concern. There is this excellent opportunity for us to continue to expand all through the European Union. I think it's gonna be pretty exciting next couple of years.
Big growth potential there?
Yeah, I think there's really great growth potential there.
Okay, great. Okay, well, we're blinking. I see it. I wanna close with one minute from each of you. The topic is new markets, new models. What makes you, Bob, most excited about the future?
Yeah. Three weeks ago, I was in Austin, Texas. It was a Texas Energy Summit, and there were a couple of takeaways. A couple of years ago, people were talking about microgrids. They didn't really have any experience. They didn't have outages to the extent they've experienced them over the last three years. There was a major airport there releasing publicly their desire to go to microgrids in late this summer, right? It was kind of an invitation. Part of that was EV. Part of every discussion was EV, and they were real projects. As an example, they, it not only has an impact on the electrification of fleet, but the power requirements is gonna be an opportunity with that, too.
This particular airport said they were at a 30 MW capacity, and if they took 10% of their 35,000 parking spaces, they'd have to double their capacity, and they're going to microgrid. I think that's what's coming.
Yeah. That's exciting. Very much so. Britta, how about you?
I think we're really in this sort of perfect storm of opportunity. We have amazing advancements in technology happening right now. We have really smart, educated customers that have goals and are helping to drive us also to helping them implement those goals. You know, we have within Ameresco the technical capability to do that deployment on behalf of our customers. Whether it's in the battery storage market or whether it's in decarbonization or electric vehicles, I'm really excited about the fact that we can offer all of those services to customers so they can really take a comprehensive approach and make really measurable progress toward decarbonization.
A single solution provider.
Correct.
That's huge.
Absolutely.
Right. Okay, Louis?
Well, I think, energy as a service and, public-private partnerships in the higher ed market are really exciting because I haven't really seen as much enthusiasm for other things as I've seen for that in the customers. You know, I've seen a lot of talk in the industry about different fads before, but as I go around talking to different chief financial officers and other executives in the higher education market, they're really excited about that, and they wanna hear more about it. I also, of course, I'm really excited about the Smart Building Solutions space. I think the combination of the Smart Building Solutions, which gives us control and visibility, and the energy as a service, which gives us ownership of assets, again, it's gonna create some of that optionality that Mike talked about with his assets.
I think we may not know yet exactly what that optionality is, but it's gonna be valuable down the road.
Great. Great. Excellent. Well, clearly, there's a lot more to cover with these three, no question. Hopefully, you all stick around for a little bit and spend some time with them afterward. But my understanding is that we are skipping this Q&A, and that we're gonna hold this Q&A till the end, and we're gonna try to. I'm getting the nod from Doran. Don't even think about going anywhere else. Thank you so much, very much to the all-star panel here. I found my pencil. Good. All right. On to the next, right? Okay. ESG is the next session that we have here. Geez, for anyone that knows George and the beginning of Ameresco, you would know that ESG is really in our DNA and has been from day one.
It didn't necessarily have that term, that coined term, but when George started this business, his vision was to energize a sustainable world. He has spent every day since then working with customers across the U.S. and Canada and the U.K. on fulfilling that vision. ESG is really just a part of who we are and who we always have been. That said, of course, over the last couple of years, we've put together, I think, a very good framework for doing a better job really reaching across the company and pulling together our ESG resources to ensure that we're looking at it holistically, and we're leveraging the entire company's efforts to do well by doing good. Another one of George's great lines that we've carried through over the years.
Under Doran's leadership, we launched an ESG group of ambassadors, and he's gonna talk about the frameworks that we're putting in place and a lot of the details. Before we go there, I just wanna take a minute to share with you a little bit of the highlights from our 2021 ESG report. This group that has come together to work on our ESG efforts has put a tremendous amount of time into sort of looking at these holistically year-over-year, and then also making sure that we're pulling it together in a consolidated report that we can share with all of you. Because we lugged some with us here, if anyone wants to take a look at our ESG report, we have a number of copies of them over there.
A couple of quick highlights that I wanna point out, and then we'll move on. From 2021, we had a subgroup of ESG ambassadors that were focused strictly on the environmental impact. They did the hard work that so many of our customers do in rolling up their sleeves and understanding Ameresco's own carbon footprint. Now, we are a company with 70 different offices. We have utility bills coming from all different locations, you name it, and they really spent quite a bit of time understanding and deciphering what that looks like. A very good process for us to go through as so many of our customers are doing the same thing. That said, once they were able to do that, we came up with a 2040 net zero goal.
I think we feel particularly proud that we went through that exercise ourselves and also figured out a way in which we're gonna commit to a net zero strategy. Next, on the social side, this past year, we launched our first volunteerism group, and this group was really focused on pulling together the company's efforts and thinking about our communities and how could we do more for our communities. In just the first year of this effort in place, we logged over 1,000 hours of volunteering in our communities. What did that look like? We built children's playhouses for veteran families that were in need. We stuffed backpacks for children that needed it. We volunteered at organic community farms.
We cleaned up rivers and beaches and parks, and we really dug in with all the communities that were lucky enough to work and spend some time there volunteering. Next up, I just wanna quickly call out on the governance side, you see some of those highlights, but a big focus for us in 2021, of course, cybersecurity and the health and safety of our employees. A tremendous amount of training and learning. My hat goes off to our IT team as well as our corporate safety team that spent a lot of hours training and ensuring that we're being careful and being thoughtful about everything that happens within our organization. For me, thanks, Doran, for giving me a few minutes to talk about some of the things that make me very excited. Now I'll give you the mic.
Thank you. Luckily, there's only one more slide to talk through. As Leila said, I'm looking at the clock. As Leila said, you know, ESG is in our DNA. The nine ambassadors, so you see the little laptop with everyone's pictures, mine included, that's actually expanded now to 11. The team has done an extraordinarily thorough job of putting in place the measurement methodologies for us to continue to measure our own footprint 'cause that net zero goal for ourselves is important for us to be shown as a leader in this industry. You know, we're not only doing this for our clients. The prior slide, through 2020, we had 60 million tons from client-installed renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, right?
Now we've included 2021 in that, we're up to 75 cumulative from 2010. We need to demonstrate that we are doing the same for our own footprint. We used our own internal Asset Planner software. That's out of our asset sustainability group. Some of you may have heard of it. It's a building monitoring and data collection system for asset planning. Their Asset Planner software, that's a software-as-a-service business that we have, was used to set up to collect all of this data that we need to measure our Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. We'll be using that going forward. Our footprint itself was actually right around 47,000 tons, I think is where we're sitting, and that made us very comfortable with setting that 2040 goal.
In addition to the strong team, we do now have a dedicated resource internally as the head of sustainability. You know, this is a person who comes from a reporting framework background. For the ESG reporting frameworks, even the ones that all of you knew about before the SEC started talking about its rules, you know, we're gonna be implementing, we're going through materiality assessment now, and she is charged with picking apart the external reports when we get external ratings, figuring out where we need to focus, and then project managing every bit of our ESG effort. We think it's a really great setup to have us seen as a leader going forward. Again, you know, 2021, the focus, the innovation, action, integrity. Integrity is critical.
We will need to be able to talk about what we do and stand behind it and stand behind our goals. Speaking of our goals, there are our commitments. I mean, this is something that's in the ESG report. I did wanna make sure that this made it into the presentation. That's our ESG speech. It just hits zero-
We're out of time.
Right on time.
I'm always out of time.
There we go. Now that we're getting close to the end, I do wanna spend a few minutes talking about SCE, and the impact it's had on the company, where the project stands, and then George will come up and we'll close it out. The project update is this. This was a very quick from proposal to award to contract. The momentum was there. Britta can tell you, we were just, you know, already in the, you know, day and night work progressing on how this project was gonna get done. The pace of the project was set even before it was awarded, and then further when it was contracted. Of course, the night that we found out we were awarded the contract, we immediately started working on the procurement.
We immediately started working on figuring out who our best subcontractors were gonna be. Britta and I and George and others on the executive team were immediately figuring out how are we gonna use this company's operating leverage to execute this project without increasing our overall OpEx base. Find the best people inside the institution to help us come through and execute this project in the timeframe that it was outlined by the customer. We put that together, immediately moved into the negotiation of all of the contracts, and here we are, you know. All of the POs for the major equipment, the batteries, the transformers, the inverters, the switchgear, that's all done. The major subcontracts, so our comprehensive engineering, the civil, electrical, mechanical subcontracts all completed.
The manufacturing of the major project product, that's all underway. In fact, the factory acceptance testing on a majority of the equipment that'll be used in this project has already been completed. With the site permits now in hand, you know, we've mobilized on all three sites in preparation for the equipment deliveries, and we do expect the civil work on those sites to actually commence pretty much imminently. As we publicized a couple of weeks ago, we did expand our corporate credit facility. I mean, that was a big step for the company, you know, really taking our corporate credit facility to a level where it's on the [uncertain] . We brought in some new banks. We're really happy to have new parties to work with.
You know, we're now sitting at a senior secured credit facility of $495 million. That's something that we feel is quite comfortable for us to handle this project and the next one and the next one, as well as investment in our assets, as you guys know, that we like to do. Now moving forward, of course, you can imagine that we are working daily, hourly, often, overnight, with our suppliers to ensure that we get timely delivery of the product on the sites. You know, and with that kind of active management, you know, we've built the buffers into the schedule to ensure that we can withstand and manage.
We've been managing any issues on logistics or otherwise that are coming up, and we'll continue to manage those in a way that we, you know, expect to finish this project on schedule. That's the update on the SCE project. Just to give you a quick schematic, the project on the left is one that we have installed, we own, we operate. That's one of our assets, the Newmarket Battery, 16 MWh. You can see where the batteries are. It looks like a little bit of a fast food restaurant parking lot, right? You look at the SCE one, well, a lot bigger, but it's sort of like maybe the big box store parking lot, right? You just have a lot more of these battery units. They're all gonna be tied together into the inverter units and the transformers.
This just kinda gives you an idea. This is representative, of course, and not an actual in the sort of as the project goes on, I'm sure that photos will come through. One thing that I want to highlight here about the impact of a project like this on our business is that it produces cash flow much like the rest of our project business produces cash flow, right? That cash flow is going to be used to invest in energy assets and bring out more of the long-term recurring revenue streams that we have. When you look at the EBITDA that it generates, you know, EBITDA goes into our development engine, and you've met some of those folks today already.
Then follow that straight out to either renewable natural gas or solar or storage standalone assets that are gonna be on our balance sheet. You know, when you generate sort of, call it $1 of EBITDA or $1 of cash flow, through investment, through non-recourse debt, through the development process and being kind of the organic developer of projects, that can pull out right here, sort of probably $0.50 per year worth of recurring EBITDA in, you know, an average life of, call it, you know, 15, 20 years. That's the important part of looking at this. I mean, we know and we recognize that winning this contract is setting Ameresco up as a leader in the battery storage market, right? I mean, we've been installing battery storage.
Nicole's been doing it for ages, you know, behind the meter and working on microgrids and putting solar on storage projects. Now we get the utility scale, and with our financial flexibility, the future actually looks great for utility battery that we can install as a design build project like SCE or as an asset on our balance sheet. That's what we're really excited about. That's where we are with the SCE. I'm gonna bring George up to talk about our financial goals. I'm gonna hold onto this.
I'll hold onto it.
I'll hold onto it. You talk.
Well, again, I wanna thank everybody for being here, but most importantly, now you know why we rate number one in execution, the team. Great job, all. Thank you very, very much. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. I think I'm a very lucky man about the organization that we have at Ameresco, the people we have, and the teams that we have. You know, and not only these guys that they are good individually, but they are great working together as a team. You know, we have a lot of fun together. We play hard together. But again, congratulations, guys. Thank you very much. Great, great job. Where we go from here? I think you've heard a lot, and sometimes I have to pinch myself again. The market is developing much faster than probably what we can deliver, as you saw.
In the past, the way we're planning for the company, we have a five-year plan, and then we develop goals for three years. Each and every one of the executives, we will measure them not only the annual individual goals, but if they achieve their three-year goal, rather than five years because it's very hard. Where we are in the last three years that came to pass, 2021, we had to achieve the $150 million EBITDA for the three years previous one. Then we were telling the street we will grow the top line in high single-digit numbers between 7%-10%, and the EBITDA between 17%-20%. What did we do?
Because we stole some market share from the competition, we grew the top line for about almost 14%-15%, and the EBITDA around 19%. Where's my slide now? What we should be able to do a little bit better than that. That's what I convinced them to do. The market, though, is helping a lot. We should be able to do little bit better than what we did the last three years. The goal for the next three years now is very, pretty much to double our EBITDA. Each one of these executives, they are measured on how well they will do against that particular goal. The board is incented according to that particular goal. You heard a lot.
The market is expanding, our capabilities have expanded, and we've taken a market share from the competition. When we develop this plan, so you have an idea, we look at the backlog, and we look at our capabilities. What can we do? Based on where we are, the assets that we have in development, and Mike went through the RNG development of those assets and how they will evolve in the permitting stage or the construction stage. Then John, we have a substantial amount of solar assets, again, how they will develop. We feel pretty comfortable that we expect that 2,000, we'll make that goal. That's about it. I mean, it's great to have you guys all. Now we'll open to questions and answers.
We've got some microphones around.
Yeah. Yeah.
First, go ahead. Joe?
Can you hear me?
You're good.
Kind of. Okay. Hi. I'll say who I am, Joseph Osha, Guggenheim Securities. Two totally unrelated questions. The first is that there's some reasonably beefy liquidated damages language in that contract that you filed as part of the 10-K, and I guess I should have read the whole thing, but I'm wondering, is there any kind of force majeure or anything else in there that would. I know, of course, you're not gonna slip, but, you know, God forbid you do. Is there any mechanism in there, if your suppliers don't make deliveries for dodging that liquidated damages, or you're just kind of on the hook if you slip? Thank you.
Sure, Joe. Let me talk in general terms about the way we approach projects and subcontracts. Right? When we contract, we typically ensure that we've got comfortable force majeure provisions in our contracts with our customers. This is no different. In addition to that, of course, with our suppliers, especially the major suppliers and the value in this particular contract, we look to push down the provisions. You know, you just refer to it as flow downs in the contracting business. We were quite acute with the flow downs, as you might expect in this particular case, in order to manage any situations where those LDs may kick in.
To rephrase that, you know, the, maybe the liquidated damages applies, but, you know, the pain will not be yours alone. Is that a good way of putting it?
I think that's fair.
Just a completely unrelated question. It's interesting if you look at the asset business and putting your own balance sheet to work and your own tax appetite to work and so forth, I wonder, especially given your background, do you think about engaging tax equity partners, maybe other people that might have tax appetite as part of how you capitalize these things?
We do. I think on a regular basis, we have relationships with a few tax equity providers that we use on a fairly regular basis. The financing of the portfolio is relatively balanced in terms of how much of the portfolio we take the investment tax credit ourselves, and how much of the tax credits we pass on to third-party investors that provide us tax equity. You know, we have deployed solar using
Probably, well, the two major types of tax equity sale-leaseback as well as partnership flip, those are regular. We've got good relationships, good solid lines set up to hit those as needed.
All right.
More questions?
Hi. Eric Stine with Craig-Hallum.
Eric.
Just curious, on the energy assets. You know, I think everyone thinks about the growth there being just adding to the asset base. Clearly, you are looking to expand the capabilities of each project. So curious, I don't know if you're able to quantify, but from a high level, talk about how you could add, you know, if you think about an average project, how you think you can expand that over time.
Expand the project's bus-
The EBITDA contribution from each project.
Yeah. Go ahead, Mike.
Yeah, from the assets you mean?
Yep.
Yeah, yeah. I'll just give you a real example. Ameresco owns and operates a tremendous portfolio mix of landfill gas fuel power plants. Right now, those are sold to the market. There's RECs involved. The reality is that it's highly probable that come May, we should expect to hear something from the EPA that will expand the addressable market for us without the addition of eRINs. Right now, those eRINs aren't anywhere in the model. Never have been, because at the time, they never existed. With those existing assets, we could very well redirect some of that power to be able to monetize some of the eRINs. That's just one of many examples, right?
A great project I fail to talk about that Louis and I did was, again, the integration of the projects business, the asset business, was Jefferson City, Missouri. There was a prison facility that Louis was doing efficiency work at, and we were developing in the meantime a power plant just selling electricity to the electric municipality. That was how it was modeled. That was the original base that was built on. Then Louis came up with the idea of, "Hey, geez, you know, what if we could deliver thermal from your plant to provide that as another revenue stream for us and a sale to the customer?" That was nowhere in the model.
Now that project delivers not only electricity to the municipal light department, but has retail steam sales of thermal sales to the prison. That's the whole point. If you control the asset over time, especially as this market evolves, we will find additional ways to generate incremental revenue that we never thought about from the beginning.
Thanks.
Go ahead.
Stephen Gengaro with Stifel. You talked about the growing addressable market, and you also, I think, started the presentation by showing your market share a bit. As the market evolves, and I imagine as the market evolves and the opportunity evolves, so do the amount of competitors in different areas. What do you think is key to maintaining your strong position and just continuing to gain share going forward? Is it technology? Is it execution? Is it
Yeah.
How should we think about that as we go forward?
Execution.
Yeah, execution has a lot to do with it, but make sure we build the capabilities inside the company to be able to handle more projects. You know, otherwise, we have a dominant position right now, and that's why I say when I said we developed the three- and five-year plan is adding additional resources in order to be able to deliver to maintain that percentage. We think we can expand it because, and Bob brought it up, and Louis brought it up. Because this is our main line of business and we have the passion of what we are doing, we are able to attract talent. One of the things that has impressed me when I go around the company lately, meeting the young people that we have in the company right now, they thrive in this particular company.
It's great. Now we go to universities, we have co-op programs with the university. We cannot steal people from Honeywell or Johnson Controls or whatever the case might be. We have to develop new talent. John has done a great job since he came in with. We have a couple of pitchers. We turned them into a couple of the best developers in the solar business because they are driven. The young generation today, they are driven about sustainability, and that's what we are doing. We are able to attract the talent, but it takes time to train them, mentor them, and get them to the point that they are very productive.
The other thing that's happening, 'cause they are so well with the digital age, the research and development that they do, and they pull the company in a different direction that someone like me, the old-timers, will take us. You know? Basically, we have to expand our capabilities. Right now, we're looking for between 75-100 people any given point in time. That's where we are right now. We want to expand our workforce. We wanna-- The other thing to maintain the leadership position, we gotta drive the market. You know, our people have to go out there and approach those customers. This is what Britta said, you know, the perfect storm. Now, the customers are approaching us because they have sustainability goals. Well, Bob said it. We have to be able to deliver.
It takes time to build the organization. We feel very comfortable where we are because this is our bread and butter business. Many of our competitors have not, what I say, broadened their platform, broadened their capabilities to deliver across that space. You heard Kevin talk about it a little bit, what they like about us. They say it's the only energy services company that they can address renewables as well as all the other aspects. It took a lot of investments.
I don't know if you recall, about four years ago, we said we're gonna take $5 million-$10 million of OpEx to broaden our capabilities, and that's where we brought expertise in battery storage and microgrids. Last year, Mike made the huge investment to expand his engineering capabilities and construction management on the green gas plants.
Great.
Good question. Yes.
Thanks. Ben, over there, and then we'll go.
Noah was first.
Go to the front with Noah. Sorry about that.
Feeling the pressure now. Just to clarify, Doran, just you emphasize the SoCal Edison battery project, and it felt like that you might have been saying that something's off track, or maybe I've just got that wrong. Or
No, I don't believe I would describe anything as off track.
Good.
Yeah.
Then, George, I think that some of my competitors have written about, you know, you being a key man risk and what happens after you retire or what you do next. You look younger than me.
Thanks.
You know, how do we address that?
Listen, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon because I feel great, I love what I'm doing, and I love this business. Listen, I started this business 52 years ago. I was a startup engineer on a 650 MW coal-fired power plant, right? Now, I want to build 650 distributed energy resources and about couple of MW each, you know, to build that. Look, I love what I'm doing. But on the other hand, I'm not retiring. But if something were to happen to me, we have great backup team. Why I look so good is because I run, and I challenge anyone from here to do a marathon with me.
This team is keeping me young because I rely a lot on them, I delegate a lot, and I have empowered them to run the company. When it comes to the vision and where we go, where we do it, that's where I get involved.
Thanks, George.
I'm not retiring. I am incentivized here, by the way. They have the same three-year goal.
Noah Kaye from Oppenheimer. George, I would not dare challenge you to a marathon.
No.
I would dare to ask a multi-part question to your team.
Oh.
First question would be for Mike, and the second question would be for some of the project folks, starting with Nicole. Mike, you know, In the landfill business, generally speaking, fugitive emissions aren't directly measured these days, right? The industry is working on that, but it's all estimated using EPA models. When you do a landfill gas project, how much of the potential gas are you actually recovering? What's the opportunity, you know, just on a brownfield basis, to expand production at existing sites over time as some of that measurement gets better? And then for Nicole and the project team, you know, we heard on the last earnings call that there's an accelerating potential sales cycle, just given all the demand drivers you talked about, and now higher energy prices.
We'd love to know what are some of the verticals that are really manifesting that for you, where you're seeing the most incremental demand, and then what evidence can you give us that the sales cycle is actually accelerating?
It's a great question, and you must be from the landfill business. Typically, we take the gas at a delivery point from the landfill owner. Typically, we aren't in the well field. But the reality is that at times, there is opportunities to invest further into the well field to collect more gas. That could be through technology, which is continually getting better at the wellhead as well as additional wells. What we've done on many occasions is we'll actually run an analysis for the landfill owner. We'll even be willing to put the capital investment up because the return for us is so quick. It makes all the sense in the world.
We try to structure our agreements to give us the ability for that, if you want, self-help provision so that we can go make that investment. Where there's opportunity to collect more gas because it's not just at the point of regulatory collection, we'll go ahead proactively and do it. Does that answer your question?
Yeah. Thanks.
I guess I would answer on the project side. I think just the urgency of the drivers that we've talked about so many times throughout the day, need for resiliency, compliance with ESG plans for our C&I customers is really shaping these opportunities to come out. The project that we talked about, the Coast Guard, we actually did that project, developed it in 8 months, which is probably the fastest project I've ever seen go under contract for a federal customer, where we were selected in February of last year and got it under a contract in September. Again, driven by the customer who had that urgent need for resiliency solutions. I think we'll see more and more of that, in all of our customer sets for different reasons. Again, whether for needed infrastructure improvements, resiliency, or sustainability goals.
If I may, the last couple of years, because of COVID-19, you cannot use that as a measuring stick what's happening to our sales cycle. I think as we're coming out now, I think the next 12 months to 18 months, we will find out better. What Bob pointed out, though, was beginning to have better traction, the C&I. Moving that selling cycle, especially where we have national accounts and we do various facilities, and Bob mentioned some names there, but that's where you will see the acceleration of the selling cycle.
Can I add into that?
Yeah.
When we go into these enterprise accounts, and we've got a number of them right now, we pre-negotiate all the contracts, terms and conditions, pricing, sometimes open book.
In cases where we have ownership, we're lining up our equity. It's not like we're renegotiating everything. That's what gives us the scale and the repeatability. It's the same. When Mike and I get on those calls with the hospital that I referred to in California, we're dealing with their treasurer. There's chemistry there. We're negotiating with it. This is not a new one over. We're seeing some compression on the deal side there.
Yeah. Great. Well, that portion of the business is a smaller scale, so it doesn't impact the top line as much as you would like yet. Ultimately, it's gonna become a driver because they have the sustainability goal. You heard it.
Great. Thanks for the questions, Noah. We've got one over here.
Hey, guys. Thanks. Greg Wasikowski from Webber Research. You mentioned electrolysis a few times. Have you guys done any internal demonstration projects or work around production costs or logistics required for that? If not, what would be the timeline for you guys to look into that a little bit more seriously?
Go ahead, Mike.
Yeah. Yeah, I think our first project out the gate will be SMR for a variety of reasons. One being is, again, we're leveraging our existing assets. We are looking at some technologies on the electrolysis side. We're also trying to keep in mind, I think, you know, opportunistically, what's the best place for it. I mean, you talk about the West, right? It's faced with a three-year drought, and water is becoming a very scarce resource, and that's the basis of electrolysis. Where we do it, I think will also play a role into the availability of, you know, water where it's not as restrictive. Out the gate, I think it'll be SMR first for us.
Great. Thanks. Other questions? Can we go live here?
I gotta turn it on, I guess.
There we go.
Go figure. Maybe just on the 2024 three-year goal, how should we think about kind of the target percentage coming from energy assets? Should that stay pretty consistent with where we are today? You know, looking at some of the new markets, how should we expect, you know, versus kind of the consistent growth of the markets versus some of the new markets you guys talked about, how should we think about you guys penetrating some of those new markets as kind of core to that $300 million target would be helpful.
I'll start.
I don't know if I get it.
Yeah. I'd
What percentage comes from the assets?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
The recurring and coming from the energy assets.
I just saw that energy.
Yeah, go ahead.
EBITDA. Look, for the last year, we had 65% of the EBITDA coming from the assets. I wouldn't be surprised that out of that $300, probably it would be 70%-75% maybe, which I would feel great about it. Good. The other thing, because you saw Mike's development of the assets, and then John has even a more ambitious mega good development for the next 3 years. That will contribute a lot. That's what makes me feel very comfortable that it's a very good target, and we should be able to make it, and the management team. Now, as far as the top line, that's very hard to predict.
That's why we don't forecast until the end of the year what we will do the next year on the top line, 'cause we are in the project business, and maybe we will win another $700 million project, then all the numbers, the top line you forecasted, you'd be all right. On the other hand, we have a solid base, what we have in the contracted backlog right now to deliver that EBITDA.
Got it. That's helpful.
If I may just say one thing, 'cause you mentioned new technologies. As far as hydrogen and carbon sequestration goals, efforts go, they aren't really gonna scratch the surface on that three-year goal.
Okay. That's helpful.
Great. Other questions? Get a mic coming.
It's okay.
Yeah. Right.
Thanks. Just a quick one. One of the questions we get from investors, so I figured I'd just ask you here, is you set the bar pretty high with this battery project and what it does to your 2022 numbers, right? As we think about the pipeline of opportunities over the next 12 months, I mean, based on your guidance, it clearly looks like you're confident in what you see. How do you think about the bridge from 2022 to 2023 as far as order flow goes and how you fill the gap from what we suspect will be a pretty strong EBITDA contribution from the battery project?
We-
I will, yeah, I'll start. So I think the answer is, we are focusing on the EBITDA. That 300 is an EBITDA number. As we've talked about the revenue number, when you do design build projects at lower gross margin percentages, but with our operating leverage, you know, that's gross margin dollars that can drop to the bottom line, right? So I don't think we're thinking in terms of, you know, communicating and talking about gaps or anything of that nature.
We're thinking about that EBITDA trajectory, and we feel very comfortable about where that EBITDA trajectory is going to be, and that's a combination of adding energy assets, project business that's going to come, project business that's already in our awarded backlog, already in our contracted backlog, and the use of operating leverage in those future years with the new market opportunities that we're seeing.
You know.
Okay.
Yeah. If I may add, I'm a long-term stockholder, right? How you create long-term value for the company is the long term. You know, what we do next year is not as important, what we're gonna do the year after. You know, the value that we create. That's what we're building for. Everybody, the whole team is focused on building long-term value for the company and ultimately the stockholders as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You set a pretty good bar.
No, we did. That's not to say that this year's over or next year is over, right, already. We're a long-term play. That's why we don't like to talk about quarters too much. We like to talk about years, and we like to talk about multi years. Look, I wanna thank everyone for coming. We're gonna wrap up the Q&A here. As I said before, we've got a full hour of cocktails in the room, next room here. We've got the entire management team, everybody you see on the screen, except for Nina, unfortunately, who had to be remote today. Our general counsel is here. Questions there. We're looking forward to visiting with all of you, and we wanna thank you again, for coming.
George, closing remarks.
Well, other than thank you again. Great to have you here, and I hope we do it more often. You know, we are excited. We thank you for your support, all the analysts. In addition to that, all the stockholders, but that they are here, we thank you for your support. We will not disappoint you. Thank you.
Yeah, one last thing. Sorry, housekeeping. We will be posting the slide deck here on the website later this evening. The press release was issued with some of the new information after the market closed today. Lastly, this webcast will be, you know, available for replay. That's probably gonna go up an hour or two from now if you've got others that you want to go through and dig in, pick apart what we've said. Thank you very much. Looking forward to seeing you next quarter. Thanks.