Good morning and welcome to Generac's 2026 Investor Day. I'm Kris Rosemann, Director of Corporate Finance and Investor Relations here at Generac. I'd like to thank you all for joining us. For your reference, today's slide deck is posted on our investor relations webpage under the Investor Presentations page. Today's presentation will include strategic updates from leaders across our business, highlighting the range of opportunities that lie ahead for Generac. At the end of the presentation, we will conclude with a Q&A session for the in-person audience, so please hold all your questions until that time.
Now, a quick intro of today's speakers. Leading off will be Aaron Jagdfeld, President and CEO, with a strategic overview of Generac and the mega trends that we expect to drive our long-term growth expectations, as well as the strategic realignment that we believe will help us capture those opportunities. Erik Wilde, President, Domestic C&I, will follow with a highlight of the global capabilities and market opportunities that we expect to drive significant growth in C&I end markets for Generac over the next three years.
Following a 15-minute break, Norman Taffe, President, Generac Home, will highlight the organizational realignment and innovative technologies that we expect to accelerate growth on the residential side of our business. Following Norm, Kyle Raabe, President, Home Power Generation, will provide a specific focus on the significant penetration opportunity present in the home standby category. Finally, York Ragen, Chief Financial Officer, will bring us home with an updated three-year financial framework looking out through 2028. We'll begin our presentations today by commenting on forward-looking statements.
Certain statements made during this presentation, as well as other information provided from time to time by Generac or its employees, may contain forward-looking statements and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in these forward-looking statements. Please see our SEC filings for a list of words or expressions that identify such statements and the associated risk factors. In addition, we will make reference to certain non-GAAP measures during today's call. Additional information regarding these measures, including reconciliation to comparable U.S. GAAP measures, is available in our SEC filings.
Finally, this presentation contains select recast unaudited financial information for the previously reported 12 months ended December 31, 2025, that relates to our organizational realignment, which will be discussed further during the presentation. Select recast unaudited financial information relating to our organizational realignment for the previously reported quarters in fiscal 2025 will be provided with our next periodic report or sooner.
With that, I'd now like to turn it over to Aaron.
All right. You guys hear me okay? Sorry, didn't mean to.
Good.
All right. Good deal. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today for Generac's Investor Day here. You know, it's been a bit since we've done one of these. We used to do them on every two-year cycles, but you know, we decided that we'd wait a little bit longer this time around for two reasons. One, we noticed that the timing of our previous cycle, we used to do it in the fall, and that's kinda right in the middle of the season, the season for our consumer power business or our residential business. It was never really very optimal because you know, depending on how the season turned out, it was difficult to set the baseline year with that timing.
The second reason, and maybe more important, is obviously the changes that we've been undergoing as a company that we're gonna talk about this morning, kinda the headline changes around, you know, the not only the strategy of the company, which we've been committed to for the last three years, and I'll talk about that, but some of the bigger changes in terms of the mix and what we're doing and where we're focused, where we're putting our energy, our time, and our resources and our investment. We're gonna talk about that this morning. Obviously, the C&I business is a big part of that and where we're going and what we'll talk about. The data center market opportunity obviously front and center, kind of the middle of that entire discussion point.
We thought that kinda moving the cadence here for the Investor Day to a spring season and then having this extra kinda six-eight months to kinda let that C&I business mature in terms of the developments there that we've been talking about as a business, and we'll talk and fill you in a little bit more on this morning. Just a level set here starting out. You guys know the company quite well. You know, this is a $4.2 billion company last year's sales, about $716 million of EBITDA last year. The last three years, $1.3 billion of free cash flow.
If you know anything about this company, you know that we generate a lot of free cash flow, which is great because we're putting that free cash flow to work, and we're gonna talk about that this morning and how we're gonna use that free cash flow to enhance returns for shareholders and all of our stakeholders here in the next, at least the next three years and probably longer. We've got great scale that we've built as a company with 9,400 employees. We have a lot of engineers as a part of that staff. We are a products-focused company. It's kinda deep in our DNA. Our founder was an engineer back in 1959, and we really believe deeply in the power of engineering and the importance of products and solutions for our customers.
The center here is by segment, as Kris mentioned, and as you may have seen in the release, the 8-K this morning, we are debuting new segments today. I'll just point out that the two segments, Residential and C&I, if you go back to how we used to use product classes, right? Product classes of our residential products and our commercial and industrial products, this is pretty close to what that would look like. We just don't have the other category. The other category now is divided appropriately into those two segments, and we'll talk a little bit further about that. You can see how that mix kinda turns out based on last year's sales. About 59% of that would be on the residential side, which again includes home standby generators, portable generators.
We have some core products still in that. We also have our some of our clean energy products. Our ecobee products are all in that residential bucket. Then on commercial and industrial, we have the larger machines, stationary machines, as well as battery energy storage systems and our microgrid components, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. About a 59%-41% split if you looked at it based on last year's sales on the new segment reporting. I do want a couple things, though, this morning just to talk about here. You know, this has been. It's been an amazing company in terms of growth. I've been with the company almost 32 years now. You know, just a couple of things to point out on this slide.
Obviously, the company has grown a lot. It's grown a lot really in the last decade, in the last 15 years in particular. You know, I think when you kinda back up at least for the last 20 years, it's a 14% compounded annual growth rate. You know, I think the headline this morning we wanna talk about in terms of the next three years is kinda right there, right in that mid-teens compounded annual growth rate going forward. We believe we've got a great track record that supports that, and obviously, we believe we have a lot of really interesting things to talk about here in how we're gonna make that work. Because, as you know, the law of large numbers, it gets harder to maintain that kinda pace of growth as the company grows.
I think another important detail this morning, you probably saw it already, but we are maintaining our 2026 guidance. That's another important point on this slide. You know, again, I think when you look at a lot of companies, you know, somebody has said this in the past, but you know, if you're not growing, you're dying as a company. Growth is an incredibly important part of who we are as a company. It's a important part of at least how we've built this company to really go after opportunities and to be aggressive. We have an aggressive slant in what we do.
You know, I think it's maybe it's deep not only in the DNA of the company, but maybe deep within my own DNA in terms of being aggressive, in terms of leaning forward, in terms of going after opportunities. Growing creates opportunities, not only for us as a company, but obviously our team members, right? I think it's one of the things that's I started out as a staff accountant with the company at one of the lowest levels that you could possibly come up with doing travel and expense report ticking and tying and things like that. Worked my way up to a CFO and then into this role. I think that kind of opportunity only comes from growth.
It's really difficult to get that kind of opportunity or to give that kind of opportunity to our team members unless we're growing. We're very focused on growth. It's not a growth at all costs type of mentality, but, you know, it's profitable growth. We wanna make sure the things that we're doing are worthwhile. You know, there's a lot of companies out there that grow but don't make any money. I call that running in place. That's not what we wanna do. We wanna run to get somewhere. Growing and growing profitably and finding opportunities that make sense, fit our strategy, and really play into our future is really what we're all about. This is kinda just maybe just a takeaway slide. It's kinda starting out.
We're doing this in reverse but, you know, these kinda bold statements here around what's going on with, you know, kinda the industry around us, the environment around us. The grid is strained. There's no question about that, and I've got some great slides on that. Load growth, which has been flat for two decades, is accelerating, and it's accelerating in a frightening way. I've got a couple of data points I wanna share with you. You know, I think if you're a utility executive or if you're a grid operator and you're looking at load growth, you know, I think you used to say, "Well, there's no load growth." Two decades of zero load growth. Oh, boy, now they're projecting 1%, you know, and what are we gonna do? How are we gonna respond to 1% load growth?
Now the numbers are staggering in terms of where demand is going on the grid, and I've got some data on that. Power prices are surging, and this is the good news is this is, you know, this is kinda simple economics 101, right? We do not have enough supply for the demand. When you don't have enough supply for the demand, what happens? Prices go up. That is exactly what we are seeing across the entire U.S., across the system, and our prediction is that will be a global phenomenon here as we go forward. There are a lot of places around the world where the power prices are already a lot higher than they are in the U.S. Within the U.S., what we're seeing in terms of power prices increasing is pretty frightening.
All of those three bold statements kinda lead us to the fourth bold statement on the page, which is we believe that we are at the intersection of a generational opportunity for Generac, right? Both for our industry, but also specifically for our company in the way that we've aligned ourselves, prepared ourselves. We've got the right strategy, and I'll talk to that. We think that this is kind of one of those moments in life that maybe, you know, you can go through your entire career, wherever you work, and maybe you don't ever have that chance to say that you have, you know, the opportunity to participate in something that happens only once in a generation, right? This is, I think, one of those unique times, and we are directly at the dead center intersection of that generational opportunity.
Now, we're getting a lot of help from the media in terms of kinda, you know, presenting our case, if you will, right? The headlines that are out there, and, you know, we've talked about the power quality headlines for a long time, right? We talk about megatrends, the megatrends that we see in our industry, that we see that impact the company. We see four main megatrends, and I'll talk to these four this morning. The top two, lower power quality and higher power prices, these two megatrends have been around for some time, in particular lower power quality. In fact, I might argue that, you know, as a company, Generac has maybe been solely focused on that singular megatrend for the bulk of our, you know, 66+ years, 67 years in business.
The newest trend emerging here, though, and it's, as I said before, power prices, this higher power price concept, these trends, I think are, you know, have major implications on the direction that not only we go as a company, but I think about how we think about power in our own lives, as homeowners, as business owners, right? It's a monopolistic system for the most part. You don't have a lot of choice. If your rates go up, you know, you can't just go across the street and go to, you know, the other utility company on the other side. There's a few places around the U.S. where it's a little bit more of an open market, but for the most part, right, you're kinda locked in with your provider, right?
You have, honestly, you have more choice in cable providers. You have more choices when it comes to your mobile phone providers. You have very limited choices when it comes to your power provider. As prices go up, that's gonna put pressure on not only your household budget, but maybe your business budget. What do you do? What do you turn to? You're gonna start to think about this in a much, much different way going forward, and this is part of our thesis, part of what we are focused on strategically, is we believe there's an opportunity for us to play a role in that.
Not just about keeping the lights on, which has been Generac's kinda legacy business, but where we're going in the future in terms of helping homeowners, helping businesses solve not only for resiliency challenges, that'll still always be the core, but also for these higher power prices, right? Could be self-generation, could be different concepts around arbitrage between when the grid is charging high prices versus lower prices and what you do to kinda play that arbitrage as a homeowner or a business owner. We are developing products and solutions to help not only keep the lights on, but also keep your power costs in check. These headlines keep coming. I mean, these headlines are, you know. Again, the power outage headlines, that's easy. When the lights go out, right? We're in Wisconsin, right? We're a Wisconsin-based company, right?
The first snowflake that hits the ground, you know, the meteorologists are out there, right? Live reports. You know, it's snowing. Yeah, no kidding. It's Wisconsin. That's what happens. It's gonna snow every year. We're gonna get that. And every year, the media has to make, you know, a big deal out of that. That's what outages have always been about. When the power's out, you know, it's easy to get those headlines. I think the bigger piece of this puzzle is the headlines now that are starting to come with regularity around these increasing power prices. That's a big change. I don't think we were talking about that a couple of years ago. We're almost talking about it relentlessly in a lot of places.
In fact, you know, you can pick up any of the major publications, and you're gonna find something about power prices, something about why those prices are increasing, and I'll talk to that 'cause it's complicated. As you would imagine, that entire you know, it's an easy story in terms of supply and demand and why prices are going up. It's a little bit more complicated underneath, though, on why we don't have enough supply and why demand is growing. We'll unpack that a bit this morning to talk to that in terms of how it impacts us and where we're focused. Those are the headlines. Again, lower power quality, this is a longstanding trend. We are only going back a decade here to 2015, right?
On a five-year rolling average, when we look at, we call it our baseline average, and you guys who followed the company for a long time know that that's how we guide, right? We use the five-year rolling average or the five-year baseline average of outages to set our guidance. We do that every year. You can actually see 2025. These bars represent total hours lost to outages. We call it a severity index. Last year was actually quite low. When we see this occasionally, usually every decade, something like that, you'll get a year where we don't get a season, and that's what happened last year. Back half of the year last year was historically low in terms of outages, but that's temporary, right?
Now, most outages have historically been caused by weather. Over 70% of the hours lost for outages come from some kinda direct weather event. Be a hurricane, could be an ice storm, something like that, right? You know, we've had 13 major outage events since 2007. Seven of those since 2010, excuse me, and seven of those since 2020. We do get these spikes. In our five-year baseline, we actually take those majors out in how we compute that because we don't, in effect, wanna plan, we don't wanna guide as if there's gonna be a major event. For longer term planning horizons, though, we do include one major event. For the next three years, our assumption is that that happens in 2027. Might happen this year, might happen in 2028. It will happen. There's going to be a major event.
In terms of outages and how we plan around that and guide around that, our annual guidance does not include that. But for the purposes of longer term discussions here on growth, we have to include that because that's prudent in terms of, you know, just the frequency. You can see the frequency of how often those major events happen. I think the new kernel here, though, around outages and the potential for outages goes to the heart of this kind of, you know, supply-demand imbalance, as we call it. This map here, this is right out of North American Electric Reliability Corporation's, you know, NERC, if you will. They do a long-term assessment report once a year. They also do a winter readiness report, and they do a summer readiness report.
If you guys haven't read those, I would encourage you to pick those up. This is the most recent. I think this was January of 2026. This was refreshed, the long-term assessment. This map kinda lays out kinda those are the grid territories, right? You've got PJM, you've got, you know, MISO, you've got ERCOT, you know, all the major grids that you guys are familiar with, that we talk about. These are the grid operators and how they kinda geographically lay out. The orange, kinda color there represents what in NERC's vernacular is high risk for outage activity in the next 10 years. Those orange areas geographically represent over half the U.S. population is at a high risk for some kind of outage event, a major outage event, within the next 5-10 years.
It's frightening. You go back in history, you look at these reports. Even more frightening, if you just read the headlines from this report, it's a couple things that were packed in this thing. You know, you could argue maybe it's NERC's responsibility to scare people into action, right? Is there some hyperbole in this report? I don't know. There's a lot of data in the report. I think it's up to you to decide whether that data is hyperbolic or not. At the end of the day, here's a couple of stats that are in that report. The peak summer demand. Peak summer demand, right? If you know, everybody kicks on their air conditioners and, you know, what could that peak demand look like, is forecasted to be 70% higher than the previous year's forecast.
You know, just from one forecast to the next, they said the summer load growth, the peak load, is gonna be 70% higher than they thought it was gonna be a year ago. The winter, this is probably the more frightening part of this, the winter peak demand is forecast to be 65% greater than they had the forecast a year before. Why is that important? Because outages in the summer are bad. Outages in the winter are catastrophic in terms of property damage, in terms of, you know, loss of life, right? The, you know, a winter outage, we see this in our own business. You go back to the Texas freeze, February 2021. Texas figured out that it could get cold. That scared a lot of people in Texas.
The damage that was done to homes and businesses from frozen pipes, right, the loss of heat. Right. A lot of the heat in Texas is either heat pump or it's baseboard heating, right? It's electric. That has a lot to do, by the way, with what's going on with these winter demand peaks, the electrification of heating. Heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces, right? Just on a raw numbers basis, we clipped past that, I think, two years ago when heat pump sales actually eclipsed gas furnace sales. That has big implications on the grid, right? That electrification just of heating, right? But there's also electrification of transportation. Now, maybe we're in a lull here, but make no mistake about it, right, a generation from now, the only vehicles that are on the road are electric vehicles, right?
Gas vehicles will be out there, but they'll be the realm of hobbyists. Why? Because the technology's better, right? The cost continues to come down. You know, the good thing about technology is it's politically agnostic. It doesn't really care whether you're red or blue, right? What wins with technology is cost and performance. If you've driven an electric vehicle, the performance is better, right? Now, that makes me sad. I'm an engine guy. We like engines, right? That's at the heart of our business. This transformation of transportation around electric vehicles has major implications on, you know, our industry, right? Supply chains, things of that nature. Now, it's gonna take a long time to play out. It's another generation out there. There, it will ebb and flow in terms of the adoption rate. Right now it's ebbing, right? Policy is pushing that retrenchment.
Over time, EVs will continue to grow, and that will have major implications on the grid. Demand growth continues to rise and rise very quickly, and there's a lot of reasons for that. I think probably underneath all this, what's really interesting is if you look at last year, retired about 20 GW of power across the country, right? Retirements of old coal plants or old power plants coming offline. On a net basis, added about 20 GW of new generating capacity. The difference, though, is important. What was retired were what are known as thermal assets, so coal, gas, nuclear, right? These are the assets that are great base load power assets. They have +90% uptime in terms of planning capacity.
The 20 GW that replaced them were largely intermittent, renewable, which it's great that we can build those plants on a, you know, relative cost basis that's at or less than cost for a gas, you know, a combined cycle gas turbine plant. The problem is, from a planning standpoint, you can only plan in the 20 percentile range for a utility scale solar plant, for a utility scale wind plant. Wind is just slightly better. Solar, the planning factor is something like 21%. Wind, it's something like, you know, 32%. It is better, right? 'Cause the wind can blow when it's dark out. Solar will not work when the sun's not up or when on a cloudy day. You have to have then storage to augment that.
That's where the cost formula starts to get, you know, probably not apples to apples in terms of that comparison. While I can build and construct that utility scale renewable power plant for roughly the same or less than I can construct a typical thermal plant, when I add storage, some storage technology into that, it adds a lot of cost to the system. Who pays for that cost, by the way? I'm gonna talk about that here in a second. We pay for that as ratepayers. You know, it's complex, as we said, and I think the NERC report kinda gets to it.
To put a little bit of a finer point on it, though, when you look at, you know, kinda just demand in general and where that growth is coming from, you can see that if you go back the decade 2010 to 2020, it was actually down 1%, right? So no demand growth, right? That's what, that basically almost goes back two decades if you were to look back all the way. The last five years, though, we've seen demand grow 9% over that five-year period. 9% over a five-year period doesn't sound that great, but you know, it doesn't sound that outlandish, but it, that's a big number. More importantly, though, is of course what's on the far right there, which is the forecasted growth over the next five-year period. Demand is forecasted to grow 32%. That is an unbelievable number.
Again, if you're a utility executive or if you're managing a grid, if you're a grid operator, those numbers are staggering. You know, you've kind of got your back against the wall in a lot of ways. By the way, there are just a couple of numbers here. There are over 3,000 independent power plant operators around the country. Now, those systems, those utilities, they're really full utilities. A lot of those are smaller cooperatives. There's a lot of, you know, where you've got local generation for a village or a city. Of those 3,000 utilities, there are 3,000 regulators, regulatory bodies. It's one to one. Is it any kind of wonder why, you know, first of all, the utility industry, the pace that they can react is incredibly slow.
Somebody once told me the only documented death at a utility was somebody getting run over by a glacier. Right? That was—that's how slow the pace is at the utility world. There's a lot of reasons for that. It takes time. It takes money, right, to do a lot of the things that utilities need to do, whether it's building new generation, building new transmission and distribution. Then, of course, they've got regulatory bodies that tell them kind of what is, you know, what kind of return can they expect to earn on that investment. Right? There's been a lot of talk about this, right? Maybe we need to lower the return hurdles.
In fact, there was just a ruling here recently where, you know, we saw return on transmission and distribution investments, the return on equity, the ROE was originally 10.57%. This is a FERC, you know, the federal group, set that return on equity hurdle. It used to be 10.57%. They just changed it in a ruling, I think it was last week, to 9.57%. 100 basis points less. They just said, "You know what? It's not. 10.57% is too rich. We're not gonna allow you to get a return on equity 10.57%. It's gonna be 9.57%." That has major implications for those utilities, right? For the grid operators. It's gonna transition. It basically is all gonna come down to reliability.
At the end of the day, the incentive, if you compress the return, the hurdle rates, the incentives to actually make sure the system's up and running, I mean, we're diminishing those incentives, diminishing the return. You know, it's just, again, this is what we forget about, or at least at the federal level we seem to, that that matters, right? Those returns matter in terms of incentivizing investors and those corporations to continue to invest in the reliability of our electric grid. What's underpinning demand growth? As I said before, these electrification trends, whether they be heat pump, whether they're EVs, EV trends, but also, as you know, data center growth is starting to come online and is having an enormous impact.
I mean, it's hard to put into words when you look at the numbers in terms of the total gigawatts that are projected to be on the system here in the future as a result of data centers, but it's massive. It's going to absolutely change everything we know about the grid today. It's gonna change everything about how we use power, what we pay to use power, and it's gonna change everything about, unfortunately, the availability of that power. You know, and again, I think that probably the most frightening thing about this whole thing is just how quickly the forecasts are changing. Every new forecast that comes out is taking the forecast before, some of these are six months ago, and it's dramatically increasing the percentages.
You put that together with the pace of utilities, you have a major problem that we are headed towards. There is a huge cliff out there. It's either gonna stop data center development, which I don't think is gonna happen, or, right, the utilities themselves are gonna find themselves in a position where they just can't supply enough power. On very hot days or very cold days, you're going to see stresses in this system, what the utilities and the grid operators call reserve margins. They've always said, "Look, we've got to have between 20% and 30% reserve margin," right? Excuse me, the excess of supply over the highest point of demand. They call that reserve margin. Those reserve margins are shrinking.
In some cases, the projections are in the next five years, there are reserve margins in some of those regions, right, those independent system operators, those grids, those ISOs, where it's actually negative. When it goes negative, that means your lights go out. That's exactly what happened in February of 2021 with ERCOT. They were six minutes away from major destruction, long-term destruction, to components in the grid, transformers, operating plants, things that would have taken months, perhaps even years, to fix. Their only tool in the toolkit with six minutes left was to shut everything off, drop the load. They disconnected loads everywhere. 9 million people. That was the tool in the toolkit. That was the last one they had. Just shut it off on a very cold day. This is gonna happen more. Right? That's an isolated example, right?
It's five years old now, but we think that that is the tip of the spear when it comes to what's coming at us in the future. As we said before, prices are going up. Who's paying for those prices? You and I. In the parlance of utility companies, right, in the parlance of the regulatory bodies that manage those companies and watch over those companies, we are known as ratepayers, collectively, together. We are the ratepayers. We're the ones paying the bill. You know, there's a lot of discussion about there that, you know, data centers should come out, and they should pay their own way. Yes, they should. But this is a system, and the system has to generate power here, get power there, right? It has to adjust to stay perfectly in balance, by the way.
This is probably the biggest issue is that if you're a grid operator, the only thing you care about. Well, you care about power prices, but you don't care as much about power prices. You care about making sure that your supply and demand are almost equally balanced every single minute of the day. You can't have too little supply, and you can't have too much supply. Those are also problems, right? You can't have too little demand. You can't have too much demand. You have to manage those. The problem is the equation there to keep things in balance is becoming very, very complex, and the changes on both sides are now happening much more quickly. The ability to react, the ability to keep those systems in balance is challenging.
It's gonna take a lot of money to do what we need to do as a nation in terms of investment in the power grid. $1.4 trillion is the estimate here. It's not a small, you know, it's not for the faint of heart. That's over the next five years. Feedstocks going into the grid, those costs are increasing as well, right? I mean, we all know what's going on right now with the energy shock that we're going through here over the last four weeks. Natural gas prices are up considerably. As those feedstock prices increase, right, that's who pays for that? We do. That's the variable cost portion. There's not even a question about that, by the way. Like, when you look at the formulas, the variable cost piece comes right to us.
The fixed cost piece is, you know, that's spread out over time. Again, we can go back to, okay, who really pays for that? Is it data centers? Do they pay direct, right? Should it be industrial users, right? How do residential customers fit into that? Every grid operator, every utility has different ideas on that. But at the end of the day, you know, the result is the same. Our prices are going up, and they're not going up a little bit. You know, in that same decade where we had zero load growth, they only went up 6% over that decade. The next five years, they went up 32%, right?
If you've got your own power bill at home and you look at that, it's up +30% , some parts of the country more than that, from where it was five years ago. Where it's going is even worse. The next five years, it's gonna go up another 40%. Power costs are gonna double, more than double in the next decade. That's the forecast. That's the long-range forecast. There's a lot of reasons for this, but in the end, you get back to that simple economics, supply and demand, the investments that need to be made to grow the grid to accommodate all of that additional load growth that's coming at us. Now, underpinning that is AI, as we said before. You know, and you guys follow the hyperscale CapEx numbers, but look at that chart.
You know, $650 billion-$670 billion, pick your number based on, you know, the major hyperscalers and what they've said they're gonna spend. That's an unbelievable number, and we're seeing it, both, you know, indirectly in terms of the impact it has on, you know, power costs and what that does for our business, but even directly in terms of the backup power needed for these data centers that we're gonna talk about this morning and that we've been talking about for, you know, for the last several quarters. The addressable market for our products, for backing up those data centers, grows commensurately with the CapEx spending, as you would imagine. Every single project, almost every single project has some amount of backup power on it, right?
Some of them are fully backed up, some are a smaller percentage, depending on if they've got their own generating capacity that they've brought along. Over time, though, we think that based on at least the near term here, that market for backup power on a global basis, about a $14 billion-$17 billion opportunity. You know, obviously a huge opportunity for us as a company. We're a new entrant in that market. We'll talk about that this morning. It has major implications on where we're going as a company. Those are, you know, those three megatrends, so lower power quality, higher power prices, and then, you know, the AI boom, if you will, in terms of what that's gonna do to the grid and what it's gonna do to our business directly. Those are three of the four megatrends. The fourth megatrend is all about infrastructure investment.
Now, we've been focused on infrastructure investment as part of our strategy for quite some time, right? We're doubling down on that. You know, we recently announced an acquisition, a company called Allmand that does mobile products, temporary lighting products, temporary power products, temporary heating products. These are the products you need when you're rebuilding infrastructure. When that infrastructure's finally rebuilt and you wanna harden that infrastructure with backup power, we also do that, a lot of that in our C&I business. Whether you're talking about, you know, you're talking about backing up the telecommunication sites, wastewater treatment plants, right, other municipal installations, we do all of that. You'll see our generators, you know, if you go on toll roads, you see them backing up at the toll booth locations.
You'll see them at ports. You'll see them, again, at cell towers along the highway. That's all critical infrastructure, and we believe deeply that this $100 trillion global infrastructure requirement, this investment that's required for the next 15 years, that, you know, they're gonna need a lot of our products. Both to build and construct, so that's our mobile products, and we'll talk about that. Erik's gonna talk about that here. But also in the stationary products to harden those infrastructure elements. Our strategy is powering a smarter world. This hasn't changed. The last three years, we put this together three years ago, and there's three main pillars of this strategy. Improving energy, resilience, and independence.
That's kind of again, as I said, if you were to look at Generac over the years, maybe over the last 60+ years, that might've been the only kinda leg of the stool, if you will, in terms of our strategy. It's all about backup power, all about resilience. Optimizing energy efficiency and consumption, though, was a new leg of the stool that we added several years ago, four or five years ago, with our foray into battery storage, our foray into rooftop solar, right? Battery energy storage in larger formats in our C&I business, microgrids. Those are efforts that are focused on controlling cost, helping homeowners, helping businesses not only keep the lights on as part of that system, but also reduce cost. As I said, innovating and protecting and building critical infrastructure, that's the third leg of the stool when it comes to our strategy, powering a smarter world.
Now, new this morning. You know, we got a great strategy, but in order to execute crisply against that strategy, we felt that we needed to take the next step in making sure we've got the right organizational structure. We made an announcement this morning, it's something we've been working on over the last several months, to get our segments and get the organizational structure of the company set up such that it can feed that strategy and help us quicken the pace of execution against the strategy. Our two segments, as we debuted this morning, will be our residential segment and our commercial & industrial. On the residential side, we're introducing something we call Generac Home.
This is the combination of our, I'll call it, our legacy consumer power business, right? Home standby generators, portable generators. Combining that with our energy technology businesses. ecobee, you know, Energy Hub thermostats, right? Security cams. We've got all of our PWRmicro products, which are our rooftop solar products, our battery energy storage products, PWRcell. Those products all combined, and then, you know, obviously the monitoring and management of those assets underneath all that, and Norm Taffe is gonna come up and tell you, kind of explain the system. But as you've heard us talk about this, it's an ecosystem. We see the future of the home as not just a single product to solve a single problem, right? Like a generator. You buy a generator 'cause you're worried about the lights going out or they have gone out.
That has been our approach traditionally. We've broadened that approach with the development of this ecosystem that works not only to protect your home, your family, your livelihood, right, with backup power, could be a generator, could be storage device, right, something different, but also to focus on helping you control the costs of what you're paying for that power. That is the ecosystem. To deliver a full ecosystem and to do it efficiently, we felt we needed to bring those groups together. Okay? We'll talk a lot about that this morning, but this is kinda the unveiling. It's about that ecosystem. It's about bringing those distribution networks from both of those businesses together into a single energy distribution network, residential energy distribution network. Obviously, when you do this, there's a lot of operational opportunities when it comes to efficiencies.
We can leverage our technologies across the businesses better. We can leverage the people across the businesses better for a more efficient outcome, and that's really what we're after, those synergies that are buried in this, and we'll talk quite a bit about this this morning. On the commercial and industrial side, now that's a global business for us, but we're working on improving the structure to increase the collaboration. Because whether you're building a 3 MW genset for the Australian market or for the European theater or for, you know, some part of the Americas, the South America market or the North American market, we wanna make sure that we're leveraging our scale on the supply chain, right, in manufacturing, the technologies, the controls that are at the heart of these machines. We wanna make sure that we're getting the most out of that.
Same is true of battery energy storage. We wanna leverage our supply chains and technologies there across our global business. Eric's gonna come up and talk about that. In fact, he'll be up next to talk about that. This improved collaboration took some organizational changes as well. Bringing that together into a more I would say a tighter format was an important part of these changes that we're announcing here this morning. It's aligning those reportable segments then to our strategy, right? Our former segments, domestic and international. That made sense. You know, ten years ago, we were new to the international markets. We acquired a company called Pramac over in Italy that became our essentially the nucleus of our international business, and we've grown that business very nicely, by the way.
It's a seven-- you know, $700 million+ business on its own today. When we acquired it was something, I think it was, $300 million, something like that. We've more than doubled that business in the 10 years that we've owned it. We've done that through organic expansion as well as additional acquisitions to go after other regions.
The fact of the matter is, when we think about our business and where we're going and how we wanna line up resources here, we feel that these new segments of residential and C&I are a better representation, not only of how we're gonna manage the company going forward, but also how I think we talk to the company externally, how we talk to the, you know, to the investment community about Generac. The differences in those segments, both the growth rate differences, the profitability differences, right? I think you're gonna get a different feel for that today. In particular, York's gonna take you down that path, to finish off here today. Those segments, as I said, if you restated 2025, C&I would be about $1.7 billion and residential about $2.5 billion.
I think probably the most exciting thing here though is, you know, back to that 59%-41% mix based on 2025, is what happens over the next three years. This becomes a much better balanced company. I'm excited about that. You know, I love our residential business. It's not becoming better balanced because residential is not growing, by the way. Residential still has some very healthy growth rates in it, right? High single-digit types of compound annual growth rates over the next three years. Our commercial and industrial business is gonna have better growth in the low 20s in terms of percentage. A lot of opportunity there that we're gonna talk to this morning. Again, if we execute, it's not, you know, can't take anything for granted. We can put anything in a spreadsheet.
York and I talk about this all the time. We can put anything in a spreadsheet and it can be true, right? The execution phase here is super critical. What I love about this though, when I think about what we've been working on the last five years, you know, as we got into some of the newer technologies, you guys have heard us talk about this, some of the challenges we ran into, right? In terms of just perfecting those technologies, becoming proficient in them, which by the way, we are today, and Norm's gonna talk about that. It took a lot more to get to where we are today than we thought it would when we made those investments five years ago. We're there, right? We've got great technologies. We've got the latest technologies. They're competitive, market competitive, both in spec as well as price.
Those are great technologies. They were new to us. You look at C&I, you look at the majority of the growth here, that is directly in our wheelhouse and what we do and what we have been doing as a company. Yes, they're larger formats, larger blocks of power, but these are generators. We know how to do generators. We know how to do these ecosystems on the C&I side. We've been doing it a lot longer. I'm not telling you it's a short putt to grow +20% on a compounded annual basis for the next three years in that business, but I'm gonna tell you that, you know, we feel very confident, and the quality of the conversations we're having with the customer base there that Erik will talk to is fantastic.
If we do this, actually, the C&I business is just slightly bigger. We didn't do that on purpose, but it's slightly bigger than the residential business in three years. I think a better balanced Generac between C&I and residential, I think is a good thing, right? Because as we know, the residential market can be a fickle thing. In particular, in our core markets of backup power. Look what happened in the second half of last year, right? Things that are outside of our control. We know this. We think they're gonna happen with increasing frequency and velocity. We just can't tell you when or where. That sometimes is not, you know, what an investor in particular wants to hear.
We know they're gonna happen over time, and for the long run, we think that, you know, we're in the right places in our residential markets. We think we have the right strategy. The C&I market, again, there's no sure things in life at all, but it sure feels like this is much more closer down the fairway to what we do as a company and what we have done as a company from a legacy standpoint.
With that, I'm gonna turn this over to Erik, and he's gonna get you oriented, if you will, on the opportunities in our commercial and industrial business. Erik?
Thanks a lot, Aaron. I was gonna kind of a lot of people are new to the Generac C&I business, although the business isn't new to us. I was gonna walk through kind of where the products are, how it fits in, and end up with where we're going. The base business has been generators, which is top left. We have a mobile generator product line for site power, light towers. Our battery energy storage systems are part of our multi-asset solutions and microgrids. We have our own natural gas engines, so we drive and develop our own products there. On the controls and connectivity, we've built out all of our controls and integration in-house. We do sell those products externally, but really it helps us drive a better value solution for our customers.
As Aaron's talked about the scale and the growth of the business, we've been investing in facilities globally. Right now we're up to 17 manufacturing facilities in the global marketplace, both covering North America and international. We're serving 150 countries, and our strategy is to build and produce those products in the markets they're serving. We try as much as possible to find scalable locations that can deliver a local market that brings density. Over the last 5-10 years, we've built out a really robust global distribution network. We're not just a North American market. We have over 800 partners globally that we're working with. How have we been doing it?
The Oshkosh factory, Eagle factory, we have legacy facilities, but as we found the investment opportunity, we just added the Middle factory, our Sussex facility, that's going online in Q4, really late Q3, to build that large data center product. On the right-hand side, we added the Beaver Dam facility to actually scale up our base business because that business has been growing very strong. Then with the Allmand acquisition on the bottom right corner, that's brought us additional expansion for our mobile product solution. On an international standpoint, as you can see, we're in market for market, and we build the same or similar products and solutions, but we have it there for customers, their unique needs, their unique requirements to deliver that just-in-time experience that customers expect.
Oftentimes, the products are very large, sometimes delivered in two truckloads or three truckloads, so having them available in the local markets gives us a very distinct advantage. We look at the opportunity change, and this is what we're getting a lot of questions and feedback on is how is the large data center, large megawatt products changing the business? Really, I think first and foremost, it doubled the addressable market we're serving. We went from a $14 billion market up to a $30 billion market opportunity. Purely just on the scale of the opportunity, it's giving us a lot more chance to really grow the business.
When Aaron talks about, you know, the C&I business growing and being as large as the residential side, the market is there, and we just have to capitalize on the market, and now we've opened up a whole new leg of growth in the business. Where do we serve, and how do we cover those markets? This is a little bit of an eye chart, but it's really important to note we have a multipronged strategy. It's not just large megawatt, small megawatt. It starts really with the go-to-market. We go to market through our distribution partners in region, so those 800-some-odd distribution partners we have globally, but we also go direct. We pick those strategic pillars that you can bring scale and value by going direct with those end users.
We mix and match to optimize the way the customers wanna procure products, and we meet them where they wanna buy the products. What's interesting to us is that when you look at our below 2 MW, which we've had 2 MW products for forever, basically, when you add in the additional product lines, we're already selling in those generator market segments to those customers. There's nothing we're missing on that far left side on those end-use. Now we're just bringing a different, larger product to those same, end customers and end-use segments. It's giving us a really great opportunity. We're meaning it when we say we go direct. We have 17 global branches, not to mention our North America opportunity that we have here. How does Generac win?
Really, we differentiate our products in many ways, but one of the key things is we're fully vertically integrated. We manufacture, design, and integrate our products for their end use. We're not just going out and buying off-the-shelf components, packaging a unit up, and delivering it. We design and produce our own alternators. We actually make our own natural gas engines. Up to our 1 MW gas product, that's a Generac natural gas engine. We optimize that product to meet the application. Metal fabrication and customization, it's something that's really our strong suit. We bend, cut, and shape our metal in-house, and we're actually expanding this kinda Generac core capability globally. As we've taken on the Pramac team, we've added these capabilities and our in-house expertise to their scale.
One of the key things that probably isn't known enough, the brains of all of our products come from an integrated control solution. Really, the Deep Sea acquisition we made several years ago unlocked a lot of capability. We had our own controls platforms, but this just took it to the next level to not only design, but also manufacture fully end-to-end in-house and bring that technology and that technology curve very rapidly to deliver end-use customer products. We're going through the process now. We've integrated all these new features and products from Deep Sea into the Generac product line, and we're expanding the Deep Sea portfolio as well. It's really a differentiated advantage because this is how the generators function or batteries function. We control those assets really through that control side, and that's something that's our own technology that we leverage in-house.
We really separate the markets into domestic and international inside C&I. On the domestic front, we approach the market in two ways. We go through independent distributors, but also something we haven't really talked externally about is that we also own about 40% of our distribution partners in the market. Really, why do we do that? It was more opportunistic. It's not a strategy that we're gonna go up and buy distribution. As we wanted to grow the customer touch points and our connection with customers, we invested in those local markets. By having this great geography and great coverage, we cover every county in the U.S., every province in Canada end to end, and we have our sales partners and service partners in those locations. One of our unique differentiations is our elaborate service technician bench strength.
We have over 4,000 technicians to serve customers. When we talk to these large accounts, that's how we win. Historically, in the telecom side, we've been able to provide service for the customers where they need it. If it's on a mountaintop, if it's in a downtown location, we have service partners that can deliver it, or maybe it's even the Generac-owned store that can deliver that solution. What we really try to drive is that customer experience. A lot of our expansion on the owned distributors has been as we've gone to energy ecosystems, expanding the portfolio, selling microgrids to customers, so not just backup power. How are they using the assets to peak shave, to cut their energy costs, to, you know, optimize their energy bills?
We built out this distribution path, and it's working very, very effectively, and we'll continue to evaluate, you know, where we go next with it, but right now, we really love our distribution partners, and they deliver a lot of value for customers. On the international side, really what we've been focused on is expanding our branch role. When you serve 150 countries, you can't have a 150 different, unique experiences. We're leveraging our sales branches. We've been investing there. We just added, recently in 2025, an Australia location to actually have, like, formal brick-and-mortar to support our channel partners in region. We've really been broadening our capability and exposure, leveraging our branch to get us in region and then leveraging local partners to win big and win better, like, in that specific market.
As we've done that, we've expanded our technician partnerships to 800 servicing companies. When we talk to a global hyperscaler, they know that we can provide a service support in that region for that customer. They're very confident in that. We've built training centers globally to train in those markets so that our technicians are ready to support the products. We've added engineering capabilities. Industrial generators are typically a specified engineered solution. A customer has a problem, and an engineer comes up with a solution to solve that. We've invested a lot in building out that engineering capability within the region. I mentioned earlier, you know, leveraging the Generac playbook. We're making a lot of investment to insource all the previously outsourced components that the Pramac team had done.
Now they're doing vertical integration. We just finished launching a new facility in Italy to insource all their sheet metal fabrication to really, one, it delivers a faster speed to market, but you also control your experience for the customer and can have the products ready when they need it. We'll continue to invest in vertical integration and expanding what we deliver as part of our value solution for customers. We've been known really as the leader in telecom, and really, there's multiple different segments of the telecom space that we participate in. This is really a global effort, but we're talking specifically here about North America, and a lot of our North American customers are global, and we're winning outside the U.S. as well. We're the market leader in the macro towers and the C-RAN hubs.
We provide products and solutions customized for those telecom customers, and we have a great support network. Really, as they're expanding their network and their products, so going with larger edge data centers, it's a growth opportunity for us as well. When we talk about large data center products, it's not just for your traditional data centers, it also ties in and connects very closely with our telecom customers, and we're leveraging that customization and solutions that we've done with telecom as we jump into the data center space. It crosses over very, very well. We'll talk a little bit later on about edge data centers and how we're expanding there. This telecom opportunity, as Aaron mentioned, it's a critical infrastructure. People really just can't function without it.
A lot of emergency communications, people don't go to their radio anymore, they want the alert on their phone. This critical infrastructure is being backed up. It's still underserved. Less than half of all cell sites are really fully backed up, and so the market continues to grow and expand, and we're well-positioned to serve whatever segment of the telecom channel is necessary. Rental equipment. Aaron mentioned the Allmand acquisition. In January, we acquired Allmand. It expanded our breadth of products. We've had mobile generators, mobile light towers, mobile heaters. This expanded it more, but it also gave us some scale and footprint, additional manufacturing capacity to better serve the market. It's been a great complement to our team, and it didn't really overlap. Their customer segment didn't overlap with Generac's legacy customers, and neither did the products.
We had similar products, but serving different market applications. That's been a great addition to the team. Really, it ties into our global presence. We've built out over the last few years this global mobile business that we haven't really highlighted, just like we haven't highlighted C&I, that we're serving infrastructure markets globally. We have the most robust product line in the world, light towers, mobile generators, and we're serving that through multiple channel partners, both North America as well as internationally. There's some key themes that are really driving the growth in that business right now. Fleet replacement. As we came out of post-COVID, that cycle kind of missed the fleet replacement as people weren't sure what was gonna happen. Then there continues to be a global shift on rental versus owning.
On large capital equipment, a lot of construction companies are switching to that rental model, which benefits us as we deliver great rental solutions. Our products are what we call rental ready. They're more robust than a typical generator. It's ready to be dropped on the site and used in live construction. Now jumping into really the data center side, which is a lot of what I think most people in the room wanna hear about is what Generac's doing on the data center space and how we're growing into it. I wanted to start with what are the products and solutions we have? Really what happened, the bottom three right nodes are the only ones that are new.
As we look at data center business, we've been covering the market needs with our existing product lines. It's not just a diesel generator play. We've been selling and promoting and marketing natural gas generators in the data center space for years. We cover all the different end segments, and we're actually very strong on the edge data center market. We build a lot of custom solutions for edge data center customers. In some cases, like it says 500 kW, well, a lot of the edge data center sites are 2 MW or more. Oftentimes they'll actually take multiple units to have redundancy. They'll pick four units, just like on a large data center, they're actually taking multiple units.
We'll put four units on one site for that edge compute to optimize that performance. On the small size data centers, maybe it's a self-consuming data center, it's your own data and your own, you know, location. We've always had products to serve that. Really even on the large side, we typically tapped out around 60 MW of power on a site, but as the generators have grown, customers' desire to reduce the number of units on site has increased. We've now built out as we brought in the product last year, we've launched and started shipping those products, and now we can cover all the way up to, and by the end of this year, the 4.25 MW-4.5 MW range, and building out the portfolio as people try to shrink the units on site.
We'll jump into a quick video now, and I'll come back. I think one of the unique things about the product and why we like to show it is it is different than what you think of for Generac, where a lot of people think portable, Home Depot, home standby. That's an 80,000-pound unit. We started production last year, in the second half of last year, started shipping products, and we're gonna continue to grow and expand. What I'm gonna talk about now is, you know, why we feel we're gonna be competitive in that market space, I mean, we're already winning now and how we're gonna continue to win and grow and really build out our capabilities and our partners' capabilities.
I think I brought up the earlier topics about our vertical integration, things like that, to show, you know, we've demonstrated. It's not like we're new to the generator space. We were selling a 2 MW generator. Now this one's a little bit bigger. We have this controls leadership position. We're actually able to adapt our controls right over it. It directly correlates to the larger generators. We're leading really with that innovation, and I'll talk a little bit later on, but the multi-asset solution and integrated solutions, we actually have a robust portfolio, probably the broadest in the market, for integrated solutions combining BESS, microgrid controls, transfer switches, switchgear, and providing integrated solutions for customers. We can talk about solutions for them, not just a product. It's not just a product we're delivering.
Execution at scale. If you've looked in the past, our ability to ramp up, build product fast, you've probably heard it more publicly on the home standbys. We've had a big storm. We ramped up our capabilities. We've been doing that on the C&I side for years. You know, we've already launched new factories in recent years and expanded our capabilities and portfolio. We know we can ramp up our capacity to deliver these solutions, and we know how to build generators. Right now, by delivering them much faster than anybody else in the market, it's got us in the door, and then the rest of the work is gonna be, how do we prove that we deserve to be there, which we already are by a lot of the product innovation we're doing.
Operational excellence. Our vertical integration has the ability for us to actually help. It helps us shorten the lead times. We actually know how to work with our channel partners, whether it's an alternator manufacturer or the engine manufacturer, to develop a plan on how to have materials ready when we need them for the customer to really optimize that agility that we have, dynamically delivering products and solutions to customers. Strategic partnerships. We actually have a broad portfolio of customers we've been working with forever. EPC firms are not new to Generac. A lot of the developers building data centers, they built other products, and we're a partner of them already, so we're not new to them. We're not a big concern. The Generac brand name being publicly traded, Generac is a global company.
We're well-known, and so the objections that a lot of times people face entering a new market wasn't there because people know who Generac is. How are we winning? This is really a mixture of two things. We're leveraging that. We talk a lot about technicians, and customers need support. In North America, we have over 900 technicians that are able to support the data center market, the end market, and we have 400 dedicated data center technicians. On the international side, we have 800 service partners, and they're all able to support these products. When we talk about support, we're trained up on the engines. We're trained up on all the technology needed to keep the uptime. We have a vast distribution network for parts and aftermarket, so we can serve customers where they need it.
We're also doing it on the technical side. We're responding quickly to bids. We're providing a great experience for the customer from cradle to grave. From the time they conceptualize a project, we actually have the engineering resources and capabilities. We've been expanding our team, so we've rapidly grown over the last two years. It was probably new to the markets that we were actually investing in the data center space, but we've built this out over the last two years. We have the people, the team, the application engineering that can actually deliver solutions for customers, and they're appreciating it right now.
One of the keys to be successful long term is to have these great maintenance plans to be able to fix units to corrective action, and we've built all this out in advance, and we're really leveraging our distribution partners, both in North America as well as internationally. The emergency response capability, we're leveraging telematics and solutions to actually know when there's issues with products and getting a solution there in time. Our network operations center works 24/7, and so we actually have had all these things in place because that's been required of telecom customers. Really, you know, the actual scale is much easier to manage. Instead of 20,000 telecom units, it might be 20 of a given large megawatt unit on a site.
We've actually been able to easily address this using our leveraged scalable systems and really managing the experience for customers. We're approaching the market and the colocator, kind of the left-hand side, there's a colocator developer bucket and then hyperscalers. There's two different ways to approach it. On the colocator side, a lot of these people we've already been doing business with, now we're bringing larger products to them. We've already been in there because they're familiar with our brand and the solutions we provide. We talk to them about full energy solutions, and you'll start hearing more and more in the end markets about multi-asset solutions on data center sites to optimize energy efficiency, optimize consumption, and actually manage the grid challenges that are out there.
We are front and center with that market because through some of our acquisitions, we built out a portfolio of products that deliver those solutions. We provide that great customer experience. We're the underdog, and we're actually fighting for their attention and peace of mind and giving them great service. We're winning there. We're building out a great pipeline of backlog just from working with the co-locators. The hyperscalers is a little bit different type of situation. There's a much more rigorous process to get on an AVL. We're starting out. I would say we're in late innings now, moving very far along, but the process is actually long.
I think after we had launched it, we were entering the space. A lot of people expected our very next earnings call, we would talk about the great backlog and how we're building. It's a robust process that they're requiring of all their suppliers. It's not just the product and having a product that works, but it needs to work in their application. We're doing a lot of product validation right now, testing, durability analysis, and then actually getting our processes checked. We have a lot of great capabilities, and now we're having to provide that and document it with the hyperscale customers. We're moving into the pilot stage with customers now, and that's where we'll actually be showing our capabilities to deploy projects to sites. Hopefully in near term, we'll be actually talking about global supply agreements publicly.
Jumped quite a few. I mentioned backlog, if you haven't looked at the slide. From our last earnings call, our backlog continues to grow even as we're shipping product. We're up to $700 million now of a backlog, and that continues to grow on a daily basis. We're deploying projects to sites. Example here in the photo, 37-unit location deployed. We're doing global deployments, so outside of North America as well as North American deployments for the product. I think what gives us confidence, and Aaron mentioned it earlier, there's many different data points on what the market size is, but when you talk about a $14 billion, whether it's $14 billion or $17 billion, there's a great market opportunity, and we fill a void by having a great product, and we can competitively deliver based on lead time.
As we get more into the market, our confidence and capabilities to support the projects is getting greater, and the visibility into the overall market opportunity is actually giving us more confidence in this $14 billion-$17 billion market. What are we doing in North America? We realized very quickly that we actually not to say we caught lightning in a bottle, but it came very quickly, and we needed to increase our capacity. We've increased our Oshkosh factory, which was building our large megawatt units, and that wasn't enough. Now we actually started our Sussex factory. That'll be online by Q4 at the latest this year, and we're fully underway on getting that factory up and ready to go.
Just domestic capacity alone, we're sizing that at a little over $1 billion in available capacity. Those of you might say, "Well, why don't you have more? Why aren't you delivering more this year?" A lot of these customers are on 18, 24 month purchasing cycles, and we're filling in slots, and I should have mentioned on the backlog, in 2027, and some customers are booking out to 2028. Longer lead time product. Then on the international side, we actually have four facilities that can produce the products. We're up and capable, you know, Italy, India, China, and Mexico to produce the products. Actually, even for North America, Mexico is an option as we need additional capacity to bring products from there into the U.S. We're sizing our capacity to meet the market needs.
I think as you've seen, we'll continue to invest and grow our capabilities as we have visibility into the requirements. Right now, we're sizing it at roughly $1.2 billion of capacity, but we're willing to invest more if it is justified. Talking about investments, we realized early on that the packaging could actually be a big bottleneck for us. The open set generators, which are some of the photos we've shown already, they get delivered to a site inside a custom enclosure based on the customer's specifications. That's where the Enercon opportunity came about. They were a supplier for us, and we were working with them, and we decided that based on the scale and how the market was growing, we needed to vertically integrate that and bring that capability in-house and really control more of our own destiny.
It'll allow us to deliver to customers faster and invest at the scale we need to meet customer needs. It expands our margin portfolio, so instead of a pass-through cost on a product, it'll actually we'll be able to generate margin on the sale of the enclosure and really meet customer expectations where they need it. With that actually came switchgear capability. There's a lot of switchgear and electrical components built inside these enclosures, and that's an area that we didn't have a really robust product line on switchgear that opens a different market and actually now expands even on our multi-asset solutions where we're selling a microgrid. We'll now have in-house capability to develop our own switchgear to deploy with the products. We're planning to close in Q2, and we did actually get approvals to close.
Regulatory approvals are done. Sometime in Q2, we plan to close the deal, and this will help accelerate our presence in the market. I mentioned earlier, we're going bigger. We're actually in full development right now of the next larger product, and by Q4 we'll have the open order board to start booking backlog for the large up to 4.25 MW product. This is changing the product roadmap that we had. A lot of the customer sites, they're actually going to higher voltage sites, so what we call medium voltage. This allows them to go to the higher, larger-sized generators. In the past, they were limited at 480 volts, and if you went to a 4 MW generator, you actually couldn't match that voltage.
Now actually they're as they're increasing voltage capacities on sites, the larger generators make more and more sense. We're building out that product line and we're excited to have that in the market later this year. Data centers are not just a generator play, so we're actually working with quite a few customers on a multi-asset solution. You might have seen we had a press release with EPC Power, and really there's two big requirements in why we're seeing a need to actually use batteries and a multi-asset solution with data centers instead of just backup generators. Buffering volatile AI loads. A lot of management of the energy, you'll go from 100% down to 30% and then back up very, very quickly. Generators or even grid infrastructure has a very difficult time keeping up with that.
A lot of, you know, the bridging power applications where people are bringing their own power to the site, a turbine can't react at all with that. It's a fixed load. We're seeing more and more requirements for the ability to buffer AI loads for the facility infrastructure. We're pairing that with generator switchgear and this unit that you see on there to actually provide the seamless ride-through so that the equipment doesn't see any fluctuation. Talking about ride-through on utility ride-through specifically, down in Texas, they've actually passed legislation that the data centers cannot drop off the grid.
A lot of times, like prior to this bill, if there was volatility in the grid, so frequency drop, the data center would disconnect from the grid, and they would go on generator mode because they want stable power coming through. Well, the grid operators are saying, "Hey, we can't manage that to lose those large loads." Now they're requiring the data centers to maintain pulling power to their buildings. By doing that, they need somewhere for that power to go because they can't afford to stay on a volatile grid and have surging in the building. They're dropping on a generator power, and then they're charging the batteries from the grid, so they maintain that grid control, grid flow.
It's a great application for a multi-asset solution, and it's something that we've been doing on all of our microgrid and multi-asset sites already. Now we've scaled it up and working with EPC, we have an inverter that we can actually manage that and manage that two-way communication and dispatch of power. It's been a great experience for us and it's early stages on it, but now that we're seeing more and more requirements for data centers to have batteries integrated in their solution rather than a traditional UPS product. We're really proud of our multi-asset solution portfolio, and really we've built that over time. It hasn't probably gotten a lot of press and publicity. We talked about Deep Sea, bringing that controls the brain, the interface. We're adding Enercon in for switchgear.
SunGrid was an acquisition a little over two years ago now, that we acquired a battery energy storage company that developed integrated solutions with batteries and inverters. We added REFUstor, an inverter manufacturer and battery packager in Europe, and then the Ageto product, which is our Ageto control, so the microgrid controls. These controls and the capabilities are what we're leveraging to take advantage of these opportunities with data centers, but also on our multi-asset solutions. We're seeing more and more customers trying to take their power requirements into their own hands, optimize power price, optimize availability and uptime, and really control their destiny with power. Depending on where the customer wants to go, we have a solution that matches what they need.
If they just need pure backup power, we have our own transfer switches and traditional generator or more complicated up to the end where you're integrating all the assets we have and they need into one site, including transformers. This is a growing market, and we see as power prices become more volatile and power availability is more volatile, we'll see more and more customers go to really behind-the-meter multi-asset solutions and microgrids. How do we control this and optimize it? Generac Link is one of our proprietary platforms, and this is how we provide the customer confidence. I talked earlier about the telematics solutions. This is our own in-house telematics solutions, where we can actually control and optimize assets.
Not just monitoring health, but if they wanna dispatch their product into the open market, so they have excess power available and they wanna run their generators, our system is actually designed to actually be a dispatchable asset. We'll actually control, and we do this for large customers. The product solution started for hospitals, controlling 500, 600 assets on one site. It's a scalable product, but you can turn it off and on and send commands to the products to create the optimization you need. We're actually grid users. Our grid managers are actually using our product to manage their dispersed assets. It can work on any of our competitors' products as well or other assets, anything that consumes or generates electricity. Really, it's our own system that we're using to optimize our performance on-site.
We're leveraging that with our next generation AI to fault detect, define what's going on, and when there is a problem, actually advance tell the customer or their technical support, "You have a problem with your product. These are the recommended solutions." There's a whole AI fault schematic tree that'll actually walk them through how to troubleshoot fix so they don't have any downtime. We think this is a great catch-all for like in the back end of the systems to make sure customers have confidence that the products can be deployed and delivered successfully. Global growth drivers. Aaron talked earlier and kinda stole the thunder on this, and so we didn't even put how 2028, how big that was gonna be.
The plan is to grow the business, basically doubling the C&I business and really on the backs of one big driver is the $1 billion global data center opportunity. That, that's a big opportunity, but the rest of the business, actually, there's many key drivers in the different markets, rental refleeting, telecom sustained growth, and a broader portfolio of products actually for our legacy C&I stationary business that gives us great opportunity, and then the growing emerging market for multi-asset solutions. On the EBITDA side, right now we're starting at a low base. As we get more operating leverage from the volume, we're planning to get an accelerated drop-through, as well as the data center margins are accretive overall to the current EBITDA that we have.
We'll continue to vertically integrate in our own factories, but also with acquisitions strategically, building M&A around it, and continue to manage and optimize supply chain to improve our profitability. In a nutshell, that's how we're gonna move. We're gonna grow our EBITDA on a 20% CAGR or our top line, and then grow our EBITDA to mid- to high-teens .
With that, we'll turn it over to Kris before a break.
We're gonna take a quick break. We'll plan to be back here around 10:05 A.M. About a 15-minute break.
Good morning. I think we're all back together, so let's go ahead and get started again. My name's Norman Taffe. As Aaron indicated earlier, we've made a rather significant organizational change in the company. We formed a group called Generac Home, and it's more than just the combination really of our energy technology business and our consumer power business into one. It's really the full integration of several companies that we acquired four, five, six years ago. It's almost at least seven different companies been integrated together and now integrated into our core home standby generator business. I'm gonna talk a little about that integration, as well as the overall technology envelope and the opportunity I think it provides us for delivering solutions to homeowners.
Kyle Raabe is gonna come up here and spend a lot of time focusing on our real core business, which is how do we grow and continue to grow our home standby business. I'll come up for a couple slides at the end just to wrap up kind of where we see the financial model going for what we are now, a single organization called Generac Home. The other strategic reason we do this is we really have been building out the ecosystem Aaron talked about, and building out the ecosystem so we can provide what we think is a better experience for homeowners and an experience to solve home energy problems that aren't just resiliency, but also our savings.
If you take a look at kind of a, what I would call the business reasons behind the reorganization, first and foremost is that we were already seeing a convergence from a technology perspective. In fact, maybe 18 months ago, we started to combine our software efforts internally just because it didn't make any sense to build a software platform from homeowners differently in one group versus another. We could get a lot more efficiencies and build a solution we think has much more value to those customers from a technical standpoint.
Also, on the hardware side, we'll talk a little bit later, and then Kyle will talk about areas where in the interconnect to the home, the two sides of the business, the solar side of the business or as well as the Generac side of the business, we're going toward the same solution, and we can actually get great efficiencies by combining those. At the same time, the changes, particularly in the renewable market, had also led us to consider a recalibration of our spending profile. What we wanted to make sure we did is in the combination, we could get efficiencies, allow us to put more leadership focus on growing our core home standby business, while at the same time take advantage of the new technologies that were part of the energy technology group and apply them to a broader market.
Of course, along with that becomes increased efficiency. You know, we literally had between ecobee, the energy technology, other parts of the energy technology, consumer power, three separate customer service organizations, three sales and marketing organizations, and more than that in terms of engineering organizations. Now, in some cases, that makes sense, right? You do need expertise in specific areas, so there's some of those engineering organizations have to stay separate to an extent, but there's an opportunity across the board to do a lot of combinations here to gain efficiencies, both improve our effectiveness, deliver better solutions to the customer, and also save money. That's kind of the core business rationale for why we made this change, and that's what's important from a business perspective. It's also, we believe, a path to delivering a better solution from the homeowner perspective.
Let me, I'm gonna at this point move to a video to give you a little bit of flavor for why we think that's a powerful solution.
For as long as power's been available, it's really only flowed one way: from utilities to our homes. They deliver it, and we use it. Now, as the total energy solutions company, Generac has a bold new take on power, one that offers you more control than you've ever had to generate, store, manage, and monitor the energy you need for whatever you need. With products that are powerful alone, but brilliant together, so you can protect what matters most, reduce the power you use, the cost to use it, and your footprint too, all for the greatest peace of mind yet. Because real power starts with knowing you're in charge. The home energy management system only from Generac. For as long as power's been available.
We're gonna play it again.
It's really only flowed.
Oh, that was weird. Okay, we didn't really need to play it again. Let's hopefully it'll start. Okay, I think the video kind of represents part of the vision of what we've been talking about for quite some time. The graphic at the top here, you've covered Generac for a long time, probably seen that for quite a while. We've been talking about a home energy ecosystem for quite a bit of time. I joined the company 3.5 years ago, and this vision was already in place, and we had bought companies to build this vision. I think it's important to note that this is not just on paper anymore.
In fact, we really have built a very powerful portfolio of products, everything from a brand-new version of our home standby generator, which has much better connectivity and supports that ecosystem better, new portable products, new products in the solar space, in the storage space, and then really at the center, a brand-new software platform to support it all, even some products we didn't envision originally. Now, I won't say that the market evolved exactly as we expected as we made these investments. You know, that a lot of that stuff changes. It doesn't change the fact that we now have a capability to offer both customers and dealer partners a huge array of solutions for their needs, not just resilience needs, but their ability is to save money and lower-cost solutions.
I'll also say, I've been around long enough that as much as markets shift in one way, before you know it, they might just shift another way again. I think it's from a portfolio perspective, we're very well positioned to react to changes in the market. One thing I know for sure is that energy in the home is becoming more important than ever to consumers. Aaron talked about these two mega trends as kind of the core mega trends, the power outage over time, which has always been the core of the company in the past because we're resiliency focused, but also about the dramatic changes in energy prices, and I think this graphic is kind of amazing.
You can see how level, really, things were just 2015 to 2020, how little pricing really changed overall, and then the dramatic changes that have happened in the last five years. Aaron showed the data that said this is actually gonna accelerate even further. I can tell you on the energy costs. I was from the solar industry, semiconductor, but in solar previous to this for quite some time, and it's probably about 10 years ago. We had one of the challenges we had in solar was we had done a survey at the previous company and the survey determined that the average homeowner in the U.S. thought about their electricity bill seven minutes a year.
One of the problems is we were selling on savings, and nobody really thought about it. They're like, "Yeah, whatever. I pay the electric bill." I guarantee you people are spending more time than seven minutes a year today thinking about their energy bill and thinking about their home energy. It's just totally changed. The headlines, you never heard about it. It was just something that just worked. You didn't really worry that much about it. It's just changed so significantly. It's now suddenly headline news. The concentration effect that power is more likely to go out and the power prices are going up is getting the attention of consumers. I think we have a great opportunity to give consumers a path to solve both those problems with our portfolio. From just a pure market standpoint, it's also a great opportunity for us.
You know, today we have roughly a $7 billion into 2025, a $7 billion SAM across the businesses, whether it be the power generation piece, solar and storage, or ecobee energy piece. Those are all growing over the next four years. We see a growth from about $7 billion to $12 billion. In the case of the solar and storage grows the most, part of that's our SAM increasing. The market is in the short term has pulled back a bit, but it is gonna recover mainly for the same reason we just saw on the previous page, that power prices keep going up and solar prices keep coming down. At the same time, in our case, we had previously not really participated in the inverter or microinverter side of that business, and that's a new SAM for--
That drives a bigger SAM for us going forward. In power generation as well as the ecobee energy side, we also see growth in those markets. I think for us strategically, we kinda have three things we're focused on. One, and first and foremost, and most important, continue to drive the growth of the home standby market where we are the clear leader. It's a very profitable and great business for us, and a lot of the technology we built here, we believe will help us do that further, and that's what Kyle's gonna come and talk about primarily. In the solar and storage space, it's a market we're still quite small. It's an opportunity for us to gain share in a growing space.
It's an opportunity for us to deliver solutions which lower the customer's bill, homeowner's bill, as well as providing some resiliency, while our resiliency is primarily served by the home standby business. ecobee continues to grow, it continues to gain share, and has become a very nice business on its own. It's a nice market, you know, number two player in the space gaining share, but at the same time, it also provides us an ecosystem which we think we can leverage across the whole homeowner solution. If I spend a little more time talking about ecobee, this has really turned out to be a super valuable asset to us. You know, I think we were attracted to it because from the beginning, it was an award-winning technology.
Any kind of 10 Best or Year's Best awards, Wirecutter or CNET, Good Housekeeping, almost always right at the top. Best smart thermostat in the marketplace, and that continues to drive both customer loyalty and market share gains. We're now in 5 million connected homes today. There's more than 5 million thermostats out there at those homes, whatever, 5 million homes that are connected. Now we've crossed the point where 1 million devices are enrolled in grid services programs. That is in addition to the business of selling the thermostat, that's ongoing revenue, which is highly profitable. Overall, in the end of 2024, we had our first profitable quarter. Last year, we had a full profitable year, and we're gonna continue to grow that profit this year.
As we grow market share, we think we took about 400 basis points over the last three years of market share. We're a strong number two in this space. The GM, gross margin of this business is higher than the overall margin of the company, and about 10% of the revenue, just under 10% today, is coming from recurring revenue streams, which over the time of the period, we expect to grow to over 15%. That recurring revenue is not only more profitable, but it's a healthy base, an ARR base for which to grow from.
The other thing that we don't talk as much about, but also fuels some of that growth is that we are seeing great partnerships with companies like Carrier and more recently Rheem, where they've sort of made the conclusion that as an HVAC supplier, they would be better off OEM-ing a solution with us, in the case of Carrier, dual marking that solution, Carrier and ecobee, and offering that to their customers as a solution, so that they can deliver customers a great experience, they don't have to develop it, and they get all the benefits of that. On its own, you know, ecobee really has become just a great asset and independent asset. I think from a perspective, both strategically and the vision right from the beginning, it's far more important to Generac than that.
It really has become what we call the Energy Hub of the home. We really base all of our software, you know, as I mentioned, while we're announcing the full integration as part of the announcement today, the reality is, on a software perspective, we started this effort about 18 months ago, where we built a program we call Common Platform. We started to combine groups within energy technology as well as consumer power to build the software platform that unifies that experience because we thought we could deliver a much better experience. It also just made it way easier. We had. It shows three apps here. I will tell you, we had six different customer apps between all these different companies that we purchased. We were able to combine all that into a single experience on a platform that was already award-winning.
This ecobee by Generac experience takes advantage of the fact that was a world-class platform and starts to provide consumers that experience. It's also super differentiated because you don't just have an app in your hand. Everybody's got an app, but you also have an app on the wall, an app that allows your consumer to engage not just the individual, but the whole family. You don't have to log in, nobody has to have the password. They can see what's going on with the energy of their home. It really drives an engagement, which we think is a long-term benefit. That, you know, one thing I like to say about this product and the ecobee thermostat, sure, we'd love everybody to buy everything in our portfolio, and they all work together and there's a benefit for that.
This product actually makes every individual product of ours better. It makes our generator experience better if you just buy the generator. It makes our storage or solar experience better. All of them are better. It gets better and better even more, but this is something that's a positive differentiator no matter where you fit into the Generac puzzle. On the other side, you know, we don't talk as much about it, but for some of these businesses, it is arguably the thing that drives the buying behavior more than anything else is the dealer experience, the installation experience. This actually has been fully combined. Today, even with our latest home standby generator that Kyle will talk more about, but we introduced last year, it already uses the same installer Field Pro experience based on that Common Platform.
That, at the end of the day, when dealers, you know, what they care about is how efficiently I can get into that home, get this installed, and move on to my next job. The improvements in being able to take that entire organization, work together and build that best experience for the dealer is often just as powerful as being able to provide that to the customer. I think, you know, that's kind of where we are right now, and that has, I think, had really strong implications on improving our experience. You know, we just had our annual conference in Florida at the beginning of the year. Across the board, particularly the Field Pro was seen as just a huge step forward in the ease of doing our installation and doing their job with our products.
It's one of the things we think kind of creates a bigger and bigger moat around our core home standby business, a better experience for consumers to take advantage of. I also think, you know, one of the things maybe we didn't anticipate at the time these acquisitions were made is that the advent of AI is gonna make that fundamental, I would say, capability even more important in the future. You know, I will say, I'm an engineer, I've been for a long time, I haven't seen anything like the productivity increases that this has done from an engineering perspective. It really isn't. You know, there's areas here where I'm worried about hype. The engineering productivity and part of it is not hype. It is really impressive.
We've been able to do things so fast in that integrated software group without. Actually, the product management team has a hard time keeping up with development because development is able to do so much on their own. One thing tough about AI is it's really hard to do it any justice on a PowerPoint slide. This is something that we actually started working on end of last year, and we're already in beta test with 500 of our customers now, and we will introduce really in the second half of this year. It's just an assistant called Ask Your Home, is what we internally calling it.
We'll probably have a different name when we come out, but it's a way to take stuff which actually is quite complex and sophisticated and just make it easy to use. It allows you to optimize savings, resiliency, comfort, all from just asking questions and not having to understand how any of this stuff works. It's another platform for increased customer engagement. I'm just gonna, if I may, I'll just read kinda this just example. If you have the system like the beta testers that have these systems now, the prompt here is just, "How can I get ready for the storm coming?" The system automatically knows where you live and says, "Here's what we see in your area, what to expect. We expect power outage and 8-12 inches of snow with 40-mile wind gusts.
Here's our recommendation. We think you should we would like to check your generator and check the fuel levels to make sure that's ready if it's needed to run. We'll change the battery mode from bill optimizer to self-supply. That's going from a place that focuses on savings to a mode that's focused on better resilience. Update your reserve percentages, and we're gonna go ahead and preheat your home in case the power goes out."
That's our recommendation that it just immediately, within like 10 seconds, comes back to, and just asks you, "Would you like us to go ahead and make those changes?" It'll come back in about 15 seconds after that if you say yes, and it'll essentially say, "Your generator's ready to run, your propane's at 88%, your battery's been switched to self-supply. You should have about 22 hours based on your home usage, and the thermostat has been reset to 74 degrees so it'll be warm in case you lose your power." It's doing a lot there. It's just doing it really simply.
I think that as that investment on software has become both more of a differentiator going forward, but it's also gonna become something frankly that users are gonna start to expect. That's I think a key element of what that effort has brought us. All right, spend a couple slides talking about some of the new elements to the portfolio from a hardware perspective and a market perspective before I turn it over to Kyle. The newest element from a hardware or from market for us is the introduction last fall and the beginning of volume shipments this quarter of the first Generac branded microinverter called PWRmicro. Now this is four years in the making.
I would say, at least Aaron didn't expect it to take four years, but you know, the reason it's four years in making is this stuff's really hard. There's a reason why in the microinverter space, there's been one company for a decade. The reason is in this space more than anything else, it's not performance, it's reliability and quality. It is really hard to make something that lasts 25 years on a rooftop in Arizona or a rooftop in Maine that has to be in ice or in the summer it has to be in 160 degrees and have it to really last 25 years. The mistake a lot of other players have made is not making the investment to match the quality that that market absolutely demands and actually has come to expect.
We have made that investment. That infrastructure investment was a significant investment that put in place huge reliability, capabilities and testing facilities, and really it's like chambers, et cetera. This product, before introduction or at introduction, has already gone through 2 million hours of reliability testing. By far the highest tested product in our company's history, and it's more testing than most products anywhere because of the difficulty of the environment. That's really what's necessary to be in this space, but when you get on the side of that, it's a huge barrier to entry. My favorite thing about barrier to entry is when you get on the other side of them, you love having them.
It's really put us in a position to where we have an incremental opportunity in a very high margin space to not just support resiliency at customers, but to offer them a path to lower costs as utility prices go up. Because solar is sold on savings, and as the prices of utility prices keep going up, more and more of the country is gonna see those savings. Incentives or not, it doesn't. You know, at the end of the day, much of the market will still see savings with solar. It's taken a bit of a step back, but as those prices go up, and frankly, in some ways, to have the incentives in the bag will be good for the industry. We expect solar to continue to grow again.
This gives us an opportunity to take a part of that. These on the other side of the incentives, on the positive front, these are all manufactured in the USA. The parts of the incentives, the 45x incentives that have been preserved in both administrations, they continue to contribute this and also allow the cost structure for this to be very, very strong. It's a great incremental high margin opportunity for us. On the battery side, we introduced earlier last year PWRcell 2, which is a complete redo of our battery system. You know, back, Aaron made the comment, we learned a lot.
This is one of the areas we learned a lot to improve the product so that we have a solution here, which is complementary in many ways because it does some of the same resiliency capabilities that you get from a generator, although it is shorter term resiliency capability. Interesting in this space, you know, we actually see a lot of attention, partly because of our history at Generac, in people wanting to have a battery to make their solar to improve the ROI of their solar, because in some states that actually can be quite helpful. But also want to pair it with a home standby generator. The reason that is, that's your ultimate backup experience. You have the quiet, seamless backup experience of a battery, where you don't even notice the power went out.
You know, your app will tell you the power went out. You know, batteries have a certain amount of time available. If you really are worried about lasting through more than a day or a half, really, more than a half a day, having a generator allows you to have really unlimited duration and get the best of those worlds. Now, some people have said to me, or sales people said, "Would they really wanna buy all that, you know, for a solution? Is that really realistic?" I'll give you a data point which is about a competitor's batteries, the market-leading battery company that in terms of solar batteries, the average number of Powerwalls, I'll just say it, that were installed is closer to two than it is to one.
The average number at a home. That tells you that more than half the people or more people are putting two, three, four, five multiple Powerwalls than are just putting one. The one is there to make your solar more efficient. The other batteries are there because you wanna go through resiliency. Well, I can tell you, if you're starting to stack a bunch of batteries, you're way better off putting one battery for the solar and adding a generator, you know, with whoever's battery it is, or add a generator for long duration resiliency, because that actually solves the resiliency problem while you use the battery to lower your costs. We see a lot of people, and that isn't, by the way, new with us. That's been done. Generac generators have been used with resiliency and batteries before.
We're seeing an acceleration of that, and of course, our distribution network and sales network is really familiar with putting the generators in. That's an opportunity, we see them paired together, that does give you that more of that full ecosystem experience. It's also just a great margin opportunity for the company. In my last slide before I turn it over to Kyle, while we are excited in their own right for these new opportunities for us, like in the microinverter space to add incremental business, really the integration as well as the development of software stuff's really been building around our core generator business and making that experience both more, a better experience for customers, but also building a better moat around us versus competition in that space.
Kyle's gonna go into a little more detail, but some of the areas, like from a differentiation perspective that came from the ET side, are in some ways more compelling on the generator side. If you're in the solar business, you know about things like a meter switch, or other people call them meter collars. It is, for the places that they've been introduced, there's been almost 100% switchover to this approach. This approach essentially eliminates the transfer switch install and makes the installation itself of moving the ground wires, all the wires in the back, way simpler. It literally plugs right into the meter, and it saves hours on installation time. It's become standard in areas for solar. It's brand new in the generator stuff, and Kyle will talk more about that.
Same thing for the generators, the smart breakers he's gonna talk about. Of course, I talked already about the benefits of ecobee brings to that space. The innovation there is both making our generator business more affordable, but also more differentiated. In the center, one of the things we're also seeing is a lot of interest from people say, "Look, I want resiliency. I believe generators are the best thing for resiliency, but I also wanna save money." One of the challenges we always have on generators is when you're just selling something resiliency only, there's really no economic case for that. However, if a customer is open to saying, "I'm gonna put solar on your roof," we can make a case that essentially the savings from solar more than pay for your generator over time.
That combination building, being able to talk to customers about solving two problems, solving your savings issues, your cost issues, but also giving you resiliency, is a super compelling combination. Finally, something that's happening we see in the market in the channels, and I would say the sales channels, is that these distinct markets of solar installers and customers, which are a very large array of dealers in that space, and generator installers, have been largely separated in the past. We're seeing more and more overlap. I can tell you, I would say this is one of the areas too where I think we, or at least I, kind of was seeing it the other way.
You know, early on, my expectation was a lot of generator dealers are gonna say, "I wanna get in that solar space." I would tell you in the last year, it's been the opposite. What's happened is as the solar market has gone through a lot of change with 25D and the finances, a lot of your best solar companies have said, "I need to diversify." A lot of them are doing HVAC, and a lot of them are doing generators. We're seeing that ability to come in with a generator solution actually really appealing on that side of the network. It really expands us into kind of a whole new TAM of dealer market. I'll give a specific example. There's a company that's well known in the solar industry named Freedom Solar that's based in Texas.
Actually, my previous company, our largest dealer in the country, and one of the largest solar dealers anywhere for anyone. Freedom Solar renamed themselves in December Freedom Power. The reason? Because they're not just selling solar anymore. They're selling generators, and they're selling HVAC equipment. I think you're gonna see more and more of that happen, and I think it speaks back to the original thesis that portfolio products is exactly the kind of portfolio products if you were to see yourself as a dealer delivering energy solutions to the home as opposed to just either solar or backup solutions. That's the strategy coming together. It's a long, you know, we'll see how that process evolves, but we see more and more of that happening, and I think we're very well positioned to take advantage of that.
With that, I'm gonna bring up Kyle to talk about our core generator business.
Thanks, Norm. I'm gonna talk to you today a little bit about some things that you're probably familiar with, and then some of the slides or the things I'm gonna go through, you might have seen a little bit earlier today. Actually, I should probably first introduce myself. Kyle Raabe, President of Power Generation. As we brought the groups together, it's an area that I'm very familiar with. We're gonna bring these strategies together, not just for the sake of technology, not just for the sake of bringing technology, bringing our sales groups together, but you're gonna see the themes and the strategies actually play out to our strength in an area where I talk to my teams very frequently, and I say, "Hey, guess what? We're an organization.
We're in a position where we have an opportunity to go create the market. I talk to our groups, I talk to our customers, I talk to our dealers, major retailers throughout the world, and we talk about the ability to lead from the front, right? Aaron mentioned this morning, "Hey, you're doing one thing, you're either growing, or you're doing the other thing, you're dying," right? The choice that we have today is we're already in front on the standby power category. We're leading from the front, and what you're gonna hear from me today is, yeah, there are some themes that we talked about this morning that you see behind me here. You see lower power quality. You know, it's the things that you know demand is coming, and it's residential, it's commercial, it's industrial.
You see people moving from fossil fuels over to electricity inside their homes, inside their vehicles. We know that's happening. It's a proven fact, and you've already heard about it today. The reality is from a power generation perspective, from a resiliency perspective, the sensitivity to that going away continues to go up. There's a couple of things at play here that I'll start out with today. Number one is that our core customer group, which is typically 65 or 60 years and older, right, continues to grow. As they grow, they get older. As they get older, they're choosing day after day after day for a lot of reasons, which I really and I won't go into today 'cause I could spend a lot of time as to why it's happening, but they're choosing to stay in their home longer.
As they go, even as an older adult, right, in today's society, my dependence on the power being on every single day grows. When you take that away from me, especially as I move into our core age categories, you create a problem for me. You create a problem that I can't solve. I can't get in the car. I can't drive away. I can't go to the neighbors. Maybe, frankly, I'm in an economic situation where I just don't want to. We've got a couple of things coming together when we look at, hey, there is an opportunity in front of us for our core customers, our core segment to continue to grow and for us to continue to penetrate, it really becomes, hey, we have to go create the market. That's the opportunity in front of us. We've done it for years.
In fact, we've done it for decades. Go create the market. Our name is synonymous with backup power. What you'll hear today is we're gonna go, and we're gonna continue to do that, not just with the customers that we have today, but with a growing segment of customers, but in a way that's smarter, more efficient, and better for those customers. As we went through the decks here today, it's pretty funny. This is the third time you're seeing this chart, but to be unique here, I added one line on, and we've talked about it a little bit. That thin line that you see cutting in between the dotted lines or below the dotted line there is your base power outages. We mentioned earlier today that that's how we plan the business, base power outages.
When you see that line continuing to trend up over that 11-year cycle behind me, there's really only two years that you've seen base power outages, and that's the daily outage that happens because of a thunderstorm. That's a daily outage that happens because the grid gets overloaded in a specific area, a transformer goes down, there's an accident somewhere, and then, you know, a pole gets hit. Those continue to go up. Very rarely do you ever see those reverse down. When we plan a business on a long-term trend that continues to go up for a customer that is becoming more and more sensitive every single day, we see a heck of an opportunity to go and say, "Guess what? There's a market not to just go take advantage of, but there's a market to go create." With the demand side of it, right?
Erik talked this morning, Aaron talked this morning, and they all said, "Hey, the AI, industrial, it's all sucking more power down," right? It's putting more stress on the grid. Utilities, hey, 1%, 2%, 3%, that all makes a difference. It would be one thing to say if it's just an industrial demand going up, but as I've already mentioned, as you can see on the bottom line in the chart behind me, residential usage also continues to grow. Although not at the same pace, it continues to grow. That layers right on top of what I was talking about before when we think about, hey, my ability or my sensitivity to when that power goes out goes up every single day.
Every single time it goes up, I can't cook, I can't charge my car, I can't heat my home, I can't cool my home, I can't run my medical devices, I can't charge my phone. Those are things that we as Americans, we take it for granted. I take for granted that when I plug something into the wall, it's just going to work, right? As I get older, I have less tolerance for that not happening because it affects me personally, it affects my household personally, and it affects society in a greater way. What is this in front of us? I talk about a market, a market we have to go create. How big is it? What really is the opportunity out there? We stepped back for a second, and we took a look at our best states today.
We took our five best states, those that were penetrated almost up to 20% in most cases, and we took a look and said, "There's an opportunity." As the grid continues to get worse, storms get stronger, we're gonna put more tax on the grid, both residentially, commercially, industrially. We're gonna put the tax on the grid. Getting to 20% home penetration of our market in the next years is not an impossible feat, and in fact, we think it's very, very practical. That brings to us, and this is something a little bit different than we showed a few years ago, but that brings to us a $50 billion opportunity at wholesale prices, right? In the past, we've talked to you about retail prices and what the whole retail market looks like.
As we continue to push the market from where we are today at approximately 6.75% penetration up to that 20%, $50 billion. Now, there's things built in there, as you can see down below, for replacement. As we got into this business 20 years ago, 30 years ago, we're starting to see that cycle start to build, right? People who have had a home standby generator. Actually, we were just sharing some pictures last night of a 22-year-old home standby generator, right? What does that look like? When are the wheels gonna fall off of that machine? 22 years is a long time, by the way. Like, not typical for machines. It's a very well-taken care of machine. Doesn't look like it, but it's a very well-taken care of machine.
As they get older, they're still a mechanical device, right? And they're going to decay, right? They're going to be affected by saltwater. They're gonna be affected by storms, rodents. They're made out of metal, plastic, steel, aluminum, and that replacement cycle is gonna lean into our business as a whole. The other thing that we're doing that is really starting to take effect are very strategic and very focused efforts in the new home building industry. The cheapest time, and if you talk to somebody. Actually, I'll back up here a second. If you talk to someone, and you say, "Hey, would you like a home standby generator?" And you explain the concept to them, there's not a single person on the planet that says, "Yeah, that's a bad idea," right? "Nope. I don't wanna control my own destiny. I don't wanna back my family up."
That conversation doesn't happen. It does come down to affordability, and that work that we do with home builders is by far and away still the cheapest way to acquire backup power, the cheapest way to ensure that your family is taken care of because we're putting it on a 30-year mortgage. We're running electrical, concrete, plumbing at the same time. The efforts that we have here going forward is really to go acquire and to go create, make, and market into a $50 billion opportunity that we're gonna take advantage of over the next years. Three ways that we're gonna go do that. I'm gonna walk you through each one of these, and it's about going and getting that consumer that knows they want the product, right? They know they need it. What do we have to do?
Number one, bring them the best product we possibly can. Lead from the front. Our standby generators are already considered the best in the market. We hear from our competitors, "Hey, we wanna go design a unit that's as good as Generac. We wanna have Generac quality." We're gonna carry that forward with a heck of a lot of innovation. Number two, we're gonna create the market. There are people that don't know that they can get a Generac. There are people that don't know about standby power. They're living through it, and sometimes it's because of where you are in geography, sometimes it's an age group. We're gonna go attack both.
Then last but not least, we're gonna bring, as Norm was alluding to there, a unified network to be able to deliver that promise that our consumers are actually looking for. I'm gonna start with product really quick, and for those of you that have been following us for a while, we've talked a lot about the one on the left side there, right? Our air-cooled lineup. Over the course of four years, roughly, maybe five, right? Depends on how long you wanna think about when we started designing that new air-cooled product. It's into the market now, right?
Every unit that comes off of our lines today are these new units, and the innovation that sits inside of that, what looks like a tan box, that eloquently designed tan box, does give us the best power output, the best footprint, the widest portfolio or broadest portfolio, you know, up to 28 kW on an air-cooled machine, than anyone else in the industry. But something that gets overlooked that I think Norm addressed really well is the fact that every one of these are connected, and we can see every one of the units running. Now, it sounds simple, and it sounds easy. Well, of course you can, Kyle. There's a $7,000 machine in my backyard. I would hope somebody's looking at that every single day. But the reality is, in the past, that wasn't the case. We had a fraction of them being connected.
For us to be able to see, is your unit ready to run? Are you having a problem? We can message you and say, "Hey, guess what?" As Norm was talking before with the ecobee development, "Your unit's not ready to run. We see weather coming. How about we connect you with a dealer?" Thinking about the service that we provide, it's not just a machine. It's taking care of you as a homeowner to make sure that the bet you placed with us, to make sure the investment you placed with us actually comes to fruition when you need it, is a massive advancement in the category, and no one else is bringing that. That also pertains to the far right on the liquid-cooled side.
We're in the middle of redesigning our entire liquid-cooled portfolio that goes from 22 kW up to 150 kW with all of those same things that I talked about in our air-cooled platform, the quietest, the smallest footprint, the easiest to install. The technology that we've learned and brought through our air-cooled product, applying that to a 60 kW, a large unit, some for commercial applications, some for home applications. Bringing that connectivity, bringing that ability to service, the flexibility to install on any three-phase application are major advancements that none of the competition has even come close to catching up with us.
Now, what you see in the middle, and I chose these two units very specifically, what you see in the middle is really building on what Norm talked about, is now there's an ecobee thermostat, and we call it ecobee by Generac, that can show you and visualizes exactly what is going on with your generator at any given time. It's ready to run. You have fuel, you have no maintenance needs. Here's your dealer. But more importantly, and I'll talk about it here in the next slide as well, is that it now has the ability to control temperature in your home and manage load. Why is that important? We've got a lot of different ways in which we try to manage load, and we say manage load, you translate that to a homeowner, that means a smaller unit, right? That means price.
That means I can get into a home that maybe I wasn't able to get into. Maybe they needed a 48 kW by NEC code. That's great. We start managing loads, we drop you into an air-cooled unit. We drop thousands of dollars off your install cost, total install cost, both unit and wiring. Knowing that I have a thermostat that's hanging in the living room, hanging in the kitchen or wherever you put it, that is not only telling me what's going on, but is also helping me manage that power so it's as affordable as possible, massive advancement again. Something that I never thought six, seven, eight years ago, did I ever think that a thermostat hanging in my home would be the thing controlling my energy, saving me money, helping run my power plant? Not a chance. It's fantastic innovation.
Price. Everything's always about price when I think about a consumer. We talk a little bit, or I talked a little bit about ecobee being a way, the single way that we think in the future we can regulate temperature and manage temperature load. If I can't do that, right, or if that is the only mechanism I have, I can certainly drop down from, you know, 28 kW down to 16 kW. I might go from 48 down to 28. But we also have devices coming, and I'll focus on the right-hand side there first to keep the theme of load management, a new smart breaker coming out in 2026 here in the second half. The idea behind the smart breaker is, again, just like the thermostat, we can take any load off at any time.
We start to see the generator overload, we can take it off, let your generator run, and bring it back at the right time. What does that do? Again, number one, it's price. But number two, as Norm mentioned, sometimes our biggest asset are our dealers and their capabilities. Being an electrician by trade, snapping a breaker in, the single easiest way to digitally control the load going on in your home. Very easy to adopt, very little training. On the meter switch side, which is on the right-hand side, as Norm alluded to, really, that's industry revolutionizing, right? Today, we hang a transfer switch, wires running conduit back and forth. I'm going down to a box, or I'm going to a panel somewhere.
Putting a meter switch on by pulling the utility meter off, putting a collar behind, and reinserting it, we believe has the ability to take anywhere between 1.5-3 hours out of the installation. Of course, it's very dependent on where you are. Does your utility allow you to do it? What's the complexity of the install? Between the ecobee load shedding, the Generac meter switch, and our smart breaker, we think there's 15% of labor to pull out of that install, which again comes back to what's my consumer's total cost to put a standby generator in to put backup power in their home? We think we can take a significant bite out of that, along with bringing our cost down across the board with all of the innovation that we have.
Last but not least, is that Field Pro app. It does sound interesting that you would say, "Hey, how does an app really help a homeowner?" It's an installer app. Over the years, if you've been around Generac for a long time like I have, you hear all the stories. Our dealers are great. They do fantastic installations. But we also have electricians that put them in. They're not a certified dealer. Maybe they put in 10 a year.
When you put the Field Pro app into their hands, and they start walking through an install, and that Field Pro app, as the unit is going in, sees a problem and comes back to the installer, albeit a dealer, maybe it's the dealer's new employee, maybe it's an electrician putting in their first unit, and it gives them feedback, and that feedback says, "Hey, you missed a step. You haven't done the right thing for that homeowner. You haven't done the right thing for that machine." Again, massive innovation that helps efficiency of the dealer, especially as they learn the process, but number two, improves the quality of installation on what can be a very complex system. Some really big innovation that we've pulled in with joint effort from our energy technology teams into our traditional home standby business.
Now as we continue pushing forward here, and we talk about market creation, I want to give you a snapshot of who's coming into the funnel. You know, when you look from 2019 through 2025, great advancements, massive steps forward in creating IHCs or in-home consultations, which are when our dealers go out and they talk to a homeowner. They might come in via phone call. They might come in via the web. We might get an email. However they make their way to us, we get them in the hands of a dealer. To be able to take that and grow that by 2.5x , but at the same time, not just focusing on our existing segment. We love our core segment, right? I talked to you about, hey, who actually buys these products and who installs them.
One of the things that we're doing as we go create these new customers, as we go create the market, is bringing a younger generation on, making people who are in their 20s and 30s and 40s aware of the product category. Now, it might not be the time for them to buy today, right? They might not have hit the level of, I call it the pain threshold, where I have to go and I have to make that purchase. The awareness that is coming forward at age 30, at age 40, and age 50 is building a very sustainable funnel, and we're actually finding that the age group that we service that are buying generators is starting to move down slowly. It's a big number to move, right?
As we bring new customers on board, we're finding they're hitting the pain threshold, and our ability to bring new customers in continues to grow. We do that in a couple of very specific ways. And there's a couple takeaways that I want you to go away with here when you think about this slide in specific. We're leveraging all the things that we have done for years on the left-hand side. Fantastic infomercials, our email marketing as we bring somebody on board, maybe they're 40, maybe they're 30, and we have to educate them through the process. Maybe they're 65 or 70, and they've never heard of a standby generator, we've got to bring them along. We do a lot of that work via email, and it's becoming very effective.
We also are reaching out to that younger crowd via social media. That's new over the last three years or so. Our velocity to bring younger people in, educate them, and then convert them continues to go up. We measure ourselves very specifically on how many can we bring in per outage hour, right? If you look in 2024, hey, guess what? Record outages. What do we have? Three landed hurricanes. We had storms rolling through Texas. There was a lot going on. Our ability to bring a customer in there, you would say, "Well, hey, guess what, Generac? I expect that to happen." That you should be able to do that.
It's the years like 2025, where outages were at all-time lows, that our ability to bring people in per outage hour has improved dramatically because of all those mechanisms that you see on the left-hand side. Our marketing engine and our marketing teams have been able to go and create interest in a market that statistically shouldn't have interest. The market statistically dropped 64% from an outage perspective, but our customers coming in the door were down only 29%. A huge lever, a huge weapon, not only to take advantage of it, of the times where the market is good, but to keep us from going backwards. York will walk us through, and what we talk about a lot, is a new and higher baseline. How do you create the baseline? How do you hold the baseline?
You do that by creating opportunities when they're not walking in the door. Aaron and the team have walked you through, and I know they've talked to you a lot about our lead generation. Hey, what do we do with it when the customer comes in the door? I wanna take just two minutes and walk you through really quickly, what exactly happens when we've moved from a push lead system to a pool or pull lead system, and why we think the innovation there is so dramatic. When a customer comes in in the past, we would receive them, and you'd push them out. You'd say, "Hey, guess what? Here's your zip code. We've got five dealers in the zip code," and we would assign it to one or two specific dealers.
With disregard to whether that dealer was suited to sell to you, disregard to whether the dealer really serviced your neighborhood, disregard to whether that dealer was at capacity. We knew they're a great dealer, but we didn't have the details, and in some cases, we never will have the details to define exactly what dealer is ready to go and get to the customer quickly and effectively. When you transform to a pooling system where a homeowner comes in, they digitally flow into a pool, they get pushed against a tiered section of dealers that then go and pull that customer out and say, acknowledge there, that I'm going to go connect with that homeowner. I'm going to go to the front door, I'm gonna get on the phone, I'm gonna send him an email. I'm gonna go convert that customer.
You change the mindset, you change the behavior, and we reward dealers when they close leads, period. Right? In the past, we've had a lot of different metrics that we've put on dealers to enable them to receive leads, but now we measure dealers, do they close the business for us? When a dealer raises their hand and said, "I'm gonna go get a consumer," and if they can't get to the front door, if they can't close that lead, that's a black mark on their record, and that prevents them from getting leads in the future. Every dealer that grabs a lead out of our pool is an active participant to go close. What happens? That means we have dealers going to homeowners faster.
The chart you see in the bottom behind me is kind of a representation that we had got an opportunity to push it and test the system out. What you can see is that during Storm Fern, which is a heavily marketed storm. It actually didn't materialize into that many outages, but the press, the news, everything around that storm drove thousands and thousands of homeowners to raise their hand and say, "Get somebody to my front door. I wanna get an IHC." Right? In the past, you can see in massive surges, we would get there or our leads would be slowed down to 10 days, 15 days. In some cases, and you see the bottom left there, 25 days.
Now in a surge, we have the ability to respond because we can leverage the entire network via the pool in a much faster way. In the case of Fern, seven days was the longest we were getting somebody to the front door across thousands of people coming in, even though markets were flooded. It's better utilization of the network that we have, which is really the advantage of putting this system in. Prior to coming in, we actually are putting in things that will again build efficiency. The potential customers that come in, we're dropping AI and we're dropping tools onto the customers to segment them in the right way. It does us no good to pass a homeowner off to a dealer, off to the pool, that is not ready to buy.
We go and we score them with an advanced algorithm, right, and with AI constantly learning. If you're not ready to buy, we'll bring you down through the bottom path, we'll educate you, we'll nurture you, we'll get you ready to go so that you're not shocked by a price, so you're not caught off balance by a complex solution. When your score gets ready to go, we're gonna push you back into the pool, and we're gonna make sure that you have a dealer who's there and ready to grab you, ready to get to your front door. Again, it sounds like very, very simple things. Like, of course you would do that. Why would you push somebody to a dealer that isn't ready to close, that just heard about the category, that doesn't know what they cost?
We're gonna take that onus on, one, to create a better solution for a homeowner, but secondly, create a better solution for the dealer, so they're actually going out and utilizing their resources effectively as we continue to boom and grow. As I bring this down here, we're gonna bring more homeowners in, we're gonna educate them, we're gonna put them in a pool, and we're gonna need more dealers because we're gonna grow and expand out to homeowners. How do we solve the problem of volume? As Norm talked, and he showed the overlapping circles in his presentation, we're gonna bring together a network of over 10,000 energy partners, and they come from all walks of life. We've got the core HSB customers or the core installed base. You guys know those.
We've talked about them for a long time, about 9,000 dealers. We're gonna bring those together with our line contractors, a pool of contractors that help us service the storm, and we're gonna bring them into the install network. We're also gonna reach out and bring in the solar and storage installers. A big group of customers or a group of customers that serve a big market and actually provide new access to a market that we don't serve today. Today, a standby generator never walks into a solar opportunity, right? But tomorrow, a solar installer might walk in and find out via a complex sales process, hey, this customer just needs a standby generator, right? Those are at bats, I call, that we wouldn't have gotten in the past. Bringing a network this large and setting it on top of all.
What is already the best retail distribution in the country, what is the largest and our biggest share position, which is electrical wholesale distribution, HVAC wholesale distribution. It creates a network that can now work to go and deliver something out to a homeowner that they actually need with pace, with scale, and with some of the tools that you see behind me in a way that we're gonna bring them along. I talked about the digitization of the IHC or bringing a digital IHC through, educating them, handing them off to a dealer. I talked about the journey. If they're not ready to buy, what do we do? We're gonna nurture them, we're gonna bring them along, we're gonna score them.
The biggest part of our process that will make a difference as this complex ecosystem comes together is how do I train a solar dealer to deliver a system that includes a standby generator and a thermostat? How do I treat someone who came from the HVAC space to go and install a home standby generator or to include solar into a package? Creating a digital tool and a digital sales platform will help us not only ramp the business, but it will help a very complex solution become very, very simple for the installing dealer, and then translating that over to a very simple solution, as Norm mentioned, for a homeowner, right? What does a homeowner want? Just tell me how you're gonna lower my electrical bill. Just tell me how you're gonna solve my resiliency problem.
Our solutions and our systems that we're developing today with faster speed than we've ever developed in the past will bring our partners along. It'll bring our consumers along much faster in a very complex space. What do we have as I wrap up here? We have an opportunity in front of us. We have an opportunity to go capture our piece, our share of $50 billion, and we're doing it from the front. We're doing it as an 80% market share leader already, right? We're gonna continue to innovate our products, both on the standby side themselves, but also on the products that help us install faster and more efficiently.
We're gonna continue to push the market really, really hard with our marketing assets, with the way we handle consumers, with the way we pass them on to dealers, and we're gonna create this network of over 10,000 professionals, 10,000 energy partners that are out there putting the products in and bringing the customer the Generac promise of lower bills and more resiliency.
With that, I'll hand it over to Norm, and he'll walk us through the close.
I also just want to kind of give you a quick sense of the financial model for this now commonly new segmentation residential business. What it looks like today, what we see as the future for this model, and then just some context before I turn it over to Norm. If I look at just from a pure 2025 viewpoint in terms of sales and adjusted EBITDA, when you combine the businesses in this way, you have a $2.5 billion business in 2025, which delivered 22.5% from an EBITDA margin standpoint for the residential segment. Obviously, it's certainly a healthy business. I think it's even more impressive that if you think about that business that was in a year of both, frankly, a lot of tariffs and a year also with a light outage environment.
Still on its own, quite an impressive business itself. We see that from a sales standpoint, growing at a high single digits through 2028, kind of building a business north of $3 billion while at the same time growing even faster on the EBITDA side. The EBITDA side has tailwinds of really improving margins across the board, but also recalibration on the OpEx side. We do see some synergies that are gonna impact that and allow us to grow to mid to high 20s on EBITDA.
We also see a lot of, I think, success on the tariff side, both potentially some adjustments in tariffs, but really a lot of the mitigation efforts we've been putting in place are starting to have an impact, which is gonna drive some of that EBITDA improvements as well. That's how we see the model evolving for what is really the new residential segmentation. Just to summarize the story of Generac Home that we talked about today, we have consolidated the organization. That's really been an ongoing process over the last couple of months, with more urgency. We have the new structure. We think it both aligns with the customer experience we wanna provide, but also increases our efficiency as an organization, allows us to reduce costs.
We have brought out a comprehensive home energy offering, and I would also emphasize that a lot of the big investment, the upfront investment when you're entering new stuff, a lot of that's behind us. We actually can kinda leverage the fact we have this capability without necessarily having to do a lot of the startup costs that we've already paid for. It puts us in a very good position. We can offer solutions to improve people's resiliency like we always have, but we can also offer customer solutions to lower their energy bills.
I think the combination of those two things we both have an incremental market opportunity, but overall just a consumer that is gonna be much more paying much more attention to their energy bills, much more attention to how they get their energy and the reliability of their energy. I think we are very well positioned to show great growth and very healthy returns as a business.
That's all I have. I'm gonna turn it over now to York to finish with financial framework for the company.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Thanks, Norm. Awesome. All right, let's put a bow on this. We heard a lot today, financially putting numbers around the strategy. That's basically what we're gonna talk about. I mean, Like, why are we all here? We're all here to try to figure out, you know, why I'm investing in ticker GNRC. My first slide obviously is a summary of what those investment highlights would be from a financial standpoint. You've heard Erik, you heard Norm, you heard Kyle. Massive opportunity on the top line, the generational growth opportunity around data centers. Right now, so our 2028 numbers have, I think you saw it from Erik, we have $1 billion of top line in our 2028 numbers.
Let's say roughly half of that's hyperscalers, a placeholder for hyperscalers, the other half for co-locators. Given some of the dialogue that we're having on the hyperscaler side, as we continue to that $500 million is just a placeholder as we continue to advance our discussions with those hyperscalers. There could be significant upside with that. If anything that's the low end of what we're talking about here. A $1 billion opportunity, that's just the beginning and that's what we baked in.
You think about all of the significant penetration opportunity that Kyle talked about with home standby as the pure leader in that category, and then continuing to sell the ecosystem, not only on the residential side, but Erik talked a lot about the ecosystem on the C&I side as well. There's lots of growth opportunities there. You know, mid-teens CAGR over the next three years. That's what we're talking about, that significant top-line growth, and we heard, and we'll see in a couple slides where that's coming from. Aaron talked about a more balanced business. More durable with C&I growing at a faster rate than residential. That makes the durability of our demand more significant at a more balanced 50-50 blend between resi and C&I.
There's more certainty with that demand profile. The reality is on the residential side of the business, like Aaron said, you're a bit reliant on power outages, and that's something that we can't control. Even though we know that outages will happen, we just can't tell you when that will be. We like the more balanced 50-50 blend from a demand profile. As we grow that top line, we're gonna leverage our EBITDA margins. You're gonna see that. I'll talk a little bit more about how that's gonna get delivered. With that, then we'll generate a significant amount of free cash flow, over $1.5 billion we're expected to generate the next three years.
With that, with strong free cash flow and a strong, healthy balance sheet, there's significant optionality to drive significant shareholder value that's not baked into these numbers. On a high-level summary, this is why you'd be investing in ticker GNRC. Base case assumptions. We've talked a lot about the next three years, and the base case assumptions are as follows. The top two bullet points are on the mega trends that we talked about at length, lower power quality, higher power prices, and then the continued investment in AI and data center CapEx. The overall overarching assumption is that all those trends will continue and sustain for the long term, especially over the next three years.
We're assuming a baseline level of power outages for 2026 and 2028, and then we're assuming, like Aaron said, and you saw, like, those severity power outage severity charts. Periodically, you get a major event, and you see a big spike in power outages. We're assuming one of those in 2027, the middle of the three-year period. I think it's important to note, we're assuming that we maintain our recent pricing actions. As you recall, in 2025, we had to put price into the market to address tariffs, higher tariffs. As well as launching the new next gen home standby, there was some price there. We're assuming that we maintain that price.
That any future inflationary pressures, we'd also be able to take on more price as the leader in particular on the residential side. I think it's important. I mentioned tariffs. Tariffs, the assumption here in our guide is that although the IEEPA tariffs have been ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court, the assumption is that somehow, some way, be it a Section 122 tariff, a 301 tariff, 232 tariff, somehow the administration will figure out a way to get back to the same level of tariff profile that we had prior to the Supreme Court ruling. Our assumption is that the tariff rates remain at current levels. We will get a recovery from those IEEPA tariffs.
We haven't necessarily baked that in to the numbers or I guess a one-time windfall. It's not in our free cash flow assumptions, but we will get a tariff recovery, but that's not in these numbers. I guess capital expenditures 3%-3.5% tax rates. Again, the additional optionality around shareholder value, we are not assuming additional M&A debt prepayments or share repurchases. On a high-level summary, we unveiled our new segments today, reporting segments. Erik talked about from a net sales standpoint, a low- to mid-20% three-year CAGR on the top line, mid- to high-teens percent on the EBITDA line in 2028.
On the residential side, Norm just talked about a high single-digit three-year CAGR, mid- to- high 20% on the EBITDA. Consolidated, you roll that up, as Aaron mentioned in one of his first slides, mid-teens percent three-year CAGR, low 20% EBITDA margins. There is a side note, what we hadn't talked about is there's a corporate cost layer that we'll maintain. We're modeling that it will stay at around 1% of net sales during the forecast period. That's a part of the segment profile there. I'm gonna make your jobs a little easier.
You saw the qualitative, you know, lot of words on the previous slide, but I thought I'd just lay out, okay, where's the jumping off point with these new segments? That's the 2025 financial results. Residential $2.5 billion, C&I $1.7 billion. There's the $716 million of EBITDA. That's at 17%. That's what we targeted in 2025. We gave guidance that we're reiterating for 2026. Again, when you lay that out for the new segments, roughly 10% residential growth, low to mid-20s C&I, mid-teens overall. We guided 18%-19% EBITDA margin. That's all the same thing that we talked about mid-February. We're reiterating that. Then I thought I'd put dollar ranges on the previous slide.
For residential, all that would mean roughly $3.1 billion-$3.3 billion in sales. Same thing for C&I, $3.1 billion-$3.3 billion. There's the 50/50 split from a balance standpoint. Mid- to teens percent CAGR would be roughly $6.2 billion-$6.6 billion. At low 20 % EBITDA, that's about $1.25 billion-$1.45 billion, and we'll generate a lot of free cash flow, which we'll talk about in a second. Thought I'd make your jobs easier and lay things out and try to quantify those ranges a little bit more precisely. Again, Erik, Norm, Kyle talked a lot about how they're gonna grow their business over the last three hours or so.
Again, we're talking mid-teens overall CAGR going from $4.2 billion to $6.2 billion -$6.6 billion. When you quantify the growth, the low- to mid-20% CAGR growth for C&I, that's about $1.4 billion -$1.6 billion. Then the high single digits CAGR for residential is about $0.6 billion -$0.8 billion. Drilling into the C&I $1.4 billion -$1.6 billion , like I said in the opening statement, one billion of that is data center growth and revenue. Like I said, about half of that is hyperscalers, half of that is colocators.
The hyperscaler number's a placeholder right now, and we're having, like I said, meaningful conversations that, you know, that should be the low end of any range that we're talking about. There should, you know, we'll continue to evaluate upside, and we'll continue to relate to the market, as we develop those conversations on the data center side. That's what is that? About 2/3 of that C&I growth. The other $500 million is all the other initiatives that we're talking about growing that side of the business. Our industrial distributor channel expect to see good growth there, and particularly with that large megawatt diesel product offering we can now offer in the traditional C&I market. That's through our traditional industrial distributor channels. That's part of that growth there.
Our international geographic expansion, we'll see good growth there. The mobile business, again, as that cycle and the rental cycle starts turning positive and the refleeting cycle begins, that mobile business, we expect to see very good growth there. Again, telecom and the multi-asset integrated energy solutions see growth. That's how we're gonna generate low- to mid-20% CAGR over the next three years for C&I. Then the call it $0.6 billion-$0.8 billion of residential growth, I'd say about 2/3 of that is home standby growth. Really on the back of, I would say 2025, maybe because we had such low outages in the second half of 2025. Maybe it's a bit of an easy comp, for lack of a better word.
There's a little bit of pricing that's part of that growth that we'll get here in 2026. And then all the other initiatives that Kyle talked about in terms of driving lead generation, improving close rates, that's how we're going to continue to drive growth in that home standby business. The remainder of the growth is on the ecosystem side. Continuing to build out PWRmicro, PWRcell, and ecobee growth, which we're expecting strong double-digit CAGR with that ecobee business. This is basically trying to summarize in one slide everything that you've heard the folks talk about, the team talk about on how they're gonna continue to drive growth. Margin improvement. You know, we're expecting 400-500 basis point expansion on EBITDA.
When you quantify that in dollars, it's near doubling our EBITDA dollars from that $716 million jumping off point to something close to that $1.25 billion-$1.45 billion in 2028. If you look at that price cost column relative to the mix column, those two bars are gonna offset each other. So within price cost is a lot of that, I guess, operational execution that is gonna be important to continue to drive positive price cost over the next three years. You see some examples of that on the left side. Continuing supply chain resilience. Internally, we have significant effort around supply chain resilience, trying to mitigate tariffs, continuing to work on the cost structure of our supply chain.
Profitability enhancement programs, that's just something that's embedded within Generac that we're driving profitability enhancements around the entire organization, not only in the operations, but in the back office. Improve plant operational execution. The vertical integration, for example, the Enercon deal. That's an example where we're acquiring a company to drive an incremental margin stack on that business. Those are all examples of how we're gonna drive incremental price costs over the next three years. Again, that should offset any unfavorable mix impact that we would see with C&I growing at a faster rate than residential. What's left then is this large operational leverage that we're gonna see.
When you have mid-teens CAGR overall as a company for the next three years, we're expecting a significant operating leverage, the 4% column, which will drive EBITDA margins, you know, back above 20%. Included in that operating leverage is also the recalibration of our energy technology OpEx, that we've been talking about at length to continue to recalibrate that investment lower and really driving profitability to those products. In the model, we're expecting profitability of energy technology products in 2027. We've been talking about that for a long time, and we're continuing to drive that. That's embedded in the 4%, operating leverage.
Again, with our new reporting segments, you know, we talked. This is just another way to maybe show how we're gonna continue to drive top-line growth as well as, margin improvement. On the C&I side, again, that $1 billion of data center top-line growth, along with the margin improvements that we've talked about in terms of operating leverage, vertical integration, operational execution. The fact that our data center margins actually are accretive to the overall C&I segment, that should allow us to see significant margin improvement in that C&I business from, call it, the low-teens up to mid- to high-teens over the next three years. With residential, we've always had good margins on the residential side, but 2025, maybe you'd argue, was probably artificially lower because we didn't have a season. We're starting off at a relative low point.
You know, if you get back to normalized outages and driving growth in that home standby business, as well as the ecosystem, recalibrating OpEx investment on energy technology downward, that's how we're gonna drive margin improvement on the residential side as well to that, call it, mid- to high-20% range. Free cash flow. Aaron mentioned, we've always been known, Generac's always been known as a strong free cash flow generator. The forecast period's no different. When you factor in our strong margins, strong top-line growth, strong margins, the CapEx investment, which is around 3%-3.5%, factor in some working capital investment to drive as a result of the mid-teens CAGR.
When you put that all together, we do expect to generate over $1.5 billion of free cash flow over the next three years. Again, the free cash flow conversion in 2028 would be in that, call it, 80%-90% range, again, factoring in some of that working capital investment that is required to grow that top line. You couple with the strong free cash flow with a healthy balance sheet. If you look at our gross debt leverage, you know, it's continuing to work down from 2x down to 1x, well within our targeted range of 1x-2x. We like where we're at from a leverage standpoint. I like where we're at from a capital structure standpoint.
Our term loan A and term loan B, we don't have any near-term maturities, relatively low-cost debt. We have a revolver where we don't have anything borrowed on it today. We have $1 billion of capacity there. Strong balance sheet. Put the strong free cash flow with a strong balance sheet, drives significant optionality to continue to drive shareholder value. When you put it together from a more of a priority usage of cash standpoint, what are our capital allocation priorities? It's really no different than what we've talked about since we've been public since 2010. For the last 15 years, it's always we've obviously prioritized organic growth, but given that, we're relatively asset light, at which maybe 3%-3.5% is a little bit higher than normal.
Maybe normally we're in that 2.5%-3% range. Given some of the capacity expansion we're talking about on the C&I side, we're forecasting a little bit higher, but still relatively reasonable, modest CapEx investment to drive that organic growth. Strategic M&A, that's always been core to us. Healthy balance sheet we talked about, and then when there's excess cash left over, we've always been returning capital to shareholders. You can see that on the far right. In 2021, we had some meaningful investments from an M&A standpoint, in particular around the Deep Sea Electronics acquisition that Erik talked about that controls business for C&I power generation and the ecobee business. That's sort of the 2021 column with that middle section being the M&A investment.
I would say the last four years, we have prioritized organic growth, CapEx, as well as share buybacks, the last four years. In fact, the last four years, we've bought back over $1 billion of our shares at roughly $138. Looking at 2026 and forward, when you think about the opportunities that we have in front of us, again, I think there's opportunities to continue to expand capacity on the C&I side, both organically and inorganically. Again, you can see that, you know, with the Allmand acquisition, the Enercon acquisition, that will close here in the second quarter.
So we'll start to-- Given the opportunities we have on the C&I side of our business, you'll start to see some M&A activity there on the C&I side, as well as driving organic growth from a CapEx standpoint.
With that, maybe we'll wrap up final takeaways before we go into Q&A.
Yeah. Can you get the mic?
Can you guys hear me? Yeah. Okay. Just a couple of things here just to bring this home, as a, I guess we're calling it final takeaways, and then we'll do a short break, to kind of set the stage up. We've got some chairs and things to bring the team up here to do, Q&A. You know, obviously, we talked a lot, or I did this morning, about the mega trends. You've heard it from the team as well. Four kind of key themes there. Lower power quality, which has been, you know, a long-standing trend. Obviously, Generac's been a beneficiary there for, you know, arguably 40 or 50 years. That trend is firmly intact. A lot of data to underpin that. The next mega trend is higher power prices.
As you saw some of the data there, perhaps that was not a trend up until maybe five years ago. Five years ago, you know, we started to see power prices rise up 32% in the last five years. Projection for the next five years at 40%. You know, we think this is an important mega trend for a lot of reasons, but not the least of which is that, you know, we think that there are opportunities for us, given the fact that we're already there providing resiliency for homeowners and businesses, right? We understand, we know the electrical systems of these buildings, these dwellings. We understand the codes and standards. We have the distribution networks, and we have proficiency in the technologies.
We've created proficiency in the technologies, invested in the technologies to create products and specific solutions to help, you know, ratepayers, as all of us are known as, to help us ratepayers reduce our dependence on utilities, or at least not give them as large of a share of wallet as I think most people are going to have to shell out here in the future. It's just, this is a reality. Again, probably even though the headlines are starting to tilt that way, this is definitely a theme that, I think Norm mentioned it. You know, the surveys showed that people on average spent seven minutes a year looking at their utility bills. Seven minutes a year. That was previous, you know, previous data. They're gonna spend a lot more time than seven minutes thinking about the cost of that power going forward.
That's the second mega trend. Lower power, lower power costs, higher power prices. You've got the AI infrastructure related boom, the spending that's gonna come from that, and the impact that that's gonna have on our commercial and industrial business in terms of backing up those data centers. These are massive machines, as Erik showed you in the video. A single machine can weigh 80,000 pounds. The ASP on that machine is between $1 million and $1.5 million, depending on the content, right? It adds up very quickly. You're talking about data centers. You get into 300 MW data centers, that's gonna look small. That's gonna pale in comparison to the 1 GW data centers that are projected to go online in the next couple of years. You're talking about hundreds of those gen sets on a single site.
That's huge projects, right? Obviously, we've had a lot of success initially here with co-locators, and we're getting a lot of traction with the hyperscalers. We're not here to announce a hyperscale award this morning, but we've got a lot of deep conversations that are ongoing, and we have a lot of confidence that those awards will come. Just a question of timing. The third megatrend of AI and driving, you know, not only the pressures on the grid, but also the CapEx spending, that's huge. Last but not least is the overall megatrend of the infrastructure, the rebuild of infrastructure, not only in the U.S., but on a global basis, the roads, the bridges, the ports, right? The airports, right? Just look at the investment here in the New York City market on airports alone. I keep waiting.
Chicago O'Hare, that is a disaster, but at some point they're gonna make the investment there. Those types of investments, that $100 trillion globally, you know, over the next 15 years, there's a lot of opportunity for Generac to participate in that, not only in the actual construction phases, where you need those types of mobile products that we produce, the Allmand acquisition that we just completed here to give us scale there, but also the backup power opportunities and the microgrid opportunities. We're seeing this as well, microgrids for things like wastewater treatment plants, for infrastructure around healthcare, where you've got campuses, healthcare campuses or universities. You could argue universities are part of infrastructure as well, I suppose. Those four megatrends firmly intact. We believe deeply in them, and we've oriented our strategy, powering a smarter world, directly around those megatrends.
We've oriented our investment. When you look at everything we've been doing the last three to five years and the dollars that we've been investing, all that free cash flow, the $1.3 billion of free cash flow in the last three years alone, we're putting that to work to chase after those megatrends to make sure that we're put in a position to capitalize on those megatrends as they evolve. Our organizational realignment that we're talking about this morning, again, we've got a great strategy. We're going after the right megatrends. We've got to make sure that the organizational structure of Generac is, you know, we've got it oriented properly around those megatrends and around the strategy. That's what the changes are this morning. You know, introducing Generac Home, right?
The consolidation of our, you know, consumer power businesses, we used to call it, alongside our energy technology and clean energy technology businesses, putting all of that into a single entity to allow us to leverage all this tremendous investment we've been making in the individual technologies, the technology stacks, right? The software and hardware layers to bring all that together to support that home energy ecosystem that we believe deeply in, to provide homeowners resiliency as well as opportunities to reduce their overall power costs, improve the efficiency, reduce their consumption, and, you know, effectively make them better stewards of the planet with a lot of the products, alongside helping them save some money and making sure that they're protecting their homes and families. It's a big part of that Generac Home, org change.
Obviously on the C&I side, as that commercial and industrial business has grown globally over the last 10 years. That used to be a $150 million business for us when we went public in 2010. It's a $1.7 billion portfolio. We've been quietly building it out, right? We don't talk enough about it.
Every meeting I have with probably everybody in this room, an analyst, an investor, right, prospect as an investor, you know, if we've got a half-hour meeting, we spend 25 minutes talking about Home Standby, probably some energy tech discussion, and as I'm packing up my stuff to get to the next meeting, somebody says, "Oh yeah, tell us about that C&I business." I can tell you that over the last six months, maybe even the last nine months, we've definitely changed the tenor around the talk track, right? Obviously, data centers being an important part of that. I think what's happened here is people have come to realize that we have this significant global business in commercial and industrial that we've built. It's a very valuable property.
Yes, the EBITDA margins, you know, at 11.5% last year, yeah, we've got work to do because we've been building. It's in an investment phase. As we scale that business, and we will scale it, the opportunity to get to those mid-teens or higher EBITDA margins, I think, you know, that's real. We're gonna leverage that, the mid- to high-teens. I think, you know, there's even probably upside beyond that, depending on how much business we see from the hyperscalers. We have a $1 billion worth of backlog or a $1 billion worth of data center business assumed in our 2028 guide here. Right now we've got $700 million of backlog. So we're not that far away from the $1 billion.
The backlog that we have is mostly, you know, there's a chunk of it for this year, about $300 million to be delivered in 2026. The rest of it, we're building the backlog for 2027. There's a tremendous amount of opportunities there. When we scale that business, I think we're gonna be talking a lot more about C&I. Better visibility, right? We've got great growth rates. It's gonna have great profitability long term. It's gonna present, you know, I think it's gonna put Generac in a different light relative to how people think about this company. You know, we love our consumer business. We love the brand that we've built there.
Being able to leverage that into something even bigger, into something greater, I think is definitely what we're onto here when it comes to, you know, this next phase, this next chapter of the company. Getting that org structure right is a big part of that. I talked about this generational, and it truly is generational. What's a generation? 20 years, 25 years? I don't know how it's defined anymore, but, you know, it's maybe the last one I'll see in my career, right? But I have been here a long time, and I can tell you, I've seen a lot of really cool things and all that growth I showed you before, all the great opportunities that we've been talking about as a company, I haven't seen anything like this in our C&I business.
You know, what the data center market is gonna do, and we were talking kind of in the break, you know, a little bit about what keeps me up at night. Well, you know, obviously, you know, I think any company that's coming close to the data center market or participating in this market, the biggest question is how long does it go? How far does it go? Is there something, you know, existential out there that changes it? You know, we're obviously believers that this is longer and stronger, right? I think that it's underpinned, interestingly enough, by our own experiences. Norm mentioned it a little bit that, you know, when it comes to just software, just raw engineering, coding software, the stuff that is going on in our own business, right?
You guys read about this every day, that it's incredibly transformational in terms of just that part of the business, just the engineering part of our business when it comes to software, when it comes to firmware, right? The other part of AI, obviously it can be used to enhance individual productivity, small team productivity, right? That is also very exciting. I think probably what most companies are faced with is how does it change the way they think about deep within the company, the systems they use, right? Whether they're go-to-market systems or manufacturing systems, right? Design systems for technologies themselves. Every single platform that we have is going to change, and we're gonna be making choices as a company. Every company in America is going through this, making choices about how do we invest in the future. Today it's simple.
I go buy a license from Salesforce. I go buy a license from SAP. I buy a license from Oracle. Tomorrow, not so easy. The next dollar we put down for a software package in this company, there's gonna be a lot of scrutiny around what it is we're buying and how much we're paying for it. The power of the ability to create proprietary solutions that are lighter, more cost-effective, and more rapidly evolving is right in front of us. That is going to change the nature of how we do business, every company. That has wide-ranging implications, obviously on the dependence on AI. Bringing this back around, that's why we think, at least I'm convinced, based on the changes going on in our own business, just how important this investment cycle is that's going on.
You know, $650 billion or $700 billion, whatever the new number is, keeps changing, right? Every time there's an update from one of these companies, they're taking their CapEx numbers up. That's because of the real change that's going on underneath this. That change will translate into that generational opportunity for us. Not to be lost in all this, I said before, you know, if you go back to any of our previous Investor Day, you know, and we've done, I don't know, what we've done five of these in our time as a public company, five or six of them. You know, home standby has been a great opportunity.
When we sold the company back in 2006 to private equity, I remember we were talking about how the penetration rate was at 2%, and here we stand today just under 7%, right? Every one percent is about a, you know, $3.5 billion-$4 billion amount of value to us as a company. Just think of how much value's been created to get from 2% to 7%. What we laid out here this morning for you is a case where we think what's realistic, 'cause this is a question we always get when we talk about home standby. Where can penetration go? You know, when you look at that curve and we try to, you know, compare to other technologies, central air conditioning, you know.
It was very small 50 years ago, and today it's in 98% of homes. Is that realistic? I don't know. You know, home security systems, we lay out that kind of model to show what that might look like. I think 20%. Here's why I think 20%'s real. You take those top five states where we are today. Today, the average penetration rate in our top five states is 20%. I don't know if you caught that. Those are real numbers, right? It's not something we made up. That's not aspirational. That is today. The top five states are at an average of 20% penetration. Can we get the rest of the U.S. from 7% to 20%? If we do that, it's a $50 billion market opportunity. $50 billion.
We have, you know, 75% of the machines or more that are on the ground today are Generac's, right? That's our market share or greater, depending on who you talk to. There's a lot of opportunity from here to there to get that $50 billion, that next incremental $50 billion. There, it is real. I mean, it is again, these are numbers that are actual stats with those penetration rates. I don't think it's a long way to think about that. As Norm pointed out, we've been talking about this Generac energy ecosystem and all these components and the hardware and the software and all the pieces of it. It was always just on a page before. We'd show people what the idea was, the thesis. It's real.
It exists today in real format, and every day we are working to build it out even further. Not only does it present a ton, a ton of opportunity for us in adjacent spaces like the solar markets, the storage markets, but as Norm said, it strengthens, I would say it deepens, it widens the moat around our home standby business. How do we make sure that we not only grow that home standby market, and we're making that market by the way. There's nobody else in that industry that wakes up every day spending as much time or money thinking about selling the next home standby generator as Generac does. We do that, we drive the market, we made the market, it's our market. We're gonna grow that market. We gotta make sure that we don't lose sight of the importance of the moat around it, right?
Our distribution is critical, but the technology is equally critical. To be a market leader, you have to stay in front of the pack. I want my competitors in that business every day waking up hating life. That's my job. They wake up, they think, "I gotta go compete against Generac. I don't even know what I'm doing. I'm gonna call in sick today. Forget it." I love that. I want them to hate their job. I want them to hate life competing against Generac. I wanna win every time. I tell Norm, I tell Kyle, "Why don't we have 100% market share? I don't understand. How do we let, you know, 20 points get away?" That's the kind of approach that we have to that business, is growing it, owning it, and making sure that we lead it.
What we're doing with the home energy ecosystem is super critical around the next phase, the next leg of growth, that next $50 billion of incremental opportunity. It's about leaning in not only on resiliency, but leaning in on the opportunity to help these homeowners save money as that becomes a bigger theme and as they spend more time focused on it. Right? That's I think it's super critical. Mid-teens sales CAGR, right? We've got a long track record here with that 14% CAGR in the last 20 years. I think, you know, this, you know, this opportunity in front of us, this, I don't know, I think it's a layup. That's just me, right? Fits right in with what we're doing. We got a lot of, you know, I think we got a lot of shots on goal.
You look at everything that we're working on here at the company, and we have a pretty cool opportunity to, you know, do something unique here as we talked. You know, not only generational on the C&I side, but as I've been talking here on the residential side as well, to go after those new opportunities around helping consumers save money. Then obviously, significant operating leverage, that's gonna come from that. You know, if we can grow at that rate, we've made the investments. We've made huge investments, especially on the residential side. Right? Those are sunk costs. They're there. They're in the run rate. In fact, we're gonna shrink that a bit because of the efficiencies of combining the Generac Home Group, bringing that group together. We're gonna squeeze more out of it.
There's substantial opportunity here to improve our EBITDA margins into that low 20s range. You know, from where we were at 17% last year. Can we get that another 400 or 500 basis point improvement? Absolutely. We're gonna get that from leverage. We're gonna get that from improved profitability in some of the areas that, you know, we're talking about investing in more vertical integration. You know, Erik talked about that on the C&I side. We believe deeply in that. The C&I market, by the way, is, you know, globally in particular, it's littered with gen set companies. I mean, and I say littered. I mean, there's literally thousands of, quote-unquote, "generator companies" that serve the C&I market. Residential market's uniquely U.S.-focused, but on the C&I side, that's a global market.
You need to back up hospitals no matter where that hospital is, right? Or that wastewater treatment plant or that manufacturing plant, cold chain distribution. That's everywhere. That's a global market. The differentiating factor between packagers and manufacturers is a pretty high bar. We are a gen set manufacturer, right? The major manufacturer or the major gen set providers in the world are manufacturers. They have gross margin profiles and EBITDA margin profiles that look like ours or better, as you've seen. You know, we've got some of our competitors who have divisions, gen set divisions, big companies that, you know, where they've shared those numbers. You know, I think you've seen they've got the benefit already of the scale from the AI, you know, the AI build-out. We're just getting started.
I think, and in fact, if you were to wind the clock back on many of those companies and looked at their gen set division margins prior to the data center markets, margins look more like ours today. We've got, I think, we've got a clear path here to improve EBITDA margins, to leverage all of this growth, and to do something pretty special as we go forward. All of that is gonna bring it back to free cash flow. As York said, we kinda have an asset-light model here. You know, again, 3%, 3.5% of sales for CapEx. We're gonna put that money to work. We're gonna keep as we've been doing over the last 15 years. We've been reinvesting very heavily in Generac.
We've transformed this company from, you know, when we went public in 2010, kind of a one-trick pony. It was home standby, it was dependence on Mother Nature delivering our next, you know, next demand surge. We've changed the nature of the company. We've changed the face of the company. We've changed the outcomes, right? We've changed the visibility going forward. I think that's important, and the cash flow that comes from that, we're gonna continue to reinvest it in places we think we have even greater opportunities perhaps than the opportunities that we're sharing with you today. That's gonna drive shareholder value. It's gonna drive stakeholder value. We love shareholders, but I love stakeholders in general, right? We're doing this. I wake up every day, I do this for our teams. I know you wanna hear I do it for you. I don't.
I don't know, you know. What we do, if we do it well, that's an outcome that's a benefit for you. Right? You're the beneficiary when we execute well, when we find the right strategic growth curves and the growth opportunities, when we have the right organizational structures. Those are the things that you depend on us doing, and those are the things that our teams depend on us doing. We've got 9,400 employees and their families that depend on us doing that well every day. I carry that weight. The outcomes financially, those chips are gonna—they'll go where they lay, right? That's gonna happen, those outcomes, and I think our track record speaks for itself. Went public at $13 a share in 2010.
You know, we've got great outcomes, got a great track record, and I think we've got a great future. With that, we're gonna take a quick break. I really appreciate you kinda listening to me drone on here. It was supposed to be final takeaways, and it's supposed to be like three minutes. Sorry. I got going. I got monologuing there. We're gonna take a quick break. They're just gonna bring up some chairs, grab fresh coffee, and then we're gonna open it up to Q&A. Thank you.
Let's let George ask.
Yeah, let George ask a question. George, yeah.
Get the mic over to you. This is webcast, so be careful what you say. I'll be careful how I answer.
Hi, everyone. George Gianarikas from Canaccord. Thank you for taking my questions, and thanks for having us today. Maybe first point for York. I'm just curious about the 2026 guidance because specifically I know you re-segmented some stuff, but the commercial revenue growth is a little lower than before, but I'm assuming that's because of just the re-segmentation. Can you just--
The other category. If you're trying to refer to our product class guidance that we gave historically relative to this guidance. The difference is the other category is now getting blended into the two segments. If you recall, there are some divestitures that we talked about on our last earnings call that are causing that other category to go down. It's maybe inorganic type activity going on in other that maybe is causing that C&I segment to be a bit lower 26% growth than what maybe on a segment basis relative to the product class.
The guidance hasn't changed in total.
Guidance hasn't changed at all.
No change at all. Just maybe one follow-up. You've sort of edged into more vertical integration. I'm curious as to how far you want to take that?
Yeah, you know, I think it's a great question. You look on our residential business as an example, highly vertically integrated, right? In a home standby generator, we make the engine, we make the alternator, we make the controls, right? It's our design in terms of the package around it. The fuel systems, the emission systems, all of that is vertically integrated. When you look on the C&I side, we have a high degree of vertical integration as well. When you get into certain ranges below 500 kW, we are doing our own engines, our own alternators for gas engines anyway, all of our own structural elements, the base frames, the tanks if they're diesel, the enclosures and housings around the units. We do our own controls through the Deep Sea acquisition.
You know, that break point today is about 500 kW. As Erik said, we do engines up to 1 MW on the gas side. We are looking for ways to stretch our value add because obviously, you know, what happens is as you get into the larger power ranges, in particular, the engine becomes a much bigger percentage of the cost of the overall cost of the package. We don't make diesel engines, and these are primarily diesel engines above, you know, in these types of power ranges. That's the format today anyway for backup. You know, we're not gonna go into diesel engines, right? That's not. Let me answer the question maybe you're not asking, George. We're not gonna go that vertically integrated.
That said, we do think there are opportunities to improve our integration of the fabricated components. Today you get above 1 MW, and we start to hit our break points on just how big we go in terms of manufacturing our own and fabricating our own sheet metal components. We're going higher on those. We've got those plans are underway, and it's our intent to take over more control there on the fab, the actual structural elements of the generator. The Enercon acquisition is a good example of taking it another step further. In our industry, when you get into those large power nodes, historically, the generator manufacturer would produce a generator that when you looked at it was just a basic set.
It had an engine, it had an alternator, a set of controls, and it was on a steel skin. That particular product then would be shipped to a third-party packager for final. You know, they build a housing around it. These housings are more than just a steel skin. They oftentimes have fire suppression systems, they have electrical systems, lighting, they have alarms, security. There's all kinds of things, controls going inside. A lot of times the switch gear and things are built into the housing. Those opportunities were left to third-party packagers before. We feel this is a great area for us. If we're not gonna do the engine, we're not gonna go down that path, there, we think is a great opportunity for us.
In fact, the Enercon acquisition, just looking at that acquisition and taking that into consideration, there's more than 100 basis points of margin improvement in the C&I segment as a result of that acquisition going forward. That's the kind of margin accretion we're gonna get as it translates through. That, you know, I don't wanna say that's the end of how far we're gonna go, but it certainly, I think it demonstrates the importance of us owning more of the content if we're not going to be the engine manufacturer.
Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for having us here today. I'm Dimple from Bank of America. Aaron, on the last earnings call, you mentioned, you know, you're in deep discussions with two hyperscalers. Today you kind of reiterated about $1.2 billion worth of capacity that you have. Are the sizes of those two potential opportunities in line with that $1.2 billion capacity, or do you think you might have to expand down the line? I have a follow-up. Thank you.
Right. As it relates to that, we would have to expand. The $1.2 billion today, you know, would serve, we think, very well our traditional market as well as the co-locators that we've nurtured relationships with and begun to receive orders from. On the hyperscale side, again, we said this, we're very far down the path. In fact, with one of them, we receive something called a notice to proceed. It's non-binding, but it actually lays out in concrete terms what they want to buy from us in 2027. It's over $600 million. If we can get on the AVL, and we expect to have that happen, that is something that, you know, we would use up a lot of that $1.2 billion worth of capacity very quickly.
It's why today we continue to look at additional sites. It's why we also, in our guidance, put in that kind of higher CapEx range, that 3%-3.5% range for the entire three-year period, because we believe we are going to have to add capacity. You know, that's something that I look at what we did with the existing capacity. We doubled it in the span of about, you know, it'll be about nine months when we acquired a new facility, a brownfield site outside of Milwaukee. Sussex is the name of the village where that's located. That has basically helped us double our capacity north of $1 billion here domestically. We can do that very quickly.
We think that there's a lot of opportunity, and we just wanna see a little bit more. I wanna, you know. These are all wonderful, these terms. We talk about notice to proceeds and this and that. I keep asking, "When do I get a PO?" Like, I want a purchase order. When do I see a purchase order? The reality of it is in order for these companies to cut you a purchase order, you've got to be on the approved vendor list. It's very, you know, it's a very strict process because there's negotiated, you know, language on both sides of an agreement like that. Until we're there, we're not gonna get a PO.
The fact that they're giving us these advanced notices to proceed, they're trying to tell us, you know, 'cause we have to prepare for that. There's long lead time components, there's capacity considerations, things of that nature. We're preparing as if we're gonna win that business. We're building that out here near term and longer term. If we win more than one hyperscale account, that's where we're gonna have to go even further.
Got it. And that follows into my next question regarding AVL. A large portion of that co-location backlog is related to hyperscalers. How confident do you feel that your product kind of meets the requirements that hyperscalers are demanding today, and how long does that AVL process typically take?
Yeah. I'll probably let Erik maybe chime in here 'cause he's been in the middle of it.
Yeah. I think from a product standpoint, our products have actually passed all the reliability, durability testings, and they're actually being deployed in the field for, you know, validation further. From a product side, we've achieved all the required necessities. Just from some processes when we started this, we were told it could take 18-24 months. I think some of our customers need product faster than that, and so we're assuming that there's gonna be a faster track process, and it feels very much like that. We're in the final stages.
Yeah, they're bringing us along. I would say that if not for the current superheated environment around CapEx spending and their need for these products, you know, every one of these co-locators, hyperscalers that we've talked to will tell you there's two major components that they worry most about in terms of timeline as it relates to their projects, and it's transformers and it's generators, backup generators. Because of that constraint, we found ourselves on the fast path. We've been fast tracked through these AVLs, even though it's not fast enough for the markets, of course. Everybody wants to know that we've been put on it. It's a process. You gotta go through that process. They're in our factories. They're qualifying the equipment in separate testing.
They're into our supply chain, right? So we're taking them to our sub-suppliers, so they know that, you know, they understand who those folks are, you know, and they run those companies through the gauntlets as well. It's just a process. There's a lot of boxes to check. We're very far along on it. You know, I think that we're highly confident that we're gonna get through that. We haven't hit anything yet that says we can't. All the performance testing of the product, you asked about that specifically, Dimple. Our products outperform the competition. There's a simple reason for that. Our engine supplier has the most current technology of a high horsepower diesel engine in the market.
They bought a company, they retooled that company from a technology standpoint, supply chain standpoint, and what they have on the market in the product ranges that we're supplying today, these high horsepower diesels, are the most technologically advanced engines in the market. Therefore, when our customers and these prospects are testing these engines, we're actually outperforming current market specifications and what they've kind of aligned to. We feel really good about the product. It's not about that, it's about getting through their process.
Praneeth Satish, Wells Fargo. Two quick questions here on C&I. The first one, you talked about upside to the mid- to high-teens EBITDA margin guidance for C&I. I guess that's based on your traction with hyperscaler deals. Do you think there's a path here to getting to over 20% or even as high as the resi business between hyperscalers and vertical integration on the packaging side? You mentioned 100 basis points with Enercon.
Yeah, thanks, Praneeth. So, you know, I would say there is definitely a path to that. Certainly there's, for us anyway, a very clear path to the mid to high teens that we guided to today. You know, beyond that, should we grow scale quicker? Absolutely. There's an opportunity to further leverage the operating leverage there, and further opportunity for us to deepen the amount of vertical integration. You know, Enercon alone is not enough, right? Enercon alone only gives us a percentage of packaging capacity for what we're planning here. So we're going to have to invest, whether it be additional M&A or, you know, organic investment to scale what Enercon has brought to us, those designs, the technologies, the teams, the certifications. All those packages are certified, and they meet our customers' needs, right?
Our customers today, these hyperscale customers and co-locators, are using Enercon packages today. It puts us in the game immediately, but we're gonna have to scale that up. If we see the pathway to growing the top line, we're absolutely going to continue to invest there. Will it ever be like residential margins? I don't know. I mean, the residential margins, we like to refer to them as special because I think they're very unique. The position we've built there, I think it's very rare to find a situation.
You guys have a lot of companies you cover for or are invested in, so your coverage universe, take a look, you know, companies that are in the residential kind of, you know, hard goods space like this, durable goods space, where you've got the kind of growth profile you've got here. You've got a market leader from a share percentage with market-leading pricing that has EBITDA margin profiles like this. I'm telling you right now, unless it's a software company, if it's a durable goods company, it's very few and far between. Those are unique margins. I don't know that we'll ever get there on the C&I side, but I do think there's upside to that mid-teens to high-teens guidance range today.
Got it. That, that's helpful. Maybe switching gears on EPC Power, and the push into BESS and inverters for data centers. I guess any metrics you can share in terms of the opportunity there, the TAM, you know, revenue per gigawatt. On the surface, it seems like, you know, that could be a very large opportunity, granted there's more competitors. Then in the three-year CAGR guidance, is there any meaningful contribution from this business baked into the guide?
Yeah. There's not a huge amount of business baked into the guide there. You know, I think it's only recently been an area of intense focus from the same customer base that we're talking to. I think, you know, Erik, you might just share a little bit of some of the conversations we're having. These projects are massive.
This issue that Erik mentioned of, you know, AI or data centers disconnecting from the grid and what that does to both voltage and frequency on the grid. If you drop a large load suddenly, it has downstream ramifications for grid customers and grid operators in a way that, you know, they just, it can't happen. Creating a buffer, and I think the most likely buffer there is a BESS type of system. I mean, that's, that your customers are telling you this, if it's not already required, it's probably something that will be required.
Yeah. The architecture's being evaluated. As we looked at our long-range plan, we know that we lead in the control side, so software and control space. I think that is what we anchored on. When you look at the overall battery market and the front of the meter drives the large scale, those margins are exactly what you don't wanna see from us delivering. We're not viewing that, like the huge dollar amounts might not be coming through on the Generac side. We might find a way to deliver that value, but we definitely think on the controls and optimization, we're part of that discussion, and we have product solutions that meet the needs. If the battery portion of that gets commoditized, we're not sure if we wanna participate in that end.
Thanks. Stephen Gengaro, Stifel. Two things for me. The first, you know, you're so dominant in the residential business. When we think about the commercial opportunity, what are the few things that you really need to focus on to make sure you win in that business? 'Cause it's obviously a bit of a different landscape you're facing.
Yeah. It's a great question, Stephen. First of all, it's a much more mature market, right? You look at the players in that market, they're big companies. You know, there's back to a little bit of the dialogue around value add. You know, there's a reason that the diesel engine, every single large diesel engine manufacturer has a generator division effectively, or a partnership, as in our case. That's because they need the scale. A generator is a great vessel for a diesel engine. Diesel engines, you know, there's a lot of R&D to continue to meet ever-increasing emissions regulations, and there's a lot of capital involved in the tooling to produce those products.
You need to spread that across both that R&D investment as well as the capital investment across a lot of units in order to make the math make sense. You know, for us, again, we're not a diesel engine company. We don't endeavor to be a diesel engine company. Our differentiating factor has been not being a diesel engine company. We tell people we're focused on the generator, not on the engine. We're focused on the solution, not on, you know, this particular product that with this horsepower output, this emissions profile, this fuel consumption rate, right? The engine. That engine that's, by the way, built for a myriad of applications, you know, in construction, in marine, in rail. We are purpose-building generators for customers. We're optimizing those products for their application, right?
I think the biggest proof point I can give you there is I'll take an area. We're a 15% share in C&I domestically. Where are we better than 15%? Telecom. In the telecom space, we're a 60% share, maybe more. We're the number one provider to every single Tier 1 wireless carrier in the U.S. today. We're number one, their go-to supplier. How do we do that? We don't make the diesel engines. Those are all diesel, by the way. Almost all of them. There's some gas. The majority, the vast majority are diesel. How did we get that spot? We got it because we engineered solutions for their networks that were unique. From AT&T to Verizon to T-Mobile, they all have different specifications. We went ahead and added the scale to produce, to support them as they rolled out third-generation, fourth-generation, and now fifth-generation wireless technologies. We made the bet.
We said, "We're gonna be able to be there to provide it." Then we wrapped around the entire system with a service network coast to coast. Whether that tower is on a mountain in Colorado or it's down in the bayous in Louisiana, we can get a service technician there inside of four hours, just short of guaranteeing that, right? We tell them, "We're gonna get somebody there if that machine goes down," because we understand how important network uptime is to those companies. Time is money. It used to be when the networks were down, it was a dropped call. Now, it's lost revenue, right? We're all getting charged by the drink in terms of the data we consume. Not only that, but the critical nature of the communications that are going across these networks, life or death in some cases, right?
That's just one. I think that's an example that we can say. We can point to that example to say, "Look, we have an opportunity." Maybe we even have a right to be greater than a 15 share in this space, even though we don't make the engine. We can design purpose-built solutions that are focused on uptime. 99.999% of reliability in these networks, in these data centers, in these critical applications. That's kinda how I think about it, and I think it's a great proof point for us to share. Probably we don't share it enough, again, maybe because we don't talk about C&I enough. That's one where I think telecom, we've done a marvelous job, and that's not something we just woke up and did. That's a 40-year relationship with those carriers that we've developed.
Thanks. I think you're gonna be talking a lot about C&I.
Yeah.
On the residential side, just a quick question. With the new product design, and you mentioned the 15% lower installation cost, does that just drive installers to use your product, or is there a way for you to capture any of that profitability, or does the installer just kinda pocket the difference?
Well, our hope is, and I'll let Kyle speak to this next, but, you know, our hope is that as we take labor out of the installation, right? The meter switch, which, you know, we probably could have done a better job showing what that is. Today, you install a home standby generator on the wall somewhere near the main panel of your home. It's something we call. It's another box. We call it a transfer switch, right? The electrician wires either critical circuits that you wanna back up or maybe the entire service coming into the home goes through that switch to back up the whole home. The idea of the meter switch is that we take that box and replace it with something that is very common today.
You pull the meter out, you put this. Basically, it's like an insert in between the meter and the meter connection to the home, and that becomes your switch. That reduces all of that labor, right? High-cost labor too. You're talking about, you know, depending on where you're at, which part of the country, you could be billing out at $150 an hour, sometimes more, depending on, depending on the market. You know, we would think, our studies have shown we can take 15% out of the installation cost, which is meaningful. The question is, do our dealers, do our channel partners pass it along? I mean, we've gone through this before, and we think it's an opportunity, and it's a conversation we're certainly having. Of course, we don't control the full bit, right?
We control what we charge for the equipment to the partner, but we don't control what the partner charges, and we can't control what the partner charges to the homeowner. What we can do is make sure that we send leads to dealers that close better. We do know with data that dealers that close better have lower prices than dealers who don't close better. It's an inverse, directly inverse relationship. Over time, as those leads come through and as they end up tilting towards partners who win more, the assumption is they're winning more because they have lower prices. We'll tell them the way to win is to translate that through to, you know, if you've got less labor, it's not about us taking money out of your pocket and saying you can't charge what you wanna charge for it.
It's giving you more bandwidth to sell more, to install more product with the same amount of crews. I don't know, Kyle, if there's anything else to add to that.
No, that was pretty spot on. If there's one idiosyncrasy that you might not have caught in one of the slides that I went through is we actually encourage a homeowner to get two quotes. Back to, "Hey, how do we drive price down?" It's competitiveness. When you're 80% share, right, you'd say, "Well, if I just hand it to one partner, they're gonna get the price that they get." We actually encourage a homeowner to come into our pool, right, and to then be selected by two dealers, which then offers a competitive environment, which transitively, you know, what Aaron talked through is my best price as long as I'm delivering a quality, you know, sales pitch, installation, and total cost of ownership, right, actually wins the business.
That win then translates into, hey, more opportunities for us to provide a lead back to that dealer. It will take some time to go do that, but by us dropping that labor out, and it's the skilled labor that we're after, right? It's not the manual labor. I mean, we like taking manual labor out too, but it's going after that skilled labor and the competitiveness that we drive amongst our dealers that will translate into a better price for the homeowner.
Good afternoon. Christine Cho with Barclays. I just wanted to kinda ask about your TAM number for the data center? Opportunity. You know, as more of these data centers are, you know, looking to go, find prime power solutions behind the meter, how do you think about that risk and, like, potentially eating into your $14 billion to $17 billion TAM as they kind of reduce their reliance on the grid altogether or using the grid as backup?
I'll let Erik take that in a second, but I think it's really important that they may be relying or reducing their reliance on the grid if they bring their own power, but they still need backup because there are points of failure. Even if it's maybe not a single point of failure at the grid, okay? Those assets could break down. Having backup. Again, the engineering teams that Erik and our teams have engaged with for the hyperscalers, these co-locators are very clear on something, that 99.999% of reliability is an absolute must. I would even say this, one of the things that blows my mind at this point is, you know, a C&I genset, well cared for, and we've seen these, they can last 40, 50 years in the field.
They're already telling us that, "Well, we can't do that. If we wanna stay at 99.999% of reliability, the formula says we gotta replace that in 10 years." I'm like, "All right. Well, if that's what the formula says, I guess so. Have at it, you know. Maybe it should be seven years. Why 10, you know?" But that's something we, you know, we wouldn't even think of in our industry for a backup system like that, but they're thinking about this completely differently. As a result, even when they're bringing their own power to site, whether that's, you know, a combined cycle turbine or whether it's a recip gas engine that's in a lean burn configuration like a Jenbacher or INNIO, could be a fuel cell system, something like that, they're still going to need backup.
There are some examples where it's not 100% backup anymore, but we did take that into consideration in the formulation of the TAM.
Yeah. We assumed, as we looked at it, roughly 30%-40% of bring your own power in certain markets. I think the challenge is fuel delivery. In many cases, getting that amount of natural gas to a facility is gonna be almost as difficult as electricity. When you look outside of North America, it's few and far between on the bring your own power.
I have a question for York. I appreciate the EBITDA bridge, but I noticed the gross margins are flat in 2018 versus today. C&I, which I believe is lower gross margin than resi, it's outpacing the growth for resi. Just curious as to what the puts and takes are to have margin be flat despite the negative mix.
The unfavorable mix. Yeah. Well, you saw that middle column, that price cost column, was offsetting the unfavorable mix. The assumption there is there's a number of things we're working on in terms of to deliver that positive price cost. It's 2% over three years, so you know, whatever that is, 2/3 of a percent per year. There's a lot of things we're working on, from supply chain resiliency. Tariff mitigation's a big one. I mentioned this profitability enhancement program that's just part of our DNA now in terms of delivering improved margins throughout the company. The vertical integration we talked about. There are specific initiatives we're working on today that we'll continue to work on for the next three years that will deliver that positive price cost, which was 2% in the bridge, and that's offsetting the unfavorable 1.5% gross margin impact on mix.
Brian?
Brian Drab with William Blair. If I could ask two quick ones. You mentioned the $600 million notice to proceed, and if you think about the forecast for data center, about $300 million in revenue this year, $1 billion in revenue in 2028, kind of a linear ramp I think York had mentioned so.
At least in the model.
At least in the model. Yeah.
In the model, $650 million then for 2027. How does that $600 million notice to proceed factor into your forecast for roughly $650 million in- -
Yeah. It's all upside. I mean, it's basically not in there. You know, we have a little bit ascribed as it grows, you know, out through 2028, some hyperscale business. The, you know, the $600 million , and some of that could actually be delivered this year. You know, if, again, we've got to get through the AVL gauntlet for this particular hyperscale customer, which we think we will. If we do, and if we have the supply chain capability, you know, the capacity, we're trying to bring our Sussex facility online faster. We originally targeted the end of this year. Now we're shooting for the end of third quarter. Can we bring it on a quarter faster?
Which would give us some additional upside for the fourth quarter, you know, if we were to see one of these deals come through as an actual PO as opposed to, you know, something that's non-binding. You know, again, I this particular customer, the quality of the conversations at a high level, the fact that they've sent us this notice that they're like, "Look, you know, we can't give you a PO, but we want the product and we're gonna get you through this process, and you're gonna have to buy on risk when it comes to some of these longer lead time components. You're gonna have to make some bets on capacity, but we're gonna be there." If we, you know, if we can get through the rubric here on this AVL process, and we will.
When we do, there's potential upside in 2026, and certainly beyond, for this particular customer. I mean, really very little of that.
We did have some hyperscalers in 2027.
In 2027, but not all of it.
Not, definitely not all.
I mean, it's definitely upside. Big time upside.
Okay, got it. Then on the service business, you did a good job outlining a pretty robust service business for the data center product line specifically. How do you envision that in terms of, like, a revenue stream maybe in 2028? Is that potentially a material revenue stream at that point?
I think it is. I don't know, Erik.
I think in our company-owned distributors that definitely plays into it, you know, the opportunity per unit or per--
The maintenance contracts that are gonna be available to us with owning 40% of our distribution there and growing. You know, Erik was keen to say it's not a strategy, it's an opportunity. We can demonstrate holistically that where we've bought distribution, we have faster growth rates in the years that follow, and there's a reason for that. We're more focused on it, right? It becomes the only thing that former business, whatever it was. A lot of these distributors of ours are not just generator distributors. They're in material handling or they're in construction or electrical contracting. They're in other businesses. When we buy them, generators are the only business at that point, and focus does matter, and we see that come through in higher growth rates.
These service contracts and these maintenance contracts, again, back to the 99.999% of reliability, the kinds of opportunities there to touch these machines monthly, not just the normally once or twice a year that distributors, I think, would normally be banking on. Now, there's not a ton of parts for us, right? These are limited use products for the most part, but I think the labor that comes with that through distribution is important, and I think as these service models evolve, and I think they will evolve, maybe there are other places where, you know, it might make sense for us to be involved. The actual testing of the units, load banking as it's known in our industry, right? They load up the generators with load. It's actually they roll up a box. It's like a hairdryer inside.
It puts resistive load against the generator. It simulates the grid load or the building load, I should say. The opportunity perhaps to do some of that work. We're seeing it in the rental channels today. There's opportunities there. You know, that's something that as we look at this evolve, we'll keep an eye on.
I think it's a separate part of the business though, so we have to keep it that way, that it's not awarded with the purchase of equipment. The sites we're already delivering on are distributors, whether it's ours or the third party. Is the data center operator going to self-perform the maintenance or are they gonna rely on a third party? If they rely on a third party, then we have the opportunity to win. There's a lot more steps, but I think over the next 12-18 months we'll have really good visibility into how we're gonna participate in that effort.
What that could turn into.
Yeah.
Yeah. Jeff?
Yeah. Jeff Hammond, KeyBanc Capital Markets. I wanted to hit on energy technology. I mean, you talked in the opening about profitable growth that has been challenged. You seem fully committed to it. As we've kinda reset with the new products in the market, what kind of growth do you see for this business in that three-five-year plan? How much of the path to break even or profitability is this reorg cost takeout versus, you know, that growth assumption?
Maybe I'll speak to kind of the strategy around. I'll let Norm too, and then York can give you a little bit of details. It's about $500 million in the 2028 number. There, did I just do it? I guess you don't need to do it now. Forget it.
Yeah. You did it.
A good chunk of that's ecobee.
Good chunk.
Right? About 3/5 of its ecobee, 2/5 would be the rest of it. You know, we still see strategically as power prices rise, even with the loss of support being tax credits, the 25D credit is the most visible one for individual solar customers as that went away at the end of last year. As power prices continue to rise and these technologies continue to come down in cost, the paybacks will return very quickly. In some estimates it's as quick as two years. We're right back to where we were prior to. I actually, personally, I think the loss of those subsidies is a good thing. Solar is a market that's been around for 40 years. It's been subsidized for almost all 40 of those years.
I mean, at what point do you say a technology should no longer be subsidized and can stand on its own 2 feet? I think that the technology is mature enough and it's certainly cost competitive enough in relation to power prices that it makes sense. As power prices rise, homeowners are going to turn to self-generation. Self-generation in the format of solar is probably the most likely outcome, and as Norm pointed out, you know, especially when you talk about microinverters, which is the preferred technology in solar, there's one player. The opportunity to be a secondary source there, we think, you know, that couple of hundred million of business there between solar and storage assumes very modest market share.
I think you're right, and I think from that standpoint, the other piece of it is that side of the business in particular also has a much better margin profile than I think the flat storage business. You kinda also have the opportunity to do that. I think the reality is there's a significant sunk cost aspect to this, particularly on that one, where we had to put in a ton of infrastructure.
You know, the willingness to put in infrastructure I appreciate, because without it, you really can't truly compete in that space. That infrastructure's in place. The testing room for those products is bigger than any other testing room we have in terms of equipment, but that's in place. We use it. We build it. There's a lot of engineering in that. What we've been able to do now in the integration is now start to shift much more of the resources elsewhere, save some money obviously at the same time, and then I think we're actually gonna get o verall for the business, I think a tailwind of, I think the efficiencies as an organization on the sales front, the marketing front, on the customer service front, et cetera, that will help the overall business, as you can see from kind of our expectations for the overall EBITDA margin improvement over the next three years.
I would say, though, that make no mistake about it, you know, with this 2026 and into 2027's a pivotal time period for those products, for residential storage and for the microinverters. We have got to see traction. We've got to see, you know, market share, real market share gains, even in a down market. We haven't moved the goalposts on when we've said we're gonna be profitable with those products. It's still 2027. I've been very clear to the teams, we're not moving the goalposts. I don't care if the market's down. Then go out and win more share. That's what we're focused on doing. Yet that still is a pretty modest share position, Jeff, that we're talking about.
If for the sake of argument, we don't see the traction there, yeah, we'll definitely recalibrate further. We've taken the first step here to recalibrate and making, you know, putting investment into places in our business where we have higher growth opportunities like C&I, right? I mean, we're giving Erik's business, you know, I don't wanna say it's an open checkbook 'cause you'll never hear that from me.
I don't think you've ever heard that from me, have you?
No. I haven't heard it from you.
You never will. Because there has to be return with everything we do. On these technologies, the return has been harder to come by. There's no question. We've said that. We've been very open about that. We also believe deeply in the importance of those technologies, again, in terms of power prices. I think the knock-on benefit here is what we've learned over the last few years is just how much stronger, deeper, wider they can make the moat around that home standby business. That, I think, is not a small thing. When you talk about the software layers, you talk about the firmware layers, you talk about this meter switch that I just was mentioning before, that technology is very prevalent in the solar and storage industry.
It's not nearly as prevalent in the generator market, but it can take 15% out of the installation cost. Using that same core technology and applying it into our legacy market, that's a great side benefit. We wouldn't have been able to do that, in my opinion, as quickly or efficiently as we've done had we not had our investments there. I still believe deeply about batteries and where that technology ultimately heads long term. Important.
Just one more. As you look kinda beyond this billion capacity in data center and, you know, if you get these hyperscale opportunities, like, what are the biggest risks or bottlenecks from your perspective? It seems like adding the capacity isn't hugely a challenge. Is it engines? Is it other supply chain or what?
Near term, it's in the supply chain. I would tell you it's not in the engines. The engine partner we have is very committed to the space. They've got a tremendous amount of capacity they've already put in place, and they are eager to add more capacity should it be needed. I'm actually not worried about the engine space as much as I am some of the other components that go into the package. Today, near term, alternator capacity. This is the business end of the generator, right? It's the set of copper windings that the engine turns to actually produce power. Those alternators in those frame sizes for these kind of 3 MW and higher machines, there is, like on the diesel engine side, a limited set of suppliers in the world to produce those.
Now, every single one of those suppliers has big capacity plans coming online really towards the end of this year and in 2027. Near term, it's a problem. We're already seeing that. We're stretching some of these suppliers because we're trying to ramp faster, and they're trying to keep up. Near term, I think it is some of the supply chain elements. Beyond that, I think it's, you know, it's probably gonna be more around some of the labor that maybe we don't talk enough about, the trades labor to install these machines, right? The electrical contracting labor. You know, we have an issue in this country. If you were to look at our residential side in particular, we have a pretty good lens on electrical contractors.
80%+ of our dealers are contractors like ECs. The average, you know, electrical contractor is a 57-year-old who, you know, has been in the trades for, you know, 30+ years. You know, they're looking forward to retirement, put it that way. I think I was talking during the break too, I'm part of the problem here. You know, we all have taken our kids, and we've said, "You're going college track," right? "You gotta go to the college track." We didn't push them into the trade track. We didn't push them into the tech track. We pushed them into the college track.
I think we've done a disservice probably to an entire generation maybe of college grads here who have come out with six-figure loans, you know, English lit majors working in Starbucks that, you know, there's a lot to be said there. You can unpack that. You know, we probably might have done better to turn some of those folks into the trades. I mean, that will, that'll right itself because you're starting to see salaries for tradespeople rise very quickly. Plumbing, HVAC, electrical, right? You know, this is the new profession, I think, for a lot of people, and we're gonna need a lot more of those. I am worried if there's a constraint anywhere on this, it's actually probably in those trades areas in the labor.
I was sitting at a recent event with somebody who does a lot of the data center development work, public company, and he shared the same. I mean, it's the trades that they're worried about the most, trying to get you know these pads ready to be built on, and then to actually construct these data centers, to construct this critical infrastructure. We just don't have enough electricians. What are we gonna do about that? You know, we can wait for the market to come to them and you know get the economics right. But I think we're gonna have to do something more quickly if we're gonna make headway here and not have that be the constraint.
That's probably the one area I would worry most about.
Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Keith Housum from Northcoast Research. Let me play devil's advocate a little bit here. If we look at Generac's history in the residential space, you guys were generators. HSBs were the one story. That's, you know, solar was expensive. Now you've got these battery systems. You know, you got the Teslas out there. You have a bunch of new guys, commodity pricing. What's the confidence that you guys have that HSBs will still be the lead product that people will need, and in the face of these cheaper alternatives that are coming down the line with the battery and unique pricing that some of these guys are coming up with?
Yeah. No, it's a great question, Keith. This is. Look, when we got into the battery market, the storage, residential storage market five years ago, part of our thesis was defensive in nature, right? These technologies were improving in performance and reducing in cost very quickly. Look, you can't ignore some of the players that are in that market today. Now, almost always, when a residential storage system is sold today, it's sold with solar. You're talking about a project that the ticket is much bigger, right? You're talking about $25,000, $30,000, $35,000, $40,000, $50,000 if you've got multiple storage devices on site.
As time goes on, you know, maybe battery technology gets to the point where if you've got somebody and they're just worried about limited outage protection, and that's all you're gonna get out of one of these cabinets. Half a day maybe. If you're managing your loads closely, maybe you can stretch it a full day. I don't think it's ever, in at least in the near term, gonna be a stand-in for what a home standby can do. Here, the problem with a power outage when it happens is you don't know how long it's gonna be, how long the power's gonna be out. If you've made a bet on a short-term solution like a battery, or even if you have two or three of those things, the reality of it is, if you have a multi-day outage, you got a problem there.
I think the most likely next step in this evolution is some kind of hybridized system. You know, Norm touched on it, Kyle touched on it, but the idea, don't buy four Powerwalls. That is asinine. You're gonna buy four Powerwalls, you don't know when or how long an outage is gonna last. You only need one and a generator, and you have what in effect is a bottomless battery. That technology, and from a cost perspective, far less cost than doing multiple storage devices. Generators themselves are fantastically cost effective relative to the cost to actually produce the power, right? The cost, the capital cost of the equipment. I don't see that changing anytime soon. I do think that over time, this hybridization strategy could become more prevalent.
One of the benefits, by the way, if you do have a battery, if you have a hybridized system, is you have what we refer to in our industry as a no-break experience. Today, if you just have a generator on your house, the utility drops, you still have the flashing clock problem, right? It's, I mean, it still happens. As homes become more sophisticated, these home automation systems, all this other technology or security systems, oftentimes those devices don't play well with a short-term outage, right? Your router drops, all the connectivity drops. Stuff that should work doesn't work, has to be reset, powered on, power cycled, right? All the stuff that drives us nuts as consumers.
If you have a battery system that can act as a whole home buffer for that 10 seconds to 30 seconds between when, you know, the power's lost and when the generator comes fully online, you have a no-break system. We have customers who are. They're like, "Yeah, I want that," even if they don't have solar on their roof. Like, "I just want that. I don't wanna have to reset the clocks." Or they have a significant issue with even a momentary, you know, loss of power and they can't have that. Oftentimes today, people buy individual UPSs, right, for a point solution, an uninterruptible power supply for your computer or a particular, maybe a medical device in the home. A whole home battery paired with a whole home generator is probably the solution in the future.
You probably don't need as big of a battery, and you might not need as big of a generator. Something of that so in our laboratories today, in our R&D centers, we're working on hybridized products because we believe the future continues to change. Again, we think we have an advantage there. Because of all the investment we've made in storage and all the investment we've made in clean energy, we think we have an advantage to come up with, you know, a hybridized system that by far would be the, not only the best performing system but also the lowest cost system in the marketplace.
Great. Quick follow-up here. You know, data centers obviously is the excitement from investors today, but there's also a fear that this excitement, data center strength is gonna wind down at some point in time, and everybody's gonna have to go back to, you know, relying on other sources of growth. Your non-data center business for these large diesel engines, I know it's probably not been the priority for you guys, but where is that falling in terms of what your plans are for the future in terms of building these relationships, getting growth from that vertical?
Yeah. Actually, we launched the products at the same time, and we're generating backlog on these products in a traditional application. You know, cold storage, wastewater treatment facilities, that was a very easy bolt-on to the business just having the products available. It’s very complementary.
Yeah, I mean, we started quoting that maybe a little bit after we launched the data center units. The data center units are admittedly maybe a little more simple. Oftentimes you'll see in our traditional business when you get a machine that's required on a specification that's of that size, it's a lot of customization. The bigger the machine, the higher level of customization. It's been the history in our industry. The data center thing's kind of breaking that because they want 100 copies of the same machine. We're like, that's like, you know. We're talking like building home standbys then, right? Like, we're pounding them out down an assembly line versus stall building them, you know, and kind of with a high degree of customization. We had to get some of that customization stuff ready.
We're in market with it now. We took an order for our first project here recently. We've got a nice pipeline building there. We've got to make sure we stay focused on this. You know, we have a project internally to double the size of our C&I business over the next three years. One of the core tenets of that project is not losing sight of our traditional business and the importance of that business. Because you're right, the data center market, are they gonna spend $700 billion a year for perpetuity? No. Probably not, but it could be a long run here. Even if there's not, there's a traditional business that we weren't participating in at all, and that's all, you know, it's 100% incremental, and it's a space we think we're at least entitled to the 15% share we get in the rest of our C&I business.
As we build that out, that's a market that, you know, we're keen to make sure that we focus on. It can't all be about data centers. Erik's done a great thing in his business, is he separated the teams. We have our traditional teams. We have a data center team. We have a direct sales team that he and his team have built to go directly after the data centers and call on those. I think the service model, which was a question that came up before, that's why you gotta keep that separate as well. We can't lose sight of the importance of our traditional market as that grows as well going forward.
Do we have time for one more, Kris? Why don't we do one more? We'll just do a closer here. Anybody?
Yeah, maybe there were no more questions. Maybe you were ahead of me. There we go.
Fine, forget it. Go to lunch. I don't care. No. Well, if there aren't any other questions, I really appreciate your time this morning. We hope that, you know, the takeaways here were meaningful. We hope it was worth your time. You know, I think. As I said before, we've got a very unique opportunity, an exciting opportunity as a company here to do something that we believe is, again, generational. Probably overusing that word this morning.
Stay tuned. Now it's on us. We've got to execute, and we will do that. Thank you very much.