Good morning, and welcome to Plug Symposium 2025. Our program this morning will begin in 10 minutes. Please find your seats and silence your devices. Our program will begin in 5 minutes. Please take your seats. Our program will begin in 2 minutes. Please direct your attention to the stage. Our program is about to begin. Energy independence isn't a destination; it's a movement, and Plug is driving it forward, building the global hydrogen ecosystem that powers industries, strengthens grids, and redefines how the world creates its own energy. We're not imagining a hydrogen future; we're building it. Plug is the only company delivering a complete hydrogen ecosystem, from production and storage to delivery and power, end-to-end solutions that make clean energy work at scale.
We produce and liquefy hydrogen in a growing generation network across Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana, with the capacity to produce over 40 tons of hydrogen every day, reinforced by milestones like the Georgia plant's 97% uptime. We move it through an industry-leading cryogenic delivery fleet. We store and handle it with proven, field-tested technology. We dispense it at more than 275 fueling stations around the globe, and we use it in more than 72,000 fuel cells powering forklifts, trucks, and stationary systems that move 30% of America's food supply. Across five continents, Plug GenEco electrolyzers are powering industrial transformation. We're not just growing; we're accelerating, executing with discipline, and shaping the future of global energy. This is the power of hydrogen. This is the power of Plug, strengthening energy independence worldwide. Please welcome to the stage Plug's CEO, Andy Marsh.
I've been doing this symposium for seven years, and this is the last one that I will be opening the event. Maybe I'll be on some thought panel, Jose, where folks want insight into the hydrogen industry in the future. You know, this event, I think, is unlike what most companies would do. We've never made this an event just about Plug. We've made this an event about hearing from our customers, about how they use our products. You'll hear from partners. We try to have dialogue that's just not, "This is a commercial for Plug." You'll get a bit of a commercial from us. I'm not going to kid you. It really is about trying to tell folks where this hydrogen industry is today, but probably more important, where it's going in the future.
You know, as always, everything we say is covered by safe harbor statements. It is a great agenda, and it is really separated into three parts. First, you will hear from Jose, Paul, and myself about the business a little. More important, you are going to hear from customers, both customers in our material handling market as well as some energy partners, about how Plug's working with them. Those who are here are also going to get a wonderful tour of this fabulous facility. Those online will, while the tour is going on, Jose and I are going to take a half hour and answer any of your questions. I hope you enjoy the event. This is, you know, I was thinking to myself, some would take this as a step-down memory lane. It is really not about that.
It's really about dreaming what's possible. I think what we've done here at Plug over the last decade and a half is really built a business, quite honestly, from very little. It's also kind of a challenge for the future. You know, people who say things can't be done, quite honestly, are wrong because very few, even us, would have imagined where we are today and what's been accomplished by this team. When I take a step back, when I joined the company back in 2008, we had a million dollars in commercial revenue. You know, today, we'll hit, we're targeting to hit over $700 million. I asked ChatGPT what that growth rate is, and it's 46.5% annually. Not going to continue to grow at that rate.
I think that, you know, big dreams are probably more important than the everyday grind that so many of my employees, and you're going to hear from people like Tim Tirrell, who started two weeks after me today, who's deeply involved in our customer relations and service, about what it takes to really build a business from nothing. You know, in our material handling business, there's a good young Andy Marsh there. You know, when I joined the company, I went on the road for six months because it really wasn't a commercial business. I went to Walmart and, you know, saw my buddy Mike Buckley, who works for us now, and we had about 25 of these material handling units in the field. We didn't have a fueling station. We didn't have what we're calling pedestal customers today.
What we had was, it was explained to me, and I didn't, you know, was trying to understand that we had a value proposition that helped people move goods faster. It was actually a very, very simple value proposition. Mike explained to me that these 10 units could help them, you know, what eventually became 8% more goods per hour. Think about that. It's 8% less labor. It's 8, but it also could be just as much labor and moving more goods to deliver to their customers. You know, it's also when you kind of take a step back, we didn't have customers. Look, and one of the reasons we named Jose to be the CEO was he's so customer-focused.
We're customer-focused with people like Amazon and Walmart and Home Depot and Floor & Décor and all sorts of customers, BMW, and not just here in the United States, but around the world. These products, 17 years ago, were not using Plug stacks. They were using stacks which we were buying from third parties. Today, this wonderful team at Plug has designed and developed three platforms for low power, medium power, and high power of ProGen. The MEAs and the production of the stacks happened at our wonderful factory in Rochester. All that was really a dream in 2008. Just think about what we should be dreaming in 2025 to where the future can become. We also did not have an electrolyzer business. We had no business in electrolyzers in 2008.
You know, back in 2020, I can remember the day pretty vividly because it was March 14th, 2020, the day the world shut down for COVID when the NBA shut down. You know, Paul and I were in Massachusetts cutting a deal to allow Plug to enter this market. We bought a small stack company, which the DOE said had the best PEM stacks in the world. Weren't really manufacturers. Today, you know, we've grown this business, and José's been deeply involved in it. From $5 million in revenue in 2023 to we expect to do $200 million this year. With great customers, people like GALP, Hybrid Ola, BP, you saw the Carlton Power announcement. You'll hear folks today from Ally Green Ammonia. It's, you know, this was just a dream.
We working together at Nitty Gritty every day and made it into a real business. It really didn't stop there. Those electrolyzers and those systems developed by Plug people in the Netherlands, developed by Plug people in North America, actually have built the largest electrolyzer liquefier plant in the world. It works. As Jose will tell you, it is his greatest sales tool because he doesn't have to say to folks, this is what an electrolyzer plant would look like. He can take them to Georgia and show them. That plant, you know, when we want to run it, we've run it 97% of the time in August. When electricity costs are high, you know, I think, you're going to hear from Jessica Fleck and Luke today and how they turn it off when it doesn't make sense.
I mean, when electricity costs are high. We also have two other plants. Alan Sharkey is here today, and he's going to tell you about how to build a hydrogen plant. I know we've stepped back, but I think you'll see as part of our electrolyzer business, we will be building plants for customers in the future. We'll have toy agreements. They'll be financed by third parties. Alan, 30 years in the oil and gas business, you know, our first plant in Georgia, we learned a lot. God, our second plant in Louisiana, which there'll be a tour online that all of you can go through the Louisiana plant that he was able to deliver that on time and on price schedule. A remarkable job. Part of that is using, you know, Plug's cryogenic equipment is delivering hydrogen from that facility.
I didn't even know what cryogenic hydrogen was in 2008. Today, it's a big part of our business. You're going to hear today from our folks at Edgewood. The folks at Edgewood are going to talk about how our cryogenic capability helps not only in green hydrogen activities, but also in blue hydrogen. You know, we have this hydrogen both here and in Europe. We have some small plants in Europe. We didn't have a logistic network for delivering hydrogen years ago, and we're delivering at least 25 tons per day at the moment. Now, Plug has, and I got to read the numbers again, 34 liquid hydrogen trailers on the road. We have 89 gas trailers, a good deal in Europe to support our European customers.
Nobody in the world has the high pressure tube trailers in the United States that Plug has to, to back up and support our customer operations. You know, this is really something that is special. Another reason people buy from Plug, and I think people don't really fully appreciate this, we have manufacturing facilities. So back in 2008, we were in a facility in Latham, which essentially was, about half of it was built for World War II. It was not, certainly not state of the art. I can remember my first day on the job, April 8th, 2008. I walked that floor with my wife, Kathy, and I turned to her and said, "How in the world is this team at Plug? Are we going to fill that factory?" Now today, between Rochester and here, we have over 600,000 sq ft.
We have facilities, fabricators around the world. You're going to see a great video of our fabricator partner in the UAE. We have fabricators around the world in Vietnam, UAE, and elsewhere, which even gives us more capability. Combined with that, our cryogenic business has over 368,000 sq ft. You know, this company has really developed the infrastructure and capability to continue to allow us to grow with making minor capital investments. George, our founder is here, and George McNamee, and when I started, you know, I can remember saying to folks, this was a business that was located 100 mi of radius of Albany, New York. That's really all the suppliers were here. That was the business. Today, Plug is around the world. I mean, I've been in the BMW electric car factory in Leipzig, Germany.
Do you know what they use to move goods in an electric car factory? They use Plug fuel cells, Plug's fueling stations. That's, you know, that's far away from Albany, New York. We have, if you look at our electrolyzer business, we have products in Australia. We have products in New Zealand. We have products in India. We have products in Hungary, products in the U.K., about that products in Chile. We're all over the world. I think you'll hear about some of that today during the presentation. Look, we've done a lot, but we do recognize we have to focus. It was really critical in this journey to really make sure that we're profitable in the long run so we can continue to grow and expand this business. That's what Quantum Leap's about. It's not only about improving gross margins and improving profitability.
is also about growth. You will see this slide, I think two other times, maybe three other times today. It really is what is driving us. We become very, very focused. We see great growth opportunities in the electrolyzer business. We see great growth opportunities in material handling. We see opportunities to continue with our hydrogen plants long term. Laser focus on reaching gross margin zero by the fourth quarter of this year. EBITDA zero, positive, low positive zero in the fourth quarter of 2026. OI positive in the fourth quarter of 2027. José meets with the team every day to make sure we are driving towards those three goals. I think we have learned, we have earned the opportunity to dream. I often hear people say to me, "How can green hydrogen be competitive with blue hydrogen?" I am going to give you the roadmap.
The roadmap is happening for real in Europe today. That is why so much of our activity is focused in Europe today. Europe is beginning to build the infrastructure of the new world. I would like to start and say, my first day on the job, we had a fellow who was a really good fellow around our operations, Brian Johnson, said to me, "Andy, the problem with this business is the cost of hydrogen and the availability of hydrogen." I think we have made great progress, Brian, in both of those areas. Our production of hydrogen ourselves has really been a big step. The fact that we can move hydrogen ourselves is a big step. For this world to really take off, you know, I am challenging them as the future, as the chairman of Plug.
The real goal is, how do you make hydrogen cost-effective with natural gas? That's the holy grail. Then all these applications, which are shown on this slide, become an immediate reality. We're not as far away as you think. I kind of see three big elements. Of those elements, you really do not need innovation. You need execution and build and be able to build. I'd like to take a look at Germany in May of 2025. 17.5% of the time, the electricity market in Germany was zero as more and more renewables get built out. You know, Europe expects to have 73% renewables by 2035. When you kind of start thinking about that, sometimes the wind blows, sometimes the sun shines, and you need load on the grid to support it.
That is why electrolyzers are so, so important. They really become a flexible load on the grid. Just dream and think during that 17.5% of the time, you could almost be just producing hydrogen for almost zero cost. That is a big deal. That beats fossil fuel-produced hydrogen. That beats any hydrogen that could be generated. There is an equation. The world's, regardless of, you know, you know, skeptics out there, the world's going this way. I spent some time this weekend reading about what people were saying about natural gas in 1930, 1940, and 1950. It was not going to happen. You know, coal worked well. Even though natural gas was cleaner, you know, we know how to get coal. Coal is more cost-effective. There is no distribution network for coal, for, for natural gas. There is no storage system. Storage is a reality.
You know, hydrogen stored in salt caverns and as well as around the world in aquifers. You know, Europe has will have by 2030, 9.1 terawatt hours of storage. So that hydrogen that's generated when nothing else is going on, that the grid is overloaded, you know, you can store it. And you can store it more cost-effectively than putting it, buying batteries and putting it in batteries. You have seasonal transformation. That hydrogen can be used four months from now. You know, it can be generated on a sunny day and used on a real cloudy, cold day in December. That's one of the versatilities of hydrogen. This is happening. Okay. Renewable power is happening. Hydrogen is happening. In Europe, they've really been thinking about moving it. Europe is targeting 50,000-60,000 kilometers by 2040 of hydrogen pipelines. Think about that.
You know, one of our big challenges is how we get hydrogen to our customers. We can now move hydrogen as low cost as natural gas. And that's hydrogen was produced from a real low cost, zero cost source. On top of that, you know, these pipelines aren't a pipe dream. Europe expects that 60% of the natural gas, 60% of that hydrogen pipeline can just come from converting natural gas pipelines. Do I believe there's a future for hydrogen that's much bigger? Do I believe that, 10-25% of world's energy can come from hydrogen, that it can replace natural gas turbines? I mean, I was just talking to folks at Delta Electronics on the way in. We were talking about where stationary products are going to go in the future.
This is where, you know, there are hydrogen airplanes going on and regional flights will be possible. There'll be data centers, you know. I, we had our old COO, a great, great guy, Keith Schmidt, used to tell me who worked in the data center market for years. What you really should do cost-effectively in data centers is move hydrogen directly around the data centers and use fuel cells in the, in the racks. I don't know if that'll happen, but all this is possible. It's going to take a lot of work every day to make it a reality. The bottom line is, I really feel Plug has chosen the next CEO that not only is, you know, capable of moving us, meeting the goals of Quantum Leap.
I watch how he's working and driving that every day, but also to help continue the vision of how hydrogen can become one of the dominant energy sources. Plug is well, well positioned with our talented people, our infrastructure, our customer focus, as well as a world that we often don't see here in the U.S. that is really evolving towards using clean hydrogen and clean liquid fuels to really change the world for the future. I couldn't be more thrilled to see Jose come in to take over Plug as a day for the day-to-day operations. He's genuine. He's customer-focused. He has high levels of integrity. I think the board and myself are just thrilled, Jose, that you're going to be the next CEO of Plug.
Let me introduce Jose, and I'm going to talk to him about 15 minutes and get out of your hair most of the rest of the day. Jose. All right. Yeah, that music, I guess I should let the music go a little longer, Matt. Jose, I know a lot about you, but folks may want to know more about you. Why don't you just give us a little bit about your background, where you came from? You can talk pre-Plug days. Pre-Plug days. Yeah, pre-Plug.
I, not a lot of people know, but I am an engineer. I have a six-year engineering degree. I did that in Spain, where I'm from. I started my career in Bell Labs, actually in a Bell Labs facility in Mesquite in Texas.
I moved from Madrid to Dallas, Texas, and then worked in Mesquite. That same facility that you were, you were working there.
We did not work together.
We did not work together. You were on the second floor. I was on the first floor, for the systems, part of the power organization. The first floor made more money than the second floor, actually. Naturally. I started working in the labs, actually. I was doing design, you know, having some fun. At some point, the marketing and sales team asked me to help them because they had a customer that spoke Spanish. It was a large telecommunication company from Spain called Telefónica. They said, "Can you help us?" I went and started helping them.
I realized that what I really wanted to do and what was fun to me was to, if I understand the technology well, can I go in front of customers and help them take advantage of the technology, help them add value to their operations? That is what I realized I wanted to do. I started doing that, for AT&T, network systems. We sold wireless networks in the hype of the telecom boom. It was a fun time. I got a little bit bored of the big company life, and I decided to go to smaller companies. One of the companies did Voice over IP. Again, always trying to make sure that when, you know, I understood the technology well, I could help customers take advantage of the technology.
It's not just selling for selling. It's selling to make sure that customers actually can use the technology and can extract value from the technology. After that, I went to a company called PDI, Power Distribution Incorporated. You were on the board of that company. Even though I didn't work with Jose, my wife worked with Jose and said they were looking for an international salesperson. My wife said to me, "Hire Jose." And they did. And they did. That was fun too. It was also when the first data center wave was happening around 2010, 2011. You know, we grew that company. We sold the company later. We're just having all the fun with these smaller type of companies and going around the world.
Then Andy called me one day and he said, "Hey, you know, I need a, I need a salesperson for the company. Would you be interested?" We were not at $1 million then. You had gotten it all the way to 20 by that time. That was 2000, 2004. You are going to take 20 to 700 credits. I think we work all in, in that. That was good. Now here I am at Plug. Yeah. Before Plug, you know, tell me about, you know, a win that really meant a lot to you, which was tough. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, it's been a fun ride, you know, during the time that I just mentioned. There is an opportunity that was special to me.
One, because it was in a country that I was not, you know, and a culture that I was not used to. Two, because it was during a time that the market, the telecom market, had already burst. The dot-com bubble was done. It was 2002. Two, because if you remember, the world in 2002 was pretty, pretty chaotic after what happened in 9/11. I decided to start doing business development in Pakistan. That was a fun, a fun experience. I went, to, and this is right after 9/11. Right after 9/11, it was very interesting to travel, to travel to that area of the world right after 9/11 and to Pakistan specifically. I can tell you that the culture there, the people are incredible. It was fun from that point of view.
We actually closed a deal with a company called Telecard. We installed a wireless network in that city in Karachi. I think that was one of the most fun opportunities that I worked with. The audience is probably interested in what you're talking about, big deal. You closed the plug. A plug. I think a plug, you know, that's an easy one. Although we've done a lot of very interesting things. A plug has been very exciting over the last 12 years now. It's going to be 12 years in January. I think the opportunity that probably had the most impact and it was, it was, you know, a very fun opportunity to work with was Amazon. Amazon, we, you know, we already had Walmart. It was a pedestal account that everybody knew.
We wanted to, I was deeply involved in it. You're already deeply involved. You still are. You know, it's been always a good thing to have a CEO in the company that actually has, you know, a commercial and customer focus. That, that's from a CRO point of view, this is, you know, the best, the best setup that you can have. With Amazon, we worked with them for a long time. It was probably 18 months or so until we kind of convinced them that, you know, the technology was going to bring value to their operations. As I said before, that's the challenge. You need to make sure that, you know, they understand what we can do. We did our first site in October of 2016. The site was called MG1, in Georgia.
It took a little time for them to start using, you know, heavily the, the fuel cells. I was like, well, this is going to be, you know, a, a long road for the, the second side and so forth. In December, I sat down with Dean's team. Dean is our COO, and he was my customer at that time. I sat down with Dean's team and I said, "Hey, you know, what's going to happen in 2017?" Just for reference, in 2016, we had done about 11 sites with all customers, the entire company. Dean's team told me, you know, we really like the technology. We see the value, so we want to do 12 sites in 2017. I was like, "Here we go." You know, one new customer, double the, double the, the, the business, right?
This is how we achieved this 47% growth year over year. Amazon was special and, you know, we now have over 90 sites with Amazon operating. That's the one. We're focused on three things. Tell me a little bit about the electrolyzer business and why would people buy from Plug? I'm going to talk a lot about that later on in my presentation, but I'll give you a preview of that. Electrolyzer business is basically driven today by, in many areas of the world. We may not see this in the U.S., but in Europe, in the U.K., in Australia, it's driven by regulation and government support. What you see, and I'll talk a little bit more about later, is that Europe is driving to convert gray hydrogen into green hydrogen.
These types of opportunities we have been working on for the last four years or so, and we're beginning to see that, the opportunities are getting to FID. You just saw yesterday we announced Carlton Power. The reason because I think, not that I think, I've heard from our customers why they buy from us is because of the things that you were showing before in your presentation. We do things when we bring customers to see Georgia. If you're thinking about going to a new technology and you've never done it, and it's going to be the first plant that you do, don't you want to work with somebody that actually doesn't only give you the technology? An OEM just tells you, "Hey, here's the product. You can use it.
You can install it. We can actually show them that we have installed the product, that we use it, that we produce hydrogen every day, that we manage the operation. That is incredible value for customers. I was talking about value before. That is the part that I enjoy when you're able to take that technology and show customers that they can actually take advantage of the technology and be successful.
Over the last decade, what do you think we've done well and what do you think we could have done better?
Surprisingly, we haven't been perfect. Haven't we? Yes. I have to say, probably the last decade has been the most fun in my career. I've learned so much. Building a new market is not easy. It's a lot of work, but it's so much fun.
I don't think you get a lot of opportunities in someone's career to build a new market that we have. What have we done well? I think one of the keys for the success of Plug and that we have done well, and it's really driven, you know, by the culture in the company that you have set up, is we are extremely customer-focused. This is why it's so good to work at Plug, because we listen to customers. We went into doing infrastructure because we listened to Walmart. We went into green hydrogen because Amazon told us now green hydrogen is important. Before that, they were saying, "Hey, gray is good. It's cheap." Then green became important. We listen to our customers and we take action with that.
That is the reason because we have been able to build the company that we have today and to have the success in certain markets that others haven't been able to do. That's the part that we have done really well. What haven't we done well? I think in hindsight, you can always analyze things and go and say, "Oh, I could have done this better," right? It's a difficult thing to say or criticize. I'm going to use this more of a constructive, you know, thought process on things that maybe we learn from it for the future. I think, you know, during the excitement in 2021, 2022, hydrogen was going to be good for everything. Obviously, we live hydrogen. This is what we do as a company, right? We gave it all.
We invested. We made the company that we are today. Before then, we were a material handling company. Now we are what you saw today, an ecosystem company, right? We invested a lot. The results of the investments are here. If I had a crystal ball and I went back to 2022, maybe I would have said, "Hey, we can pace these investments a little bit," right? One investor last week after we announced the Q3 results made a comment like that and he said, you know, maybe, you know, in 2022, they could have done, you know, a different way of investing.
Right after, if you read the comment, it said, "But I think that if I were in their shoes in 2022, I would have done exactly the same thing." It was such an exciting time. Yeah. So, yeah, I think maybe we should have pulled the plug quicker on a few items, but what do you think about the present strategy? I participated in putting together the present strategy with you and the rest of the management team. I think it's amazing. It's great. No, seriously, I think it's the right strategy for us right now. We have, you know, made a great investment. The market hasn't, you know, materialized the way that we wanted it to materialize. What have we done over the last year and a half to two years? We have adjusted to that.
We have adjusted in a way that puts us in the pole position to take advantage, advantage financially when the market kicks in, and it will. It will still continue to grow even now. Of course. Right now, it's already growing. Yeah. I 100% agree with you. This strategy really puts us, you know, in a position to capture the growth today and even more growth in the future. This is why I think it's the right strategy. We'll be talking about it today a little bit more, and you'll see more details on that. I think the strategy right now is the right strategy for Plug. Good. One last question since I got a minute 19, they tell me, what would make you pivot from the strategy? Obviously, you know, strategies are not forever, right?
You, you, we're going to see market conditions change. We're going to see customers, as, you know, as I said before, center of, you know, the success of the company, telling us that they want to do other things, that they see their business in another way. We will listen very closely, and we will adjust to that type of, of, feedback from the market. We're going to execute on this strategy, but we're going to keep an eye open on things that change and get there, with adjustments of the strategy or, or, or a new strategy altogether. Right.
I'm going to literally walk off the stage for the rest of the day, but I hope you already have seen Jose's someone who can execute on the present strategy, well, just a future strategy, but also keep the dream going of Plug really being the dominant player in developing this hydrogen economy. I have 100% confidence in them. I have three board members here who I know during this process of selecting Jose have 100% confidence in them. We have a strong new leader, and I strongly support his leadership of this company. Jose, I don't have to do any more work today.
It was a thank you, Andy.
Thank you. Here you go.
There you go. Okay. Take care.
Thank you, Andy, for your kind words.
It's, it is an honor to follow Andy on his footsteps of, you know, being a CEO of Plug. It is a super exciting time for us in the company. There you go. We've been talking about this already a little bit. We've made the company the leader on the hydrogen ecosystem in the world by getting all the solutions that Andy reviewed before. This is, this is, there's no company in the world that has these, these capabilities. Over the last couple of years, we've seen the market not to move at the pace, at the pace that we wanted. It's still growing, but not moving at the, at the pace that we wanted. What have we done? We have adjusted to that. We created Project Quantum Leap. We're going to hear about it today.
In Project Quantum Leap, what we did is refocus the company on the areas of the business that we thought were going to provide us the greatest growth and the greatest chances for high profitability. That is material handling, electrolyzers, and hydrogen. We also made sure that we optimized the operation, helping us to create and to have an income statement that has been improved greatly from the end of 2023 to today. Paul will talk about that a little bit today as well. We have also created or got a balance sheet that actually is going to help us and is going to allow us to get to the point that the company is going to be generating cash. We set up the company for success.
This is an exciting time to be in Plug and even a more exciting time to be the CEO of Plug. As I said before, the strategy, I'm going to concentrate on executing the strategy as we just discussed, but always with the mindset of getting to profitability. That is what we are right now laser, laser focused on. As we've been discussing as well, customers are the key for the success of the company, and they are the key for the execution of that strategy. With Quantum Leap, as we said before, what we have done is three, three items or three steps to get the company to where we are today, and we keep on working on those things.
We have streamlined the company and the business focus on electrolyzers because we see incredible growth there, and you'll see it in a minute. We have concentrated on material handling because material handling is the market that we have been working on and that we know really well, and we add a lot of value to customers and in hydrogen fuel because it's going to allow us to be profitable. We have improved our cost structure and cash efficiencies, operational discipline, lowering the cash burn. All of these things have made our operations much more optimized, and we continue working on that to get to the savings that are going to allow us to get to that profitability path. We have strengthened our balance sheet. This is extremely important.
It's not only important because it's going to allow us to get to the point that we generate cash, but it's also really important because customers look at us from a financial perspective, especially electrolyzer customers. When you do an electrolyzer project, you are picking a partner for a very long time. When you pick a partner for a very long time, you want a partner that is stable, that has the finances together. This is extremely important to execute on our funnel. With all of that, with all that focus and with all the activities that we have, we are set for execution on our targets. We are laser focused on gross margin neutral by the end of this year, EBITDA positive in 2026 by the end of 2026, OI positive in 2027.
Paul is going to be talking a little bit more about the technicalities and how we get there. The type of things that we have done with the company in the last two years have set up the company right to get this done. One key element to get there is growth. This is one of the reasons because I am now the CEO of the company, because I'm going to be driving growth as we have been doing over the last 10 years. We have an incredible funnel. It's an $8 billion funnel. It's a global funnel, Europe, Australia, in the US. We have an incredible execution opportunity for that funnel. In that funnel, we have opportunities in the areas of business that we have decided to focus: material handling.
Why do we know and why do we think we're going to grow in material handling? Because in material handling, we still have that strong value proposition that we had when we started with, with Walmart. It's even better now. This value proposition is getting better and better over time. Customers are now realizing that our solutions can help them with the strains that they have today on the grid. We're going to have a panel to talk about that today. We're taking power that they need on site because now that same power is provided by hydrogen. That frees up energy for them, and they can start thinking about energy management. That's how Plug becomes a partner. Another exciting part of this is that after the Build Our Passing Congress in July, the ITC was renewed. This is great news, right, Erin?
and a little bit of a surprise for all of us, but, you know, we'll take that surprise. That means that we have basically tax credit back for anybody that buys our fuel cell solutions. This is a 30% tax credit that our customers get. We've been working in 2025 without that tax credit and making our value proposition even stronger because of that. Now that we have the ITC, we have even a better value proposition because we have worked on making it better, and now we still have the 30%. Now, our pedestal customers are beginning to expand their capacity. If you think about it, during the pandemic, many of our main customers built up because of the pandemic. Everything went to be remote. They had to deliver everything to customers. You need distribution centers to do that.
That growth that they had at that time is beginning to be basically that capacity is beginning to get used. We are seeing our pedestal customers going back to growth in 2026. We will see growth in 2026. There is another important factor for the material handling business to grow, and it is that many of our customers are at the mark of having to refresh their fuel cells. They already have the infrastructure. It's a big investment, right? The infrastructure can last for 20, 30 years. Fuel cells, depending on how you use them, like a car, right? You use it a lot, then you have to change it earlier, right? Depending on how you use them, you have to refresh them every five years or every 10 years. If you remember, I told you our first site with Amazon was in 2016.
Next year is 2026. Ten years mark is there, right? We're going to see renewals and refreshes. This is important for the profitability story that I was telling you before. Our equipment has a pretty healthy contribution margin to the company. When we sell equipment, we see better margins, contribution margin. As we fill the factories, we're going to see that effect happening, and we're going to see our margins getting better and better. Also, it's important, as I said before, you know, Plug's financial performance is key for our customers. You want to have a partner that is stable and is here. In the hydrogen industry, a lot of people came in the hype of it, and many of them now are saying, "Hey, we don't want to do this anymore. This is our life. This is what we do.
We're going to be here for a very long time, forever. Then the other area of the business that we're focusing on, our GenEco ELX, our electrolyzers. Why do we think, as Andy was asking me before, that we're going to grow in electrolyzers? In Europe, the European Green Deal was started in the 2021, 2022 timeframe. That was a directive. In Europe, you get directives that say, "Hey, directionally, where do we want to go?" Right? From a direction perspective, the European Green Deal said by 2030, we want to substitute gray hydrogen for green hydrogen in industry at a rate of 42%. That is, that is a big, big, big goal, okay? It is driving regulation that was created after the European Green Deal.
We saw regulation refuel aviation and refuel maritime as examples of that that actually set targets for companies to start using e-fuels in those applications. If you do not meet those targets, there are penalties, okay? That regulation now is becoming law in many countries in Europe. Once the regulation goes to law in the countries, you have to meet those targets. Now, it is not only, you know, the stick, but there is also the carrot. In Europe, you also see a lot of government funding. One of the most prominent ones, you probably heard about it, is the European Hydrogen Bank. The European Hydrogen Bank gets money that is allocated from each one of the countries, and then they do auctions and basically give different companies a certain amount of money per kilogram to make these projects viable. We are seeing that happening now in many cases.
We see the same thing in the U.K. The U.K. has a program, it's called the Hydrogen Allocation Rounds. It's HRAR. One has already been done. The allocation has been given. Guess who got a very good allocation from that round? Carlton Power. That's our customer today. We announced it yesterday, 55 megawatts. That helps, that makes the projects become real and go FID. We see that also in Australia. I'm not going to talk a lot about that right now because we have Alfred, the CEO of Allied Green Ammonia, that is doing a project in Australia, and he's using a lot of the government help to make sure that the project goes FID.
It's happening around the world, and it's making the main opportunity be the substitution of gray hydrogen for green hydrogen, or gray hydrogen, green hydrogen used to produce e-fuels, e-stuff, e-ammonia. Now, think about the application of gray to green. It's a simple application. You just need to produce the green hydrogen, and it goes into the process. You have to do nothing else. It's very similar to what we did with material handling. Instead of having to buy a completely different vehicle to make the application work, we just created a box that you drop in, and then, you know, it works like a battery. Here's the same. We just basically create a molecule that works the same as a gray molecule, and then you comply with the regulation. This is what's driving all of these opportunities to happen. We've been working on these projects.
This is why I was saying the market did not move as fast as we wanted. We have been working on all these projects for more than three years. We have been working from the inception of these projects for more than three years. We worked on a lot of them that did not materialize. At the beginning, everybody got excited. We got excited. Everybody was excited with hydrogen. Many, many project developers came and said, "Oh, hydrogen, we are going to put a project together." Those never, never made FID. Many of them dropped. We have $8 billion of projects that we have been working with that we know they have what it takes to go FID. We will be talking to the head of one of the largest, if not the largest, hydrogen, green hydrogen funds today.
He will tell you what it will take to go FID for these projects. Very basic is you need to have electricity. You need to have the land. You need to have some government support. We just talk about that, right? Some government support. If you have an off-taker, you have the recipe for a project that can go FID. Many of the projects that we have here, we work with the customers on those items. We're not just an OEM that goes there and here's my offer. We work with them to make sure that those things happen. Again, why do customers pick Plug? I'll say it again.
If you're going to go to a new technology that you have never implemented and you're going to create basically a hydrogen plant and you have a vendor that actually uses their technology and produces hydrogen day in and day out and the technology technically is one of the best in the market, why wouldn't you pick that customer? Our plant in Georgia is our best sales tool. We take every single customer to Georgia. Once they see that, they go, "Okay, this is real. You can do it. It's not just a paper. It's not just an engineering exercise." That is really important. This is why we won Iberdrola MVP in Spain. This is a project in a town called Castellón, which is about a couple of hours south of Barcelona. This project was supposed to be starting installation about this time.
We were supposed to start shipping equipment about the fourth quarter timeframe. Beginning of the year, Iberdrola came and said, "Would you be able to pull this up a little bit? We want to start installing, you know, in the September timeframe." We said, "We're going to do our best." This is a live picture of what's there already. We have 25 megawatts of equipment already installed. The stacks are going to get there at the big in December. Actually, we're just shipping them together in December. That's real. GALP in Portugal. You're going to see a video later about GALP. This is the GALP team in our Dubai facility when they went to do the FAT, the factory acceptances. What you see behind them is a 10 megawatt array.
You get the idea of what is the size of the projects that we do, okay? You will see it also in the video later on. We already have one 10 megawatt array there in GALP in Portugal. The other nine to make the 100 megawatts are going to be there before the end of the year. Again, real projects that we are executing on. This is also why we want Carlton Power. I will not go into more details on that. We are going to talk about that a little bit later. Carlton Power is our newest customer, and we are extremely excited to see things happening now in the U.K. Allied Green Ammonia, three gigawatts in Australia, two gigawatts in Uzbekistan. Alfred is going to be here to talk about it today.
Not going to go into more details on that, but this is why we had these projects in our portfolio. Again, Plug has become, we have made Plug the leader in the hydrogen ecosystem in the world. We have set up the company the last two years, given the market conditions, to be extremely, extremely efficient and ready for more growth as the market takes off. We are picking up the growth that we have right now. We are growing in 2025 compared to 2024, but we are not going to keep on growing in the future. This is why we are right now in the pole position to capture that growth and to make it profitable. This is why, again, I cannot be more excited to lead the company during this time. Being here right now is really a dream. Thank you so much.
I think we're going to have Paul now come to the stage and talk to us about our financial updates. Thank you.
Everybody's leaving. Why are you leaving the show? It's about to get good. Before I start, I'm not sure. I think this morning, as I was sleeping, I scratched my eye. It's killing me. If I start tearing up, just know that it's not because I'm getting emotional about all the numbers and all the improvement that we're making. Even though it does make me emotionally excited, I am Paul Middleton. I'm the CFO for Plug, and I just want to share some thoughts around our financial focus in the near term. As this slide Andy showed and Jose showed, you know, I just want to make the comment that 2025 was a big inflection point for Plug. You know, we're growing sales.
We've made big strides on reducing costs and improving pricing and scaling our hydrogen plants. In 2026, we expect to grow revenue based on continued growth in electrolyzers and expansion of our material handling business. Overall, in 2026, we should see similar sales trends to what we've seen historically, with about one-third in the first half and two-thirds in the second half, given seasonality and material handling and project timing on energy business projects. We expect to grow in all regions, but obviously, as José may have mentioned, we see a concentration for material handling in the U.S. and electrolyzers, particularly in Europe and Australia. We also expect to see continued improvements on our margins and cash flows and building on the strides that we've made in 2025.
As we scale, we forecast, you know, gross margin break-even or better in Q4 and Q2, achieving evidence positive by the end of next year, exiting Q2 with positive income and overall profitability in 2028. Andy and Jose made reference to Project Quantum Leap. I just want to expand on some of those actions. You know, really in Q2 early, we really kind of centered in on the markets that were going to really yield tremendous sales opportunities and opportunities to improve cash and kind of tempered the investment on the more of the midterm markets. We implemented cost downs with targeting over $200 million in annual savings through a number of initiatives, and we focused on improving our balance sheet. Our progress is really evident in our growing sales, our improving margins, and reducing our cash burn.
On the margin targets in particular, we've seen improvement from resource optimization, pricing enhancements, new partner strategic platforms, supply chain cost downs, and scrutiny on ongoing operational costs. On the balance sheet, we've completed the required capacity investments. We've seen a tempering of the overall CapEx rates. We've been monetizing assets like ITC credits and most recently our announced program to sell the project to the data centers. We've reduced our working capital investments, particularly for inventory. We believe this collective progress positions us well for 2026 and beyond. Just zeroing in on our fourth quarter margin target for Q4-25, you know, I thought it'd be helpful just to give you a little bit more color here. First, the primary key for Plug is sales volume.
To achieve the $700 million sales target that Jose and Andy referenced, it suggests over a 20% growth off of Q3. The majority of these incremental sales are equipment sales. Given the ability to leverage the load of the plants, it can be very creative as we really drive these incremental equipment sales. Second, we need to continue, we've been executing on service cost downs. We need to keep focused on that. We have a number of measures we're rolling out that we expect to see continued progress in Q4 and on into next year. We really can't take our foot off on the gas on that. Third, this quarter, we forecast additional leverage on our fuel network and the strategic relationship we most recently announced in July, where we signed a new platform agreement with one of our key providers.
Lastly, we have to remain diligent on our manufacturing efficiencies. We've made a lot of progress on Project Quantum Leap, and we should see additional leverage in Q4. We still got six weeks to go, and there's a lot to focus on. As Jose and Andy referenced, we've got top-to-bottom alignment on the key things it's going to take to drive that. If we look at Q4 of 2026 and our EBITDA target there, to achieve this, we need about 15% gross margin on $300 million in sales to break even on EBITDA. Looking at the drivers, if we use Q3 of 2025 as a reference in context of that target, this would represent a 70% sales growth. It would mainly represent equipment sales. Again, there's tremendous leverage opportunity on the plants and the fixed load that we have.
We plan to continue driving supply chain costs through leveraging our purchase volume. We expect to make traction on fuel costs, particularly on network efficiency and logistics costs. We have many programs underway to drive product cost improvements, leveraging our rich history of our engineering ability. Lastly, we should see improvement in overhead costs given the full year benefits of the Project Quantum Leap efforts in 2025 and continued prudence on new resource investment decisions. As we end 2025, we have teams mobilizing on the actions to achieve these targets, and we will deploy the same management discipline we used in 2025 to continue this trend. We have a strong liquidity position given our current cash resources, the planned proceeds from this data center sale that we've got planned in the next few months, the continued reduction in our cash burn.
This collectively postures us to support the business over the next 12 months to achieve our financial targets. Just to expand on these points, we have built the capacity we need in the near term. CapEx rates should really migrate to maintenance levels in the 3%-4% of sales, very nominal. We're improving our margins and cash flows, which increases the leverage on our liquidity. We've been increasing our leverage on our working capital by reducing inventories, maximizing payables, and accelerating collections. We've substantially improved liquidity available to us through all these varied financial transactions. These actions posture Plug for significant leverage in 2026 and beyond. I just want to thank you for your time today, and we look forward to sharing more in our story as we move on through the year. Who's next? What are we doing next?
I made it. I can go to the doctor now. Thank you. Now we're going to take a 10-minute break. We're going to be back in 10 minutes. You know, take a little rest. Please find your seats and silence your devices. Our program will begin in five minutes.
Please direct your attention to the stage. Our program is about to begin. Please welcome back to the stage Plug President and CRO, Jose Luis Crespo.
Let's take the seats. Okay, we're back, and we're going to start our first panel. We're going to start our first panel talking about material handling. It's one of the businesses that we're focusing on. We're going to be talking to one of our newest customers, Floor & Décor. Probably you've seen the announcement that we did with Floor & Décor.
It is important to understand that we keep on growing in material handling. We keep on signing new customers, new important customers. Welcome to the stage, Meredith and Tim. Hi, Meredith. Hello, Tim. Hi, Jose. Hi. Okay. Why don't we start with you introducing yourself a little bit, the company?
Yeah, absolutely. I'm Meredith Steinmeier. I'm the Director of Fleet and Energy at Floor & Décor. Floor & Décor is a leading hard surface flooring retailer. We're actually celebrating our 25th anniversary this year. What's interesting about Floor & Décor is we really did not start growing until 2017 when we went public. I joined the company. I've been with Floor & Décor for a little bit over four years now. When I joined in August of 2021, we had 149 stores. By the year-end 2025, we'll have 270 stores.
We're going to continue growing until we get up to 500. It is very important for us to continue to do our due diligence, our research, and find partners and innovation so that we can grow and get there.
That is an incredible, incredible growth story. Congratulations.
Tim, do you want to introduce yourself? Tim has been with the company, as Andy said, two weeks after, before Andy joined, or after? After. Just after Andy, yep. Exactly. He has been instrumental in growing our material handling business. He now is going to be the leader for the sales side of the organization for material handling and other applications. You also have services in the organization, right?
Correct. Yeah, I lead our services team globally, serving all of our customers and all of our products.
As Jose said, under his leadership, I'll be leading the application sales team. We're excited about that. A lot of great products. We're out there solving problems for our customers, making them more efficient and more productive.
Wonderful. If there is, and this is really the truth, if there's somebody that knows anything about the material handling market, this is Tim. Tim knows all of our customers. He's been working with them from a services perspective. You understand all the challenges. You've converted basically all the 285 sites that we have in the field. We are in good hands for material handling.
I appreciate that, Jose. I've enjoyed really working with all of our customers, right? We have some great ones, big names out there, and some that you may not have heard of.
They've been all great to work with, and it's been a great experience.
Meredith, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you're using the technology in your operations?
Yeah, like you said, we are a newer customer. At Floor & Décor, we recently implemented hydrogen fuel cell solutions within our warehouse operations. It's to support productivity and reliability within our high-volume environments. We absolutely did our due diligence. Hydrogen fuel cells and material handling applications provide consistent performance throughout a shift, provide faster refueling times, and eliminate the need for battery and charger infrastructure. We believe that an operation powered by hydrogen is more efficient than battery and propane alternatives. Our focus recently has really been integrating the technology safely and efficiently into our daily operations.
We've been working closely with Plug Power, our internal teams, and local municipalities to really drive and understand the technology so that our operations run smoothly.
Wonderful. You've really touched on the value proposition for the technology, right? Absolutely. You don't need batteries. You don't need charging. You save time. It is really, as we were talking before, the value proposition is there. We keep on finding new customers like Floor & Décor. Tim, as we said before, you work with all of our customers. From your perspective, and you know Floor & Décor well too. We've been working with you to get to this point for a while. From your perspective, why do you think the technology is right for Floor & Décor?
I think Meredith covered a lot of it. She stole my thunder, Jose.
It was very good work with Meredith and Floor & Décor, her entire team, right? Because they really worked to understand what we bring to the table, right? With that, the reason we're a great fit is, of course, they had a distribution center or a high-density site with a lot of material handling equipment. They wanted to optimize their equipment, right? Increase the efficiency of their operators, the productivity gains, and also really did not want the management of the battery systems, right? Meredith and I talked about that several times. The changing and the queuing that happens around the batteries and the charging and all of that. The quickness of just some folks refer to it as a recharge. It is really a refuel of hydrogen, right? We average across our entire fleet 90 seconds to actually refuel.
The productivity gains are very significant. Floor & Décor wanted to take advantage of that. It is a great fit. They will see the benefits.
I think it is important to understand, too. We have seen it with many customers that time savings is key, right? Also, batteries over time in a shift basically droop and they start moving slower, the forklift, right? It is just something that also we will take advantage of in Floor & Décor here, the operational productivity as well.
Absolutely. It is in our business case. Meredith with her a lot. She was really into the details there and how that operates and how you get consistent power, as you said. Exactly. The truck does not know the difference, right?
If it's a 24-volt, 36, 48, whatever voltage truck it is, it doesn't know the difference whether it's supplied by a battery or a fuel cell. The difference is, is the battery, as you said, will droop over time and you'll get less power out of it. Whereas a fuel cell, it's like your car. I use that illustration a lot with our customers. As long as you have a full, as long as you have fuel in it, whether it's a quarter tank or a full tank, the power output is the same. Your performance is the same at the beginning of the shift as at the end of the shift for your operators.
I will add that was huge for us because we have very heavy loads in our application. The battery drains quicker than other applications.
Exactly.
That's why I was thinking about that and imagining Floor & Décor moving furniture and things like that, right? Or heavy stuff. That's very heavy. The heavier the application, the better for fuel cells.
You know, Jose, talking about that, I noticed when we transitioned a distribution center for a customer, not only do we see the efficiency gains, but the operators see that, right? Most of our customers, their associates or operators are paid on incentive, right? And how much they produce. They get bonuses built up on that. When they have a piece of equipment that runs the same speed all day, they can put out more work and they get paid more.
From the very beginning, when we start installing fuel cells, we'll put two or three in, and all of a sudden, every operator in the facility wants a fuel cell truck because they can make more money. It's added advantage. The company produces more, and the operators themselves also, if they're on an incentive base, are able to make more.
It's like if you're used to drive a Ford and they give you a Ferrari, right? You don't want to go back.
We actually have customers that want to, they'll split that, right? Sometimes they'll keep some of that productivity, and some of it they'll give back to the operator. It's an incentive.
I know that we also had customers that needed to change their KPIs with their operators, right?
Because they were so much more efficient with our technology that they were blowing through their KPIs, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah. Those are the type of things that our customers actually see, and they are real, right? That is how we bring the value to the technology now. We also make it easy for, and you tell me if this is true or not, right? You can go through how we do it, but we believe we make it easy to adopt the technology. We basically take care of the infrastructure and then take care of the transition inside of the distribution center, trying to make it really smooth. Maybe, Tim, you want to go through a little bit of how we do that, how we go through permitting, through installation, through everything, and we just have it ready to do the transition inside of the distribution center.
You tell me if this is true or not.
Call me out. There are two different paths, and we use the term greenfield or brownfield, right? In Floor & Décor's case, they're building new facilities. We call those greenfields. We work with the OEM, the lift truck manufacturer, and we supply an equivalent fuel cell, an exact replacement for the battery footprint that they were designed for. When they're installing the trucks, we marry the fuel cells with the truck, install them, and they start from the very get-go with fuel cells and trucks there. Back that up a few weeks. As they're doing construction on the building, we're also installing a hydrogen system to be able to service and multiple dispensers throughout the building to be able to serve and fuel the fuel cells once the building is up and running.
A greenfield facility, we're all taking off at the same time, right? A brownfield facility is a facility that is already in operation. And they may have 200-300 trucks. We do sites as low as 20-50 trucks, right? If you take a large facility, 200-300 trucks, you have a business to run, and you can't have us interrupting that, right? We make it very seamless in that we install the hydrogen system outside of your building. We run the piping over the roof down to a dispenser inside of the building. All of the pre-work goes into that. We do all the permitting. We work with the team to decide a good place to put the dispensers. From that point, once the hydrogen system is live, we work with the team there.
We can transition, and we have before, a 200-300 truck site in two weeks, right? We have also taken two months, right? We really work with the operations and the customer on how quick they want to transition. Sometimes they have battery commitments. Sometimes they have battery equipment they need to get rid of. We work around their schedule. What we do is we pull the batteries. They bring them to us. We install a fuel cell. It is just a complete cycle, maybe two or three at a time all day, whatever shifts. Over a two-week period, we can transition the site without any impact to the customer's operations.
Is it like that? Is it that simple?
It is that simple.
Good. I am going to make a comment on something.
You started going on greenfields and brownfields, which I think is an interesting concept to understand. Also, as a kind of a preview of the following panel, when we do these things in a brownfield, we free up utility power. That's another big, big advantage that we give to customers because now you don't have to charge batteries anymore. You can use that electricity for whatever you want. More to come later. In a greenfield, now you don't have to have a building that has that power. It makes it much easier to find a building and to get a building that actually you want where you want it. That is a very important value proposition for some of our customers.
Yeah, some of our customers right now, we're an enabler to automate, right?
You need more electricity in your building for conveyors, robotics, and those things. The only way you can do that is free up electrical power, which we do.
Okay, we're talking off. Meredith, if you had another new customer for Plug came along, what would be the advice that you would give that customer to move to fuel cells?
I think there's three parts to it. One is do your due diligence. You have to understand the technology. You really do. Two is talk to existing customers that are already using the technology. Learning from their experiences is invaluable. The last piece of advice is more so of an internal piece of advice, but involve your internal stakeholders early and often. If you do, it'll be much more efficient, and you'll probably get the project done quicker than I did.
Wow, that's actually very good advice.
The last one is especially important, I think. Very good. Meredith, thank you so much for being here today, for talking to our audience. We are hoping to do much more business with you in the future.
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Thank you. Now you're going to thank you, Meredith. Thank you so much. Now Tim and I are going to take questions from the audience or from the online. Anybody has any questions? There you go. I think Plug has pretty much all the big box retailers and Amazon, Walmart, and so on. I was thinking the list, who are remaining, right? When I think about it, probably there's Costco and Target. I do not know, a few others. What will it take for those guys to kind of move towards? Because they have pretty much large distribution centers too.
Amazon is getting the value prop. Walmart is getting now Floor & Décor. What will it take for Costco or Target or these customers to move to having fuel cells? That is a great question. I think you probably have some.
I would say that a lot of my sales team is watching or here today. Some of those names you mentioned, every time I talk to them, I'll say, "When are you going to get us a meeting?" We're going to go there. I know that. I think, as in any case, when you work with a customer, you need a champion, right? Or someone to drive a change within an organization like Meredith. Meredith is a champion, right? Within Floor & Décor, she recognizes the value that we bring. It will eventually come, right?
Today, most of our customers have two options, right? Just about everyone's moving away from lead-acid batteries. You either go lithium or you either go hydrogen fuel cells, right? The more you use your equipment, the more electric space that you want to free up in your building, and this one has become very real to a lot of our potential customers, or the more that you are, the less you're able to manage your operators. Because with lithium-ion, you have to plug in every time with opportunity charging. If you can't manage that, you end up with dead equipment, right? If any one of those three things are an initiative for you, then fuel cells are a prime fit. We see that all the time. Customers calling us. We have customers that have tried lithium-ion and said, "We're not able to manage it.
It's not working for us." We use the equipment too much, right? And so fuel cells work for us. The automotive industry is a key example of that. We're in the majority of the automakers here in the US. Our biggest facility of sites where we're at 900 fuel cells is at BMW in South Carolina. Of course, we have Mercedes, Volkswagen, Honda, GM, right on down the line, right? The big proposition for them, a reason it made sense, is coming out of 2008, during the downturn in the economy, a lot of the automakers shut down plants, right? To reduce their output. Coming out of that, as they're expanding, right? They need more production, but they close those facilities. Now the only way that they can do it is add shifts, right? They were running just first shift.
Now they're operating a second and a third shift. Now you have no downtime that you can use for charging. You have to go to fuel cells, right? The more you use the equipment, the more fuel cells and hydrogen make sense to answer your question.
I think also there is a piece of that that is cultural within the companies, right? Hydrogen solutions are more expensive if you really look at it. The fuel cell is more expensive. The infrastructure is more expensive, and the fuel is more expensive. We are very upfront with our customers about that. We have a value proposition that helps to pay back and more. If you are concentrated in a first initial low, low cost, and you're not looking really at what the technology can do for you, then it's a difficult, much more difficult sale.
We've been pushing with those companies for a lot of time. I remember we went to Target at least four years ago. We're going to keep on pushing. We're going to try to convince them because we believe the technology will add value to them, so. Absolutely. All right. Any other questions?
Guys in the back. There's a couple of big trends around moving towards faster delivery for a lot of these customers, as well as just the cycle of digesting some of the capacity that got built out post-COVID. Can you talk a little bit about how that's shaping your opportunity around greenfield opportunities and brownfield opportunities as we start moving through this next part of the cycle and we start to see some real growth around capacity at the distribution and warehouse level?
We've seen that with Amazon, right?
Now other companies are kind of accelerating that, and you're seeing that on a much more widespread level. With that, we see that we're going to see growth in existing customers, but we're seeing other customers also going to that type of concept. I think Home Depot is one of them, right? Where you may want to say something.
Yeah, yeah. Both of them, Home Depot and Walmart, really. I mean, the first thing, as your business grows, you look to maximize your existing footprint, right? How can I get more out of the same buildings that I have before you build new buildings? One way to do that is what I talked about earlier, of course, is automation, right?
A lot of our customers are installing conveyors or robotics, automated pick systems, all of those items to get more throughput out of their buildings, but that all requires more power. The majority of these buildings do not have the power capacity to operate a battery system and all the automation. We have especially one large customer that is their primary driver of transitioning their buildings to fuel cells so they can automate and put more product through their buildings.
That is a really good segue to the next panel. Yep. Because we're going to be talking about, as I said before, how do we help our customers to manage their energy needs. Thank you so much, Tim. Thank you, Meredith. We're going to go to the next panel. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right. All right.
To introduce the next panel, the music is off. To introduce the next panel, we're going to play a video. I think, as I said before, that we help customers with energy and energy management. It's probably something, a concept that it may not be straightforward to understand, but we're going to have a panel here today that is going to help us with that. Why don't we see the video?
The electric grid we depend on was built more than 50 years ago for a world that barely resembles today's. Since then, we've patched it, not rebuilt it. Capital spending keeps climbing, yet real upgrades keep falling. We're putting Band-Aids on a system under extreme pressure. For decades, demand was flat. In just the last five years, electrification, industrial growth, and AI have ignited unprecedented demand. The grid can't keep up.
Every storm, every heat wave, every new data center pushes it closer to failure. When that happens, it's not just the lights that go out, it's life, communication, transportation, even access to food and medicine. We're at a breaking point. This is where Plug steps in with hydrogen solutions that stabilize, supplement, and strengthen power where it's needed most. The grid wasn't built for the world we live in, but hydrogen can power the one we're building. Because the future of energy won't build itself, we will.
That video sounds a little bit dramatic, right? Oh, wow, things are, you know. Let's go back to April 2025. I wake up in the morning and I call my family in Spain. The phones are not ringing. I'm like, "Something is happening here." The entire country went into a blackout. You probably have seen that.
The strain that we're putting in the network is real. When a country like Spain and Portugal go on a blackout for 10 hours, the grid is not ready for all of this. We are electrifying everything. What type of things can we do and how can we help with hydrogen to alleviate a little bit of that? We're going to be talking about that in this panel. We are going to welcome Jessica, Luke, and Benjamin to the stage. All right. Here we are. Why don't we start by talking a little bit about what's the state of the grid today? Where are we? You want to start?
Sure. Absolutely. A little background about myself real quick.
That's true. First, introduce yourself. Get into the—why don't you introduce yourself?
I've been at Plug for about two and a half, three years now.
I'm newer to the hydrogen industry, but it's been a great learning experience. I spent just over a decade power trading and power operations. I'm very familiar with the grid video. I helped out a lot on that. It's dramatic, but true.
It is true. I've worked with Jessica in the last couple of years or so. If there's anybody that in Plug knows anything about the grid, it's Jessica.
Okay, Luke, you want to introduce yourself?
I'm Luke Wendland. I'm the VP of Product and Technology. I'm running the product management and engineering teams. What we're always doing is looking at how do we evolve and move our products forward to help manage and support these challenges that we're seeing or our customers, like we were talking about earlier.
I'm Benjamin Haycroft.
I'm the Chief Strategy Officer for the company. I'm based in Europe, which is a reflection of how significant the European market is also for Plug. Very pleased to be with you today.
Wonderful. Now, you want to tell us about the grid?
Yes, absolutely. As you talked about, it's a dramatic video, but very true, as you referenced with what happened to Spain. We've seen blackouts in the U.S. as well that extend eight hours or even in Texas a few years ago, days. It's very extreme consequences. There are three main components of the grid. You have your demand, the AI, electrification, you and I using all the electrons on the grid, and then you have your supply. Andy talked a lot earlier about Germany and the intermittency of supply that's come online in the last 5 to 10 years.
You have a really fast-paced growing demand, and then you have a lot of intermittent supply coming online trying to meet that demand. What that causes is a lot of disparity in pricing and price volatility with that intermittent supply trying to meet that demand. Andy talked about Germany a lot. I think they had 14 gigawatts of solar come online in 2023 alone. That causes a lot of negative pricing with the excess supply. On the flip side, you have a lot of really extreme pricing, pricing going up to $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 when the solar is not there. You have solar ramping offline in the evenings just as your demand is picking up. We see that a lot in the US too, California, the East Coast, even just earlier in the summer.
In the East Coast market, one of the hottest days of the year, you saw prices reach $5,000 a megawatt hour during that 6:00 to 7:00 P.M. timeframe because the intermittency of the renewables are ramping up, and you need that more expensive generation to meet that demand that's ramping up. The third piece is your transmission system. Again, you saw in the video, it's an aging system, 50-plus years old. It was not built for how we use electricity today. It is a big piece of the puzzle that needs a lot of upgrades. I think one of those graphs said over a trillion dollars is needed before the end of the decade to expand on it. That is kind of the current state. Dramatic, but true.
But real, right?
Yeah.
Exactly.
I think it's important to think about too, though, what you're describing as these challenges with the grid and how does that then translate downstream to impact our customers. We can talk about this for material handling, but pretty much anyone who's going to be a large power consumer or mission-critical thing for them is going to probably face a similar situation. Thinking about material handling, if you're running, like we said earlier, it's either fuel cells or batteries at this point, right? If you're running with batteries, 50, 100, 200, what was it, 900 forklifts or the one tips up for the big BMW, they all got to charge. They all got to plug in. You can do as great a choreography as you want, but at some point, you're going to have multiple things coming together to plug in and charge.
What you create for your facility is a really peaky load profile, right? That has multiple impacts. One is the grid doesn't like it because ideally, the grid wants nice, steady-state base load. Ramping things up and down, like what happened in Europe, is problematic with some of the different load there. It also hits them from a demand charge perspective. It's not just rate. It's also kind of the size of the pipe that you're buying, right? You get hit on a demand charge even if you only peak there for a short duration. There is a value to the customer of going to fuel cells because it will smooth out their load profile because you just remove it. You're not plugging in 200 forklifts anymore. You don't have that load that's moving across you over the course of the day.
The customer sees that from an electrical stability cost, right? They're not exposed to that same kind of variability in demand charges. There is also a benefit to the grid. I think that's kind of another piece of this picture that we haven't really talked a lot about before. For one facility, you may peak a couple hundred or a couple hundred. You might peak a couple megawatts in load, 100, 200 forklifts, a lot of batteries, fast chargers, things like that. You'd go into a shift change. You get a lot of people that plug in because they're doing opportunity charging over a lunch. That's fine. Now you got 10 sites. Now you're talking 20-30 megawatts of peak. Everybody's first and second shift, and it's all the same. I mean, it's roughly the same amount of time of the day, right?
You're starting to see facilities aggregate. Now, if you think we have 91 sites in PJM, those sites, because they're running on hydrogen, and we know how many units they have, we can pretty accurately estimate what kind of peak load we've removed by moving them onto hydrogen. It's anywhere from 130-180 megawatts just in PJM, right? You think kind of the country, if you look at all of our sites, about 300 sites or so, you're over half a gigawatt of peak load that you've reduced, right? Which is actually, I think, a really wild thing to think about. It's kind of a weird concept because it's not like a demand response. It's just load elimination at the point of use, right? I don't know.
You could argue some variation on VPP maybe, but the point is you're coming in and not just providing a value to the customer with the productivity and their operation, helping them manage the energy in their facility and open up other things, but you're also providing a very real, very tangible grid service. Half a gigawatt, that's a peaker plant you're building somewhere. That's transmission you're building somewhere to move that power around, right? And you've taken it away from a very decentralized type of thing with 300 facilities, right, which is problematic. There is a ton of other value that's being provided there that I think is important to think about.
I think that that is a direct connection between what we do and what we were seeing in the video, right? I mean, we are helping the grid to be not as congested, right?
This is why this is important at a macro level, right? At a customer level, as we were saying before, you avoid the peaks, which is going to make your electricity bill much lower. You basically free up that energy. You already have it there. You can use it for other things. Some of our customers use it for automation. Some of our customers use it for refrigeration, for other things that you may need because we are electrifying everything. You're going to need that capacity. If you're doing a brand new distribution center, you don't need that power. That makes you finding a distribution center much easier. For some customers that build a lot of them, that has a lot of value.
If we're talking about electrolyzer customers, how do you— is there something similar that we can explain today?
Yeah. I mean, I think a couple of pieces. One is an electrolyzer. We said it before. It's a deployable load, right? There's a value that I can provide as something that I can turn on and off kind of on the fly. That's honestly like when we talk about our plants in Peachtree where we're running electrolyzers, turning the electrolyzers on and off and managing load is the easiest part of the operation at that plant. There are much harder things on the equipment and turbo machinery side. It's also important to think about an electrolyzer that lets you transform energy and turn it into a carrier, right?
That's a really important thing to understand is that now I can both temporally and geographically or spatially move energy around. It is another lever that you do not have. I can do it clean and greenly, right, with an electrolyzer and the right power. I think an electrolyzer gives you a lever that if you deploy it the right way and use it the right way, gives you the ability to really manage costs in your operation by managed power prices. It lets me clean up my operation. It lets me smooth the load. The counterpoint you're going to say from the material handling side is, you're not getting rid of— they still need electricity. They just need hydrogen, right? You're just shell game, right? Yeah, but what you're doing is you're centralizing. You're taking 300 distributed sites.
I'm running them into an electrolyzer plant where now I manage it, right? I intentionally don't run during a peak event. I don't want to incur that high power cost, right? You're actually providing a smoothing function to the grid, which is very valuable, right? I think it's like a Swiss army knife, actually, that you can do a ton with if you're clever.
We do this in our own plant right now. Yeah, exactly. We look every day to see what we need, what's the cost of electricity. We make sure that we have enough storage to be able to manage that and optimize the cost and help the grid also not to be so congested. You were going to say?
No, I was going to say one thing that we are kind of saying today is that Plug is about hydrogen, but hydrogen is the anchor. It's not the limit. Everything we touch is energy. When you think about an electrolyzer, for instance, the very easy way to think about it is we're producing hydrogen, we're selling hydrogen, and we make a profit out of the hydrogen cell. Actually, if we take one of the projects we're developing right now, you have probably two-thirds of the economics that come from hydrogen cells. Because that electrolyzer has the ability to turn on, turn off in a fast and very reliable way, we are able to provide some grid services.
When the grid is under stress, when the grid is congested, we can erase ourself from the grid, and we get remunerated by the grid for doing so. In this project, for instance, that is not live today, it's a project under development, we have economics where two-thirds of the full economics of the plant come from hydrogen cells, one-third come from grid remuneration for providing those services to the grid because we help stabilize the grid. I think that's a very important element of the equation to understand. The value is sure in the hydrogen, but also in that flexibility. I think that's a big, big change we're seeing right now. What you're describing too is how I think we're really starting to attack projects. It's not just I'm selling you a box.
I mean, if you want to buy a box, I'm sure we'll sell you a box, right? Don't get me wrong. I think the way we're really trying to think and understand the value is kind of all these themes that Tim and Jose Luis and some of the other folks have been describing, right? What we're talking about now is understanding the customer's operation really well and understanding we have this very wide suite of tools that you can start to deploy. How do you go in and provide the most value to them, right? We can do that by on the fuel cells and the productivity and the power management and understanding what the constraints are and what are they trying to achieve in the case of material handling, high productivity, right?
They want to get easier to develop facilities or expand them or do other developments to them. How can we come in and really put together the best project for them? That means understanding the power. Where are they? What's the situation? What are their constraints and what can we offer? A good example. I was going to ask you, do we have any examples of customers that come to ask us not for any elec, but can you help us with that?
The big advantage is we're already doing this. We see the numbers already with our Georgia facility, but also our end-use customers. Your end-use customer, by removing that peak demand from charging batteries, you're saving $50,000 a month in demand charges.
Add that on the top of, multiply that by 10 facilities, 100 facilities, it becomes millions and millions of dollars a year in savings. Part of the value proposition, right? Just in your electricity bill, not including productivity or space in your facility. In Georgia's case, like you guys have talked about, it's our best sales pitch. We're doing this. We curtail the plant for peak conditions on the grid when power pricing is high.
I think that's important because as a technology provider to our customers, we become more of an energy partner to the customers. This is something that if you're not running your own plants, you're not doing this day in and day out, it's going to be really difficult for other OEMs to be able to do.
They're going to come with the box and they're going to say, "Hey, there you have it. It's great. It works amazing." The value that we add to customers is incredible.
To that point, I think, and you know it just from the sales side, one of the, I think, most useful things we've been able to help, or really important things we've been able to help the sales team with, particularly on the electrolyzer side, is how do you really operate these in the real world? What are the constraints economically, not just operationally? You don't learn that stuff until you've done it and you've paid the price and you actually understand exactly how do I need to operate this facility.
I think I've heard again and again, like the fact that we can sit and have these conversations with customers and explain like, "Yeah, so this is your project. Let's talk about how you'd operate this. This is how we've seen and what we would do is, I think, a massive amount of value."
That has to have, at the end of the day, for the customers, this has to show up somewhere, right? Yeah. I think we've been talking a little bit about it, but where does it show up? You talk about the P&L, the 50,000, but where does it, where do they see it when we're with this?
There are electricity savings, but I think there's also, and Benjamin knows this very well, the regulations that you see in Europe, the penalties for not purchasing green hydrogen.
I think that's a really clear path that they see immediately on their P&L as well.
Yeah, avoiding the CO2 emissions when you operate a refinery in a country where RED III has been implemented and where you have what we call the GHG quotas, the green certificates. Basically, the break-even point for European customers, for European refineries, is much higher than the cost of hydrogen produced from natural gas, simply because there is this penalty that comes on top if they don't transition, which means that the business case for green hydrogen works today with refineries in a very tangible way. The CFO of a company sees it in his P&L because, well, now he's avoiding those penalties, and that has a very tangible effect on the bottom line.
I have to say on that, which is very important, is driving the adoption of electrolyzers to substitute green hydrogen with green hydrogen. I've talked to several oil and gas companies in Europe, and the message has always been, "Penalties are important for us, but we don't care. We're going to go green anyway because this is the right thing to do." There is an aspect of the image that these companies give to the public, right? Penalties help too, so.
The social responsibility of the company is held by the CEO, and the financials help the CFO.
Exactly. Both of them. There you have it. There's another concept that is running around there, you know, that the more we electrify, the less you're going to need hydrogen, right? Do you guys have an opinion on that, or?
Yeah, but I think we've seen that a little bit in the discussion with Tim as well. There has been this concept out there that with lithium batteries, we didn't necessarily need fuel cells and that we should electrify everything. Actually, the electrification trend is a positive one. What we actually see is the more we electrify, the more there is room and value for hydrogen and for fuel cells because it's an energy carrier. We're seeing this value being very tangible because there is this belief that the energy transition is about electrifying everything, building more renewables, and then we're done. There is a big blind spot, which is the grid. We've seen that in that dramatic video, but the grid is indeed the blind spot of the energy transition.
That blind spot creates congestion, volatility, and a need for much more flexible and long-duration storage. The fact that today, when we build a material handling value proposition for our customers and we build that TCO model with our customers to quantify the economic benefits of adopting fuel cell solutions, they are able to capture the value of circumventing the grid or avoiding those demand charges cost and so on and so forth is a very, very tangible evidence that the more we electrify, the more value we also have for those solutions. I think that's something that has changed quite a bit. When we started 10 years ago selling at scale large material handling solutions, we were selling productivity gains largely. We're still selling productivity gains, but we're also selling energy security, and we're selling a lot of cost avoidance from grids.
I think this is kind of like this energy management kind of concept that we're talking about is really also a function of the ecosystem that you have at play. Kind of what we said earlier, if you just have just pure play fuel cells or electrolyzers, something like that, it's really hard to go and impact at this level and operation. I think what we're looking at is you've kind of reached a critical mass now. We have multiple plants. We have relationships with other producers. We have logistics that can move it around as gas and liquid. We have all these customer sites now that are using hydrogen fuel cells. How do you leverage that network to unlock new applications, new things for them?
Once you've created an abundance of hydrogen, which I'd argue you're starting to reach, actually, is you have a lot of hydrogen that now can be offered and moved around. How do you start to unlock new applications and new values to the customer that we couldn't previously? I would say it has very significant ramifications for Plug because it changes what we compete on. We're not just selling boxes. We're selling turnkey solutions. It means that, for instance, when we're shipping an electrolyzer, we're not just shipping a product. We are shipping a product that has the ability to be flexible with the grid, that can save some actual dollars of kilowatt-hours that would be otherwise expensed. It means that we're not just competing on CapEx or specifications. It also changes our business model.
It changes our business model, and it's something we've done on material handling forever. You're starting to see that with those other avenues where we touch everything that is energy, we start to lay out the foundations for building very steady recurring revenues that grow and compound over time. I think that's a very significant difference. We have discussions today with all our electrolyzer clients about setting up LTSAs, which is something that we can do over 10 years and plus. That's one of the big strengths we have from operating our own plants.
A bsolutely. Those are critical for projects to go if you have a real strong long-term service agreement to be able to get the technology maintained and serviced during a long period.
On that topic that you were talking about, I remember a conversation with Carlton Power, which we announced yesterday, where they were telling me exactly that, "Hey, you have this plant in Georgia. You manage energy. How do you use it? How do you get the most cost-efficient molecule so we can take it to customers? How do you decide how much storage you have on site? How do you decide when you curtail production, when you accelerate production?" For them, that was critical. How we also deliver to customers. That is extremely important. I think to the point that you were making before also in terms of electrification and hydrogen, right? At the end of the day, the way I see it, I may be wrong, but the way I see it is hydrogen is electrification.
It's just a different way to bring the electron to the endpoint of use. Hydrogen is basically you take the electron, you convert it into a carrier, into an energy vector, take it to the point of use, and convert it back into an electron. That's electrification to me. If the grid has all these constraints and you can bypass the grid by doing that, it's a value. It's a real value. This is why taking off load from material handling customers and other areas helps into the electrification path that we're in. All of this is extremely interesting and exciting. I don't think a lot of people think about us as our customers do. When you see the company from outside, you just think, "Hey, you are in the hydrogen business. You do electrolyzers.
You do material handling. We're becoming much more than that with our customers. We're getting close to the end. Do you want to maybe tell the audience what do you think after talking about all of this? I have to have these guys talking here for hours. I mean, when we were preparing about this, it was like I had to stop them, and I have to stop them now too. What do you think is, in summary, the Plug Power and energy management advantage?
You want me to go first? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. I think our advantage related to energy management is we're not only selling a box, a physical resource to our customers, but we are selling a grid resource that we know how to operate and make a grid resource.
Yeah.
I think our advantage is that you have a network that enables you. You can't do this with one site, just one shock. You have a network that enables you to not just create value to the customer, but it's kind of like passive income, to also create value to two or three other people at the same time. I think if you can do that, that's very powerful. I'm actually going to give a slightly different answer than the one I provided yesterday. I'm not surprised. I think that our advantage and what that means for Plug is when we think about energy companies, gas companies, the economics often improve when customers consume more energy. I believe that our business grows when we reduce the wasted energy and optimize the consumption for our customers, which means that we have very aligned interests with our customers.
This is really something that sets Plug Power apart from the competition.
I agree. The concept of not just selling a box or a solution even, but selling our know-how on how to manage power, but also the concept of giving our customers the possibility to free up energy in their operations so they can use it for something else. As a collateral benefit, you're removing all that energy from the grid. It's all coming together in a quite exciting way. More importantly, it's something that I don't think anybody else can do. If you are a manufacturer of fuel cells or a manufacturer of VLX, this is not an easy talent or know-how that you get just by doing and by operating this network. Every time that I sit down with you guys is super fun.
Why don't we go to Q&A?
Nice to meet you. My name is Matthias Bigger. There's a 40% yield gap in converting the energy from solar or the grid to hydrogen back to energy. There are a number of factors that allow you to bridge that gap, one of them being the volatility that you take advantage of in the grid. How would a shift in that volatility in the grid change Plug's ability to accomplish its growth goals, and how would you adapt to that shift?
Very good question.
You have the right people here.
I mean, I'll jump just to give you a follow-up. I think certainly smoothing volatility will make it life easier for the customers from a load management and a cost exposure perspective. It's not just a volatility. I mean, that's certainly a piece of it.
The reality is that's not going to smooth anytime soon. It's going to be trillions of dollars of investment in 10 to 20 years to really hopefully do anything like that. To kind of the earlier point, it's not just that. It's the wires. It's the transmission. It's the entire electrical infrastructure that creates this kind of confluence of things where suddenly you're, yeah, you're right. There's that hit there, but there's a real value you can provide by moving them off the grid completely to a fuel cell solution because they just can't, there's no alternative in some cases, right?
I mean, if the grid was perfect and we had all the capacity that we needed, sure, that would be a reason not to do that. It's not. We played the video here saying, "What are the constraints that we have in the grid?
This is why this plays a role, right? Yeah.
Yep. Yep. Just to add on to it, the grid is at risk, and it's going to be a long time before we can get in a good spot. There'll always be volatility. There's always going to be extreme weather events that you can't plan for. It's going to be one in a million type of event that happens eventually. There's always going to be some type of volatility aspect on the grid. Very good.
Very good question. Do we have any other questions? I think we have one here.
Yep. Guys, can you talk about you just changed location. Yeah, I changed location. We're all evolving. You guys as well.
This is the first time that we've really heard you guys be so grounded with a really compelling value proposition around hydrogen as a solution in the economy. We all kind of knew that that was coming at some point, but this feels very real now. I'm curious what customers are talking about at this point in terms of their education level around some of these pain points and their willingness to start making decisions on purchasing. It seems like this is still kind of only a couple of years old, and they've probably gone through evaluations, but curious about how urgent this feels to your customers and in their decision-making process.
I will take that to start, and then you guys add whatever you think. I think from a customer perspective, as I was saying, customers like Carlton Power, they were really worried. And it's the reality, right?
You never run a hydrogen plant. The majority of our customers, it is their first hydrogen plant, right? They are worried about, "Hey, when I operate the plant, how is that going to work? How am I going to manage energy?" At the end of the day, the majority of the cost of the molecule is electricity. How do you manage the feedstock to create the hydrogen? It is going to make your hydrogen very expensive or very optimized from a cost perspective, right? They know that we do that, right? That is why they are worried about it, and they come to us when they see Georgia and they ask us questions, "Hey, how do you manage Georgia?" We have people like Jessica looking at cost of electricity every single day and planning how we produce. They see how we do it, and that is important for them.
It's important for all ELS customers, right? For material handling customers, this has been a concern for many customers for a very long time. I'll just give you an example of in the times when Amazon was growing and doing 30, we did 35 sites with them one of the years, right? When you decide that you need to grow at that pace and you need to basically find 35 sites, and seven of them are in New Jersey, for example, and you're Amazon and start looking for seven sites, all the developers of those sites know that you need a site in New Jersey. On top of that, if you need 2 megawatts in that site to run your batteries, the number of sites gets reduced to probably that, seven or eight. Now you're going to pay for that because there's no option, right?
If you remove the need for that power, now the number of sites that you're going to find is going to be much larger, right? You can negotiate. That's been a value that we added for certain customers for a very long time. Today, with electrification, our customers are even more and more looking at that. It's not only the big savings. It's, "Can I actually use less electricity from the grid? Can I become independent?" Another value that we add because of that is when there is a hurricane in Florida or in any area in Georgia, electricity takes time to come back. We prepare our sites for the hurricane, and we are the first ones at our back producing electricity for our customers so they can basically start running their operation center much faster than if they had to wait for electricity, right?
All of this energy management around our solutions have already been there. We're just now maybe vocalizing it better.
I think probably two or three years ago was when we started having actual very tangible discussions with some customers. You're going to hear about Alastair, that is a European sales director later. I remember being with him. We were discussing with a customer that basically were completely constrained by the grid, and that was probably three years ago. The thing is, when the big electrification wave started, probably around COVID, that is when our customers, but not only our customers, started to feel the pain of how difficult it is to electrify with the current constraints. Last September, I met with a big European city, the municipality team. They wanted to electrify all their burst depots, and they built a big plan for that.
Now they're like, "Oh, we've been able to do two out of dozens of burst depots." Not because they have an issue with the batteries, the batteries are fine. They have an issue with being able to connect the depots. This is when they start to think, "Okay, if I have a policy where I need to decarbonize the city, I need to find other avenues." We see the same with our customers. I think what we're saying is, I think the world is rapidly maturing around energy, right? Especially over the last 10 years. I think people are becoming more aware and understanding. It's very complicated. I don't think anyone will profess to know every nook and cranny of how the grid and energy and everything operates because it's an art and a dark science, right?
The world is getting a lot more sophisticated and maturing a lot faster with all of the stuff we're talking about. I think we've gotten to the point now where we've reached this critical mass and we're really understanding kind of the nuts and bolts of exactly how do we provide value. That now we can start to pass down.
As I said before, I could spend here the entire morning talking to you, but we ran out of time. Thank you very much, Jessica, Luke, and Benjamin. As always, a pleasure to talk to you about this. After this panel now, we have our third panel today, or actually not a panel. It's a conversation with our partner and our customer, Allied Green Ammonia. Last year, Alfred came to see us.
Alfred is the CEO of Allied Green Ammonia and came to see us to start talking about our project in Australia. He is coming today to give us an update on that project and many other exciting things that we are doing with him. Alfred, why don't you come on? Thank you so much. Nice to see you. Nice to see you here. I can tell you that I thought that I traveled, but I was with Alfred two weeks ago in New York. We were with some investors, and he came from Australia that same day. He was presenting, then he took a plane the next day. He went to the UAE. This is in two weeks, right? Then you've gone back to Australia. Now you're back here. You're around the world.
Project development is like that. It's not easy.
It is a lot of traveling involved, and especially for you guys. I have to come. Yeah, thank you very much for having me again. Your symposium is fantastic. The project update last year when we came, Allied Green Ammonia, Australia, which we discussed. The project was starting the feed. Now we are pretty much on to the completion of feed. The project is coming very close to FID. There is a lot of development from the funding side of it from the Australian government. About three months ago, we had a first round of application, which according to the government numbers that they have provided to us, we submitted, and we got AUD 912 million of grant we can get. That is going to be the second round next year. That is what we are waiting for to make our announcement for FID.
Other progress is quite well. The project is moving pretty well.
Why don't you give the audience a little bit of a reminder of what the project is? What are you doing there ?
Yeah. That is a solar-based project using your 3,000 megawatt of electrolyzer. What you saw just before when Andy was showing presentation, one of the stack of 10 megawatts, we're going to get 300 of them. That is the biggest scale of electrolyzer anywhere in the world. Everybody says why that big electrolyzer? Normally, for this scale, 1 million tons is 1,000 megawatts or 1,200 megawatts is enough. We tripled the size of electrolyzer so we can produce the hydrogen in 8.4 hours, store the hydrogen in the pipeline. Our ammonia plant will continue to operate for 24 hours. That is the cheapest way to produce ammonia with the hydrogen provided by the power.
We got no wind, and we don't have a bigger storage of power. We are producing hydrogen in 8.4 hours and store the hydrogen for 24-hour use. We save $1.8 billion in our CapEx and reduce the cost of our plant by using this method. Thanks to Plug for providing us a PEM electrolyzer. Alkaline can't do that. It can't follow the load, right? That doesn't make sense. Correct. Why ammonia? I mean, have you ever done anything with ammonia? Yeah, I come from actually the background is I did my mechanical degree, and then I worked on upstream of the petroleum industry, oil and gas industry from oil rig for eight years. Then I came to downstream industry for five years. Twenty-five years ago, I started my business, and that's how we come to ammonia.
The last 25 years, we've been in the ammonia industry. We built one of our ammonia plants in Australia. We operated the ammonia plant for 10 years until 2014, and then we handed over the plant to Yara in Karratha, Western Australia. You have some experience with ammonia. Twenty-five years, yes. You know what you're doing, I think. Yes, we understand ammonia very well. When we handed over the plant to Yara, we went back to the Middle East. We did some other business. In 2019, we came back to Australia, and we thought this time we're going to build an ammonia plant, but no gas. We don't want that gas in Australia; it's quite expensive. Expensive, okay. We started planning on the green. Now, our green ammonia plant produces the ammonia, once we go to production, cheaper than a gray ammonia.
That is impressive, huh? It is surprising, but it's true. I'll give you an example. Now, it depends on the country where we're producing. If the gas price is $6.50 per gigajoule or BTU used here, our cost of green is $4.68. So we are cheaper than gray. That'll be surprising for many people, but that's depending on a number, how you design the plant. The way we designed, we cut a lot of cost by designing ourselves. We did not depend on others. We got over 36 engineers in-house. We did a lot of work, and we designed the way to make it the most economical ammonia plant. And what will the ammonia be used for? Oh, okay. That's interesting.
This question came before when IMO, and they said, "Oh, because IMO delayed for another year, it's going to be any impact on you guys." No, it's not. We are not going to produce tomorrow. It's 2029 when we come to production. IMO didn't say they're not going to make this one. It's going to come next year, year after, year after. By 2029, this is happening. What our focus is, we signed the MOU for offtake at the moment. That was purely for power generation. Now, for more than power generation, the fuel is used as a marine fuel. That's coming up. If it happened, we have already signed the MOU, so we have to go for another plant project now for the IMO purpose. That's been really interested in Australia.
We got quite a lot of ships moving around Australia for a lot of mining businesses, and some of the mining companies are in contact with us and asking for offtake agreements. Yeah, we're very close on that one. Maybe some funding will be linked to that to have a sell local. Yeah. We were talking before about what it takes to get to FID, right? Electricity, you have, right, already. Land, you have too. You have help from the government to get this done as well. We got actually two helps from the government. One is a grant, and one is government concessional loans. The Australian government is pretty good on that. A lot of support they provide. Yes, we do have support from the Australian government quite a lot on this project. Then offtake, right? We've just taken a lot of.
If you're able to produce green ammonia at a better price than gray, then why not buy green?
Yeah. Actually, what happened with this offtake buyer, the Tremor, what we signed the MOU, it's like a trading house, but end users are in Australia, so we don't need to go too far now. There's a lot of consumption, a lot of requirement within Australia. Within Australia, yeah. For the green ammonia in coming days. We call it low-emission fuel. We don't call it green or gray or blue. Just call it low-emission fuel. It's a low-emission fuel for marine fuel.
Yeah. I know Andy spent a week with you in Australia. It was very interesting. Yeah, he became extremely impressed with. I took him to Darwin. Oh, you know the best man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to talk a little bit about that?
He went to see Rio Tinto with you, the local authorities, everybody. That was really, really nice.
Yeah, the land we are planning to use, that land is quite a remote area, and the land has quite a lot of infrastructure. It was very interesting for Andy to visit that and see that and feel that one, how this project will feel like it. It's a huge opportunity for all of us. While we were building and developing this project last year, we made a lot of announcements. A lot of work was done. We were contacted by one of the banks from Korea. I can mention the name, Korean Development Bank. They invited us to, they asked us for some, we'd like to be part of it involved and said, "We got a mandate in Uzbekistan if you're interested.
We'd like you to introduce the government, very interested." They arranged a meeting with the Uzbek government for us in UAE. They said, "We're not coming to Uzbek. We are very busy, so let's meet in UAE." We met in the Uzbek embassy, the Uzbek promotion agency working for the government too, and they offered us a project. If you're interested, we can provide you land. We'll provide you water. We'll give you all that. They said, "Okay, great." We don't want to do ammonia as a double landlocked country. It's a lot of issues with mobilizing the molecules from Uzbek. It's a project that has to be something different. We've done a three-month study, and then we appointed one of the contractors to go and check everything and see what can be done and what work is there.
We find out that the great project, what the biggest issue is coming is SAF, Sustainable Aviation Fuel.
There is going to be SAF in Uzbekistan, right?
That's a SAF project. We got 6,000 hectares of land. Now the land is fine. We already got the land. We mobilized a team last month. We're building the camp. We are building a fence around it. We got 6,000 hectares of land on the riverside to grow the agriculture, which we're growing sorghum on 6,000 hectares, 5,500 hectares of land to have solar panels, electrolyzer to make hydrogen, and that hydrogen will be used to make e-SAF. e-SAF, perfect. SAF and e-SAF. That project is moving quite fast, faster than Australia. Faster than Australia. That sounds good to me. We're fine with you guys. Now we got financial support for development and the project CapEx.
We got some mandate. We have a lot of LOI for that project. We got offtake buyers very keen. Two airlines, we are already in discussion. We signed next year. We're just taking a bit of time to develop a project a bit more. Yesterday, we had an announcement. We signed Paraj from India to making ethanol. So it's ethanol to SAF, and then we're gasification, and then we're getting up. We haven't signed with them, but many people know the technology provider like KBR, Tyson, and all that here. That's where you guys, we signed the electrolyzer with you guys. Wherever we go, you guys are coming with us. Happy to. There's a reason for that with the Plug. I've attended your symposium in your place talking about you guys. Maybe sometimes it sounds doesn't really, but it's a reality.
We've done a 16 electrolyzer companies, the whole checklist, the best electrolyzer for our projects. We will be using in the next three years about 8,000 megawatts of electrolyzer. Our cost on the electrolyzer on our three projects, I'll give you the third project as well soon, is nearly, well, that's a big beast. That's thousands of millions of dollars. That's quite a few billion dollars going just to electrolyzers. It was very important for us to pick the right electrolyzer company. Now, as I explained, alkaline doesn't work with us. It has to be a PEM electrolyzer, and there are not many in the world. Very limited, and it has to be proven. They have to have a history. They have done the work, and they're bankable. There's a lot of criteria to pick the right electrolyzer company, and there were not many. There are some.
Good friends. We have a good relationship with them, but business was quite different. We're in the industry for long, so we do have a good relationship with all of them, but business is different. We come to Plug. We signed one. We signed the second, and we signed the third project as well very soon. That's nearly 8,000 megawatts of electrolyzer. When I was looking at your financial numbers, I see that you guys did not count us on your financials. On the final. I have counted the two that we have signed, but I haven't added the third. The final is bigger. It's very interesting. When the project. We just added another $3 billion to the final grant. The project goes to financial clause. You're a long lead item to the project. This means you guys will get the first order. I like it.
That's the reality. That's what my money comes with. The guy said, "Can you discuss and timeline?" Because gigawatt scale of supply, not many companies can do it.
That's also key here. We have the capability to do that because of the investments that we have done.
I spoke to Andy on the last visit, and I said, "It'll be better if you assemble the electrolyzer in Uzbekistan."
We do fabrication all over the world, so we can do that fabrication anywhere, especially with that volume, right? Yeah. Now you're talking about 3 gigawatts, 2 gigawatts. That starts making a lot of sense.
Yeah, we want to make sure the electrolyzer comes correct because it's a backbone of our business. We're depending everything on that. We control the power cost.
Electrolyzer hydrogen price has to be right to get the right ammonia price so we can sell the ammonia at the right price. Yeah, we were just talking about that. Exactly. We got the power at 2.6 cents per kilowatt-hour. Hydrogen has to be below $3 so I can get my ammonia for below $600. Otherwise, we can't get it. That's exactly. You have to be competitive. That's right. That's right. When we got that number correctly in line and that number verified by Nexant ECA, Nexant is like Argus Media. They do project assessment. They've done over two project assessments to get to the number that our f
inancials are correct. One of the engineering firms did a technical check on our project to make sure technically there's no gap. We've done all that.
Now we're into the final stage of moving the project to the next level. While we're doing that, a few months back, we got contact from UAE. One of the very big names, but we haven't signed that yet. We're going to sign in the next two to three weeks. We're going to sign. It's all approved, all done. We haven't signed. I can't give the name of the company. One of the biggest oil and gas companies in UAE. That's the best I can say. We are close to signing with them now. That will be in the final next time we talk. They approached, and now we've got an Australian project, exactly same site, same scale, same supplier, same contractor, everything copy-paste in UAE, where the land will be provided, water will be provided, all everything, permits, everything they'll provide.
At the FID, they will come become an equity partner with us. You have more chances now.
I like to hear that. I think that is important for everybody to understand. When you are one of the long lead items in a project like this, it is a big project, right? You are the first one that gets the order. I like that. I like to be the first one that gets the order.
Definitely, definitely. For us, it is very important too.
Exactly. I think I could be talking to you for another hour here, Alfred, but I think we have been, I have seen the red sign for, I think, probably five minutes now. We definitely have gone over time.
No problem. I am more than happy to, yeah, we can discuss like we did last week in New York. I can go for hours and hours.
We love the industry. And you're going to be around, so people are going to ask you questions, but we're going to go to the Q&A now if we still have time for that. We do? Q&A. Any questions? No, I think we'll explain. There you go. We have one question. Go ahead. When can Plug expect some revenue from this project?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a fantastic question, and that's what I was trying to tell in a very nicer way, but you asked it openly this one now.
I'm going to let you answer that.
Q4 2026, the first payment will be made to Plug.
We're going to see revenues in 2026.
Same time next year, by the time we come here, we should have it because one of the projects will be going to construction in 2027, first quarter.
Before that, we have to place the order.
There you go. Yeah. That sounds good to me. I'm hoping that it sounds good to everyone here.
Yeah, look, we're doing a lot of work. We put a lot of effort on that project in a very short time. Our team worked a lot to make that project a reality. And we are very happy that our local partners are with us and they are supporting us. Both of everybody wants to see this industry. There's been a lot of hype in the last, sorry, I'm going to take a time, but this is the reality of this industry. Three, four years ago, there was so much talk about this. Everybody, especially electrolyzer manufacturers, invested a lot. And then suddenly, in the last two, three years, many of them gone, not able to survive because they were making only electrolyzer.
You guys are doing some other businesses. That's why you are there. If it's only electrolyzer, it'd be very hard to survive. Now all these, sorry, opportunities are gone. Now it's a real market, real developers, real-time now. What you'll get now, that's going to happen. This is the time. I'm glad you guys are, we managed. I agree with what you just said. Next year, this time when we come, they should have a chance.
I agree with you on the, we see much more quality projects now that actually have the elements to go FID. Absolutely. I don't think we have time for any more questions. This is super fun to, as I said, we've been talking about this for hours. We'll continue.
Thank you so much, Alfred. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thanks a lot.
Our next panel is going to be a good introduction to the Plant Tour. It's actually related to everything that we've been talking about. We've been talking about our Project Quantum Leap. In our Project Quantum Leap, what we did was, one of the main things we did is consolidation of rooftops to make our operations much more efficient. In that sense, today you're here in Vista, and you're going to see some of the results of that consolidation. Also, we're going to be talking about not only this consolidation has helped us from a financial standpoint, but also when you really start looking at the benefits that that brings to you, it's quite clear. The panel is going to be talking about this. Let's have Bridget Brown and Dean Fullerton come to the stage. How are you? Hi, Dean. Very good.
Okay, this time I'm going to remember. Do you want to introduce yourself?
Sure. Hello, everyone. I'm Bridget Brown. I'm the Chief of Staff as well as Managing Counsel in our in-house legal department and Executive Vice President of HR. Wearing a few hats these days.
Yeah, you have your hands full, that's for sure. Dean?
I'm Dean Fullerton. I'm Chief Operating Officer for Plug.
Dean used to be my customer for many years in Amazon. Dean was one of the members of the Amazon team that actually believed in fuel cells in that 2016 time and helped us to get where we are.
It financially made sense.
It financially makes sense, right? Thank you.
Bridget, you want to tell us a little bit about how the workforce looks now after all these efforts that we've taken to make sure that we have the right setup?
Absolutely. We're still a very global workforce. We have team members across 14 countries in the world, and we continue to have our largest teams in manufacturing, field service, and our engineering group. Manufacturing alone has 1,000 employees across our facilities in New York, Texas, and Indiana. Our field service team has technicians supporting all our customer sites and our products in the field with over 750 of those technicians. Our engineering team is over 400 strong with engineers across many disciplines. All that in total, plus our operations, hydrogen team, and other corporate support functions, we have more than 2,600 employees today, and 400 of them are right here in Vista.
We still have a pretty qualified workforce to be able to take advantage of this growth that we're going to be seeing. That's great. From a local perspective, what have we seen here in New York?
Sure. This time last year, we were still spread out in our capital region here across multiple locations. We had our corporate functions and executive team in one location, many engineers in another location, and the manufacturing taking place right here in this state-of-the-art facility. Through the course of 2025, though, we've brought everyone under one roof. Now we're here together, and we're already seeing the benefits. The ease of collaboration and the increased communication is very tangible for all of our teams.
I can say specifically from the back office functions, it's a great opportunity for legal, government affairs, HR, IT, and finance here in the building to be able to see with their own eyes the products that we make and how they're made, and then take that back to their daily tasks.
We're taking different functions that were in different buildings now. They're all here, and collaboration now is improving, right?
Absolutely .
Efficiencies, knowing what we do, being able to talk to each other in person, that's really important. That is really important. I'm going to be moving here too soon, so. Excited to have you. I'll be in the office every day except for when I go to see customers, which I hope is a lot. What we do in Vista here from a global perspective, from a global footprint, what is the impact?
Sure. Yeah.
We're driving our whole workforce to try to be more effective and efficient with our communications and collaboration. This is just an example, and the colleagues here at Vista can take that experience back to their teams in other locations and their remote locations as well, and just continue to try to improve that communication collaboration.
That's good. Dean, a lot of people have been in Vista before. When they walk around the facility, what's going to be different? What are they going to see ?
Yeah. With Project Quantum Leap, we have really been focusing on improving our financial balance sheet and our financial picture here at Plug. Some of the things we've been focusing on is streamlining our operations and reducing costs. A big effort to that has been consolidating operations and different functions into Vista.
There will be two major things that you'll see differently on this tour. One is with the engineering organization being consolidated here in Vista, you'll see on the tour the engineering labs that they operate here. You'll see the environmental chamber that has been relocated here, as well as all the chilling infrastructure for that. The second thing that you'll notice is different is we've moved the low-power stationary manufacturing into this building. You'll see that operation as well as the testing for that. You'll also see a large-scale manufacturing of our integrated process for building our electrolyzers and our utility containers, of which we'll do about 30 megawatts that will be built this year in Vista.
Wow. Impressive.
If I hear you right, what we're going to be seeing is a lot of the labs, a lot of the things that were in 968 before, right? Correct. For engineering, now they are here, much closer to operations. So engineering, operations, manufacturing now in the same place, right? Has that changed any dynamic in the company? Having everything together here?
Definitely. As many know, having operations engineering in the same group is critical. We have this in the same building. We're able to move a lot faster. We're able to meet and solve problems. We're able to develop products. We're able to get from concept to shipment a lot faster by being integrated here in the same building. We've been really focusing on being a customer-obsessed company. It's in my DNA. I've been trained that way through my previous companies I've worked for.
Being focused on the customer, we need to be better at improving our quality, our reliability, and reducing our costs. We are able to do all of that by having all these groups under one roof here. We are able to meet the needs of our customers worldwide, being able to do that.
Bringing everybody together has a financial advantage, but bringing everybody together also has an operational advantage, right? You have engineering, you have operations, you have manufacturing, everybody in the same place. We can react much faster to what customers need. Do you have any examples in the last few months?
Yeah, absolutely. That is one of the things I love about having everybody here because even the leadership was located in a different building. Even the leadership has been moved here, and we are all here.
You're able to bring everybody together to be able to solve problems on behalf of customers much faster. An example of that is we have an electrolyzer project in Africa that we were in the commissioning process for. It's an issue that came up during the commissioning process. I visually saw this happen. There was a room, cross-functional group that was in a conference room near my office. I obviously went in to find out what was going on and what they were doing. They worked almost all evening on trying to solve this problem. You had the engineering folks, you had execution folks, you had the procurement folks, supply chain, all together. PMO was orchestrating this.
They were able to come up with a solution for the commissioning team at this customer quickly, but also be able to then make that change for all the electrolyzers that were being built moving forward. It was a real big benefit for our customer because we were able to move faster on the solution that we would not have been able to move that fast given if we were all in different locations.
That customer is in Namibia, right?
That's correct. Any other examples? Any other? Yeah, there's a lot of examples, but another one that comes to mind because I was personally pulled into it as well. We also had an issue out with a service tech that was out in the field that came across this problem, escalated it up. We cross-functional team again, got engineering, got operations together.
It's a product we manufacture on the floor. We actually went downstairs, went to the product, able to see it, touch it. With the technician explaining to us, we could then understand what the issue was that he was seeing. We were able to solve it quickly there and then also change that process through all of the rest of manufacturing so that it did not repeat itself. That again happened much faster than it would have previously.
These changes actually are helping us to be more customer-oriented and focused. That is what we want to hear. It's huge. It's big. Do you want to give kind of a highlight or a summary of what people are going to see when they come through the Plant Tour?
Yeah. On the tour, as I mentioned, you'll see these engineering labs.
That's early part of the tour. You'll go by the environmental chamber. You'll then move into the large-scale manufacturing of our electrolyzers. So you'll actually see our 5-megawatt electrolyzers as well as our utility conveyors, similar to the picture behind me, being manufactured on the floor. You'll then move into the low-power stationary manufacturing process. These are items that we build for railroads and telecom, a very popular item. And you'll see the testing part of that. Then you'll finish up with the fuel cell manufacturing as well as the validation of that process. Perfect.
I'll say, Luisa, one thing to add, another example of the great benefit of having everyone under the same roof here is even the back office team can get involved. I'm so excited that some of my HR team members are even leading some of the tours.
Everyone can get involved and be a part of what's going on on the manufacturing floor and be more aware of what's going on, of what we do as a company, right? And not just your job, but seeing the real things that we do.
That's great. That's good. We're going to do a little bit of a Q&A if there are any questions. No questions? If we don't have questions, maybe, Dean, you want to give the team some pointers of when they go through the tour, things to take into consideration.
Yeah. Some of the things to consider, I'm excited you all are going to be going on this tour. Again, like I said, you're going to see some new things, and I hope that those things will excite you that you're going to see.
For the tour, there's several items that I need to cover with you. First, kind of ground rules. First of all, we're going to meet outside the double doors here in the hallway. There'll be individuals with paddles that will be giving you the tour, and you'll go on the tour, and you'll go through the facility. You're going to end up at an area that you'll see another stage like this and seats. That'll be the afternoon session stage. We will not be coming back to this room. The rest of the day will be in a different location. We did not pause operations. We did not stop operations. You're going to see the building running. What I ask for you to do is stay with your group, stay within the designated aisles. Do not wander, please. You'll be provided safety glasses.
If you could wear those on the tour, you can remove them when we get to the second stage area. Please take all your laptops, phones, your stuff with you on the tour because, again, we'll be sitting in the second stage area. We won't be coming back here. If for some reason an alarm goes off while we're on the tour, out of abundance of caution, I just present to you that please stay with your leader. Your leader will then designate or take you to designate a muster point and make sure you're all safe outside the building. As well as if we're at the second stage area, there'll be several Plug folks around there. You can follow them to a muster area if that happens. The other thing I would tell you is the day will end around 4:00 P.M.
In the front lobby area where we started the morning session, we'll be back here for reception. I do ask that if you can, everybody please make that. It's an opportunity to meet and talk with Plug leadership or meet and talk with customers that are here and the other guests that are here. If you can, we'd love to have you for that too. Wonderful. Thank you, Dean. That was very clear. Thank you, Bridget. Thank you. Now we are going to take a break. For those here, we're going to have lunch where you had breakfast this morning at the entrance of the building. The tours are going to start. You're going to end up, as Dean said, in the stage that we have inside of the manufacturing facility. For those online, stay here for a little longer.
Andy and I are going to be taking your questions, and that will be a lot of fun. Do not go away. Thank you. Thank you.
I'm lost by the sea. I'm learning to breathe. It's blinding how bright this white sun is. I'm lost in my mind. How can I figure you out? I cannot believe how beautiful you are. My biggest desire turned into simple need. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. My biggest desire turned into simple need. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. I'm lost in my thoughts. I'm forgetting to breathe. I cannot believe how beautiful your voice is. I can hear what you're saying because of the wind. I hate how fast you make my heart beat. My biggest desire turned into simple need. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. My deepest desire turned into burning meat.
I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. My biggest desire turned into simple need. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. My biggest desire turned into simple need. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. My biggest desire turned into simple need. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. My biggest desire turned into simple need. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. My biggest desire turned into simple need. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. I'll keep chasing my simple dreams. Chasing simple dreams. Welcome back. Our live Q&A session... Welcome back. Our live Q&A session will begin in five minutes. Welcome back. Our live Q&A session will begin momentarily. Tell us when... we're back. This has been my favorite symposium ever because I haven't had to do a whole lot of work.
I got Jose here, Bridget, and Bridget's going to ask us the questions that are online. Glad we were able to spend some time directly with the digital audience. What do you got, Bridget?
Thank you. Glad to say we have more than 400 participants still joining us for this Q&A. Thanks, everybody, for hanging in there. Either one of you might want to answer this one. How do you, or how does Plug feel about nuclear hydrogen?
I'll give my opinion. Jose, you can give yours. First, I am a real proponent of nuclear power. Theo always likes me to give anecdotes. I actually was working in a motel front desk outside Philadelphia during Three Mile Island.
I think when you look at how safe these future designs are, and when you think about a zero-carbon world, nuclear power is important for baseloads. For hydrogen, you know, at night, it'll be great. I am a big, big proponent of generating hydrogen from nuclear power. You know, we're already supporting customers like LifeGen in France, who are using nuclear power to generate hydrogen. You know, have me as a yes, I'm a big supporter. José may be a contrarian to my opinion. What do you think, José?
No, no, I'm not a contrarian. I think, you know, we're going to need a lot of electrons to achieve the goals that we want to achieve. If you have a source of electricity that has the characteristics that you just discussed, it's good for the production of hydrogen.
I do believe that in countries like France, now nuclear is considered a source of electricity that would allow to call the hydrogen green. It is a good thing.
Yeah, as well as Finland. Finland too. I mean, Finland has a 90% carbon-free grid between hydro and nuclear. Two votes for nuclear hydrogen power, Bridget.
Sounds good to me. All right, José Luis, I think this one's probably more in your court. Where would you expect Plug Power to have the greatest growth in material handling? The U.S., Europe, or Asia?
I think that's an easy one. It is going to be in the U.S. We have developed, you know, a value proposition that is the key for material handling to grow. When you look at the U.S., you have, you know, companies like Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot that use their forklifts; their utilization is pretty high.
In that environment, our solution is the perfect solution to get them to more productivity. With that, you also have mixed that in the U.S., we have liquid hydrogen available. There was available before we started producing liquid hydrogen, and now even more because we produce liquid hydrogen. Exactly. We've added to it. So we are able to deliver hydrogen to the sites very efficiently. When you look at other areas of the world, like, for example, Europe, what you're going to see is that the distribution centers are a little bit smaller. They're more distributed. And usually, they don't use their forklifts as heavily as they're used here in the U.S. So that makes the value proposition a little bit more difficult, not impossible. We have a lot of big projects there.
When you have the right mix, like, for example, BMW, which is doing a project with Denny Munich, we announced it, I think, a few months ago. In that facility, the user forklifts really heavily. The other challenge in Europe is that you do not have a lot or any liquid hydrogen that you can use for these applications. You have to deliver gas. When you deliver gas, the value proposition is a little bit different as well, right? In Asia, what you are going to see is that, you know, in many countries in Asia, the cost of labor is low. One of the things that, you know, we bring to our customers is, you know, productivity by basically, you know, using your assets in a much more efficient way.
When your cost of labor is low, that part of the equation is much more difficult to put in the numbers. In general, in Asia, it is going to be a little bit more difficult. We have some opportunities in Korea, but in general, in Asia, that is the situation.
It seems like it goes back to so many themes from earlier today about understanding the customer's needs, understanding the customer's use case so you can figure out the value proposition and what works.
Exactly.
All right. Similar venue here. I think this one is probably for you, Jose Luis, although Andy, you may want to jump in. Oh, you think I may have an opinion, Bridget? Go ahead. One of our audience members says, "It sounds to me that the value proposition for greenfield opportunities has a superior ROI versus brownfield.
Can you comment on greenfield versus brownfield in your funnel opportunities?
Do you have an opinion on that one? I'm sure you have. You can answer it.
Exactly. I'll see if I agree. Yes, there is a different return on investment in greenfields compared to brownfields. In greenfields, one of the advantages that you have is that you haven't built any of the electrical infrastructure to power the batteries. That has a cost because you haven't invested on that. Now you can put it towards investing in hydrogen infrastructure. When you put that into the mix, it makes the value proposition and the ROI much quicker, almost instantaneous in the case of a greenfield. In a brownfield, you already have, by definition, a lot of investment to power the batteries.
You have to think about now you have an additional investment that you have to make. That makes the value proposition or the return on investment a little bit longer. Still, if you have the right mix of utilization, number of units, you know, hydrogen availability, the value proposition still works. We do not, the majority of our opportunities are in brownfields. Amazon, because of the nature of their business, was all greenfields. The rest of the customers, I would say 90% were brownfields.
I would add two things. We now have 285 sites where having hydrogen infrastructure is a differential advantage. In any model they put together, now they have to put in electrical infrastructure. That is a huge opportunity.
The second one, and you heard that kind of flavor in Luke and Jessica and Benjamin, you also have, you know, folks like Walmart taking power that was used for the forklift trucks to power freezers, which is a real advantage because that generates a lot more money for Walmart having freezers. So all you people eating frozen food, you help our value proposition. And that, you know, those are two elements which I think get lost, but are really, really important when you think about why folks, you know, why you have essentially locked folks into hydrogen early. It really helps whether it's greenfield. Now, Amazon's a brownfield for electrical folks. That is an advantage.
Absolutely. Good to keep all that in mind. Here is another one from one of our online audience members. What role does Plug Power Fuel Cells do?
Plug Power fuel cells play in the data center market?
You want to take it?
I can take that. We have worked with many of the hyperscalers in data center applications. You probably remember a couple of years ago, we made very public the three-megawatt pilot that we did with Microsoft, which Microsoft called it the landing on the moon for data centers. It's basically a zero-emissions generator, power generator. The reality is that for data centers to be able to be backup or prime power, for fuel cells to be backup or prime power in a data center, you're going to need a lot of hydrogen. Just, you know, if you think about it, every megawatt, if you run it for 24 hours, needs approximately 1.5 tons. I'm doing round numbers, right?
If you calculate that and you say, hey, you're going to power 10 megawatts for a very, very tiny small data center, it's 15 tons. I'm saying that so you get the idea. That would be Georgia. You will need the entire Georgia to power a 10-megawatt data center. One challenge is availability of hydrogen. How do you get the hydrogen to the site? Data centers, I think, are going to use hydrogen in the future. The mix that needs to happen is we need to find a way to get that hydrogen at that volume in a cost-effective way to the data center. That's going to be with piping. Piping is in the plans for many European countries. You're going to have to have hydrogen at the right pricing.
That's going to happen when we deploy more of the electrolyzer technology in other applications, but also when you have electricity that is very low cost. You're going to see that in, you know, as you deploy more and more renewables, you're going to see negative cost of electricity. We've seen that in countries in Europe like Germany. With that negative cost of electricity, you produce hydrogen, you can produce it at a very, very low cost. Low-cost hydrogen, available hydrogen, and hydrogen on-site are going to be the keys for that. I think that's going to happen in 2030, 2035.
Real exciting market, though, the data center market with the potential. Even someday, how can we co-locate an electrolyzer with it so the hydrogen's right there? Some other ideas that I know have come up from time to time. Yeah.
We agree with you, Bridget. Bridget's a lawyer, but she knows a lot about the business and she's done a lot of the contracts. I would just add, Jose, we're building the infrastructure to get to 2030, 2035. All that electrolyzer work you're doing in Europe is just a pathway to that future. To that, yep.
Here's another good question from the audience. Given the rapid development of SMRs, that's small modular reactors, and their potential role in reliable, low-carbon baseload power, how does Plug Power envision strategic integration or collaboration with SMR technologies and the companies developing them?
I'll take a shot, then I'll turn it off to you, over to you. I've had discussions with CEOs of SMR companies. That's a long pathway too, let's be realistic here.
I fundamentally believe that at night you're going to co-locate electrolyzers there to support the be the flexible load. And during the day and during seasonal changes, hydrogen's going to be the backup with our fuel cell products. You know, I think if you look at my presentation, I fundamentally believe the world will evolve there. And look, you've heard this story from me before. I worked in wireless in 1983. If you, you know, these journeys aren't simple. You know, I went from, you know, phones being, you know, we couldn't even make anything work to by 1992, we started thinking about how you make it financially competitive. By 2002, everybody had a cell phone. By 2008, people started all having smartphones. People really have to think about the evolution.
The evolution of the grid is SMRs, renewable power, electrolyzers as flexible load, hydrogen providing backup with fuel cells like Plug's, the power of the world. I fundamentally believe 10-25% of world energy will come from what we're doing. Our experience level is unmatched.
I agree. Yeah.
I don't have anything to add. I love the SMR question. It is one of those fascinating areas.
Here's one I think you'll like, Andy. ChatGPT thinks fuel cells handle hydrogen applications for larger implementations like cities, municipalities, et cetera. You handle only small applications like warehouses. What do you think is the difference there?
Oh, you know, I won't let ChatGPT learn what I'm putting into it. I have that blocked.
You know, I would say that when you think about how products get developed, it usually comes from developing things smaller than to larger. And the experience we're getting with small fuel cells actually well positions to when you get to city-type levels. Take us down that path. Take you down the path. I think I agree with ChatGPT because that's the future. You know, think about, you know, the first, you know, when Edison wired up New York and I think he powered JP Morgan's house. That's not wiring up a city. No. Ultimately, got to start somewhere. Ultimately, you wired a city and ultimately Plug will wire the world with hydrogen and our fuel cells.
I would just say there that I 100% agree with you, but we are doing certain things that, you know, point in that direction.
We have done a pilot with EnergyBolt. Absolutely. You know. To get me into the real world, Mike. Exactly. I'll get you into what we're doing right now to power an eight-megawatt microgrid for fire electrical shutdowns in California in the city of Calistoga. If you go to their energy. There's a much better answer, everybody. Go ahead, Jose. If you go to the EnergyBolt website and you click in their video, you are going to see that we are doing that today. I mean, whenever there is a fire situation in that area in Calistoga, our fuel cells kick in and they power the city. It is the first application, but we're pointing at that direction. Yeah. B answer, A answer. Go ahead. That's what we made on the CEO.
Here's a question, which I actually think we're doing some of this already, but we'll see what your answers are. What's the potential for hydrogen liquefaction for easy transportation and fuel for trucks? Is Plug planning on developing H2 liquefaction solutions? We already have done some of this.
Yeah. Let me give Alec Jose a jump in here. My view on the auto industry is it's a question of time. You know, I think Nikola actually developed a real good truck. Very good. Very good truck. We know big companies thought so. It was really the whole value chain that was missing from suppliers all the way to fueling stations, all the way to maintenance, all the way to availability of hydrogen. I think we're helping to knock those challenges off one at a time.
Certainly liquid, especially if you talk trucks, are going to be critical. We know how to make liquefiers. I'll let Jose talk more about things. That was a good product. It was really just a product before its time.
Absolutely. I've driven that truck myself. I did too. I was impressed. I think the challenge was exactly what you were saying, you know, the ecosystem. This is why for an application like material handling, we were able to get it to where it was or where it is today because we created an ecosystem for it. We made it easy for customers because it was a little bit of an easier application. In liquefaction, as you were saying before, we bought a company called Julfs two, three years ago. This company has now, Plug has liquefaction technology that is extremely efficient.
We are using that liquefaction in, we will be using that liquefaction, but liquefaction is something that we can do today and it will be critical for this application. We are ready to go for that when the market happens.
Good. All right, another one. Is Plug on track to reduce the critical material content, platinum group metals, et cetera, in PEM stacks? If so, how will this affect unit economics compared with alkaline competitors?
First and foremost, I think you'll have our head of stack development, Mani Rahmani, talking today. What time till? Around 3:40, 3:00. That's my first question for him. A lot of Mani's work is how you reduce iridium, how you reduce platinum. You know, one of the things you've listened to Alfred today, right?
What did Alfred say about using other technologies with renewable resources?
That those technologies kind of follow the load, so.
Yeah. I mean, I guess, and then I think about KOH, the level. I think we're pretty convinced long-term PEM is a better solution than alkaline. I'm sure there'll be niche, you know, but I don't think it's the right solution for the future. And we feel that from a total value proposition because one thing Jose mentioned, I heard him on the stage, that, you know, the real cost is electricity cost long-term. And our efficiency will be higher. And that's the game winner. That's key. Game changer.
Yeah. Efficiency is key.
Yeah. In your view, what combination of energy source, electrolyzer technology is realistically required today to produce hydrogen below $5 a kilogram? I think we do that, but go ahead.
I was going to say, you know, like we have that in the plants that we have right now. In Louisiana, with the source that we get from Olin, that cost is achieved. From the point of view, if you have an electricity production through electrolyzers, I think in Georgia, we're pretty close as well, right? If not. Yeah. Especially if you're asking the question, how much does it cost for the hydrogen? The hydrogen itself, yeah. The hydrogen itself, it's well below that. Well below that, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's really the liquefaction that's, you know, probably more than half of the construction cost. Construction, yeah. You know, takes probably 40% of the CapEx. The CapEx too, yeah. Yeah.
Now, earlier today, there was some conversation about pipelines in Europe, which was a question from the digital audience about wondering, have we considered pipelines in the U.S. and what's the role pipelines might play in the U.S.?
Okay, can I get on a soapbox here?
Absolutely. It's your stage.
If you go listen to me when the hydrogen hubs passed, I said, don't build hubs, build two pipelines, one down the West Coast, one down the East Coast, to really facilitate the development of hydrogen and let people put hydrogen in and take hydrogen out. That's how you rapidly grow the hydrogen economy here in the U.S. I think it's, you know, from our cause, I think we kind of really have our hands around how you continue to drive down generation costs. You listened to Jessica and Luke today.
I think the key item is how you move it lower cost. If you had the two pipelines, you'd be moving as low cost as natural gas.
I think it's important to understand that it's not a new technology or something that needs to be developed. We already have hydrogen pipes and we can reuse some pipes that already exist. In the Gulf of Mexico, there's already a hydrogen pipe that is being used for refineries. In the Netherlands? In the Netherlands, everywhere. Spain has a plan. There's a company called Enagas. You know something about Spain? I do. Go figure. Spain has a company called Enagas that implemented the entire natural gas network. Now they are basically implementing and developing the hydrogen network as well. I think it's going to happen. That's going to be an inflection point. Yeah.
I could really have some fun here, Bridget, but I'm going to watch myself. Go ahead.
We'll try to get to a few more questions here with five minutes remaining. A question about one of our markets that we may or may not have explored. Have you looked at doing deals with large marinas that use diesel forklifts? I'll let you take that.
We look at that in the past, but also, you know, for large ports and things like that. I think the main, you got to have a business case to be able to do that. Technically, you can build, you can do a fuel cell that can power those types of applications. The question is, is there a, you know, business case to be had? If you really look at the material handling business case, would you have 200, 300 forklifts in one site?
You know, in these types of marinas, you have a handful of these things, right? They're very big and there are not that many on the site. Now bringing the infrastructure to provide hydrogen to those applications becomes a little bit more, you know, cost, not cost-effective, right? It has to make sense. Exactly. From a business case point of view, from a technology point of view, the solution is, you know, doable. From a business case point of view, it makes it a little bit more difficult because you don't have the ingredients to make a business case. I don't know what you think.
I'm going to answer it a little bit different. I'm not going to answer what they ask. I think that in marine applications, it's what Alfred was talking about in Australia and using green ammonia to help power ships. Oh yeah.
Especially for the first 100 km out when the ships are using lots of energy. Absolutely. I actually think that's the key question. That's where we're going to be.
Not in the material handling equipment that is in the marina, but in the boats themselves.
And if they build a green ammonia plant there, you can actually tap off hydrogen and yep, maybe it works. Maybe it works there. You know, maybe now you have hydrogen there.
From time to time, we've even explored how to locate a hydrogen generation plant right at a port to service that community that's in the water.
I told you, Bridget, better than most lawyers. She knows our business.
I do. One digital audience member, thank you, acknowledges the versatility of our fuel cells. How are we going to use that versatility to scale outside of the material handling sector?
A bit of a segue from the last question.
The last question, there's versatility. The technology is there. Anything that needs to be powered with electricity can be powered with a fuel cell, right? The question is, can you get to a value proposition for the customers to move into those types of applications? We were talking about transportation before. If you have to basically change completely the track, so you need to buy a fuel cell track or an electric track, you have to bring the hydrogen to site and create the entire ecosystem. You know, that type of application, it will take time to happen. All the other applications are going to be kind of the same. You're going to have to find if there is a business proposition for the users to move to the application. Technically, I don't think it's a challenge.
It's more of a business challenge.
We got 141 to go, Bridget. What do you got?
I'm going to leave you with this one question because it's come up from a few different audience members from our digital audience there. Talk about this path to profitability. How do you see us getting there over the coming five years? It was alluded to in each of your presentations, as well as Paul's presentation earlier today. How are we going to get there with our focus right now?
Growth. That's where we get to profitability.
Growth is important. We're sitting in this building and just to give folks, and we've been public about this, at 177, we're minus 20% gross margin. At $215 million, we're at 0% gross margin. Most of that has to do with fixed load and pushing product through the building. Absolutely.
At $300 million, we're at 15% gross margin without even other changes. Exactly. Pushing more products through.
That was the point that I was making at the beginning in my presentation that we have set up the company to capture growth that is going to make us profitable. That is what we're doing.
This is what we're doing. Really keeping our focus on COGS, the cost of goods sold.
Absolutely. Look, and Jose did a great job on pricing. I mean, we did go through a repricing, which was really successful. Jose really went out to talk about the value we were offering customers. I'm going to be in the background the rest of the day next to hanging out with the designers. With the engineers. I hope everybody stays online.
The afternoon session, Teal, we got so many customers speaking and partners speaking, and you're just not hearing a Plug commercial. You're actually hearing from the people who actually use the products. Hope you've enjoyed the first half of this show. I think the second half is even better. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.
Welcome back to Plug Symposium 2025. Our program will begin in 10 minutes. Please find your seats and silence your devices. Our program will begin in 5 minutes. Please take your seats. Our program will begin in 2 minutes. Please direct your attention to the stage. Our program is about to begin.
Ready? All right. Here we are. I hope everybody enjoyed the tours. I think this is amazing.
I, you know, being in the middle of the factory, actually doing this, this part of the of the symposium is the first time that we do this, but from this view, it's like absolutely incredible. That way you can see, you know, what we are talking about. You know, we have the capacity, we have the capabilities, and we are doing things right. You see everybody working here. I'm sure you saw that today during the, during the, during the tours. Hope you enjoyed the first part of the show. Hope you enjoyed the tours, and I hope you enjoyed the afternoon. We are going to start with another panel to talk about material handling. This morning we talked to Meredith from Floor & Décor. She is in charge of our project for a brand new customer.
We saw that point of view, you know, why a brand new customer comes and says, "Hey, you know, I want to use material handling." And that, in my opinion, proves that the value of material handling is still relevant. We still get new customers today in this panel. We're going to, the name of the panel is Customer Testimonials on Material Handling. We're going to hear from customers that have been using our material handling products for a very long time. I think that point of view is going to be quite interesting. With that, I'm going to invite to the stage Killan from Amazon. We've been working together for a long time. Come over. Thank you so much. Ron from Uline. We've been working together for a long time too. And Tim, come to the stage again. You know Tim already from the first part.
We keep on improvising a little bit today. We had also, this is why we have extra seats in here. We had Jonathan from FreeSpark that was going to join us in person, but he could not join us. I think he is going to be joining us in Zoom. He is already there. I cannot see what is happening there, so I am going to fly blind here on this, on this part of the presentation. Why do we, as we have been doing before, do the introductions? You know, you want to start, Killan?
Sure. Killan Benedicto. I have been with Amazon for five years. I work on the global energy, sustainability, and automation team, and I manage hydrogen and ammonia solutions.
All right. I am Ron Seiffer. I am with Uline. I have been with them for almost 25 years.
I had the opportunity to bring fuel cells to Uline 10 years ago, and we've been using them since then. I'm the Director of Engineering, and I brought along a few people who are going to be picking up the ball after I leave and keep it all running.
I'm just going to make a joke that you've been telling me that you were going to leave three years ago. I don't think you're going to leave.
Just having too much fun. It's a hard company to leave.
Exactly. Yes. Jonathan, you want to introduce yourself?
Yeah, sure. How are you doing? I'm sorry I couldn't make it, but Jonathan Lamey, Director of Operations here for Freezpak. I've been with the company for 15 years, overseeing all the operations.
Wonderful. Thank you. This is interesting, you know, to be talking to somebody when you don't see them.
Tim, this is, and everybody knows Tim from the panel before. This is your realm now. You want to, you want to start, you know, the conversation?
Sure. I'll start with Ron. Ron and I have worked together a lot, all 10 years, right? In a lot of different aspects. Uline's been a great partner. We just recently, within the last year or so, worked a new project for Uline. We have multiple buildings at their one facility. You had a new project where it's four big buildings, four large distribution centers on one complex. You called us about that opportunity, wanted to go hydrogen. Tell us a little bit about that project and why you decided to stay with hydrogen and fuel cells.
All right. It's great to work for a company like Uline that continues to grow.
Part of that growth is our business proposition is we deliver service, we deliver products, but it's mostly products that people don't keep as close of an eye on for inventory as other things. We want to make sure we always have the products that our customers order ready to go, able to ship the same day. You order by 6:00 P.M., we're delivering it to you in almost the entire United States within 24 hours. It's going to arrive at your site. Part of that business proposition is making sure you have enough inventory. Inventory requires warehouses. As we grow, we're adding warehouses, shutting down smaller ones, opening up bigger ones. The one that we brought you in on is a 1.5 million sq ft warehouse.
As Tim said, it's one warehouse on a complex that will eventually have four that are all million plus size warehouses. It's just a perfect opportunity for hydrogen. We built a pad that could supply all four of those buildings. It was your XL pad. Yeah, XL. We named it right. Extra large, right? Yep. I had never heard of it before, but you showed us that. We put a few other bells and whistles in, and it's working for us right now. The other three buildings will come over the next few years. One's on the schedule to begin next year. It will be very easy to just tap into the hydrogen that's there, and we'll be good to go.
I have to say that I've been to your facilities many times.
They are like the cleanest and the most pristine facilities that I've ever seen. You guys really take care of your facilities.
Yeah, we're proud of our facilities. We're fortunate to have an owner that allows us to do those kinds of things.
Yeah, they're very nice. Should we ask Jonathan, you know, how he, Jonathan, how do you use your fuel cells in FreezPak?
We use our fuel cells on all our MHE. We have turret trucks that run in the freezer. We have our forklifts, our stand-up forklifts, and we have our electric pallet jacks. All of our equipment is running on fuel cells. Very good.
I would just like him to expand it because they have a really unique environment, right? Jonathan, tell the folks, you know, what your business is at FreezPak, what you're doing.
Yeah, so here at Freezpak, we're a 3PL cold storage, you know, provider. So, you know, our environment is, you know, below zero degrees, which, you know, some would think it'll be difficult for the fuel cells. But, you know, I think with Plug support, you know, they've tweaked it along the way and made great improvements for us to be able to have a 97% uptime at all times and make sure we get the throughput we need.
I think it's important to add, you know, maybe you mentioned that, but it's important to understand that, you know, it is a freezer environment, right? So it's a distribution center that looks a lot like this with all these shelves and all that, but it's in freezing temperatures.
Yep.
You know, as Americans, I'm reminded by a lot of our grocery customers that we're eating more and more frozen foods every year. Just about all of our grocery customers are expanding. Right. It's always in the freezer environment. Theirs is all freezer.
Right. In that environment, fuel cells perform just like in any other environment instead of batteries. Batteries don't perform well in freezing temperatures.
Correct. The battery droop is even worse in a freezer. Like we were talking about this morning, you don't see that as much in fuel cells. Also, you may not realize unless you're in that environment, there's a lot of parasitic load around those trucks because operators want heaters on their handles and they have heated suits that plug in. If you worked in a minus 20 degree freezer every day, you'd want those things too.
Now all of those run off of the fuel cell also.
Killan, how do you use fuel cells in Amazon?
We use fuel cells in the infrastructure that supports it for material handling. Forklifts inside of our buildings, in 2024 alone, we used about 17,800 forklifts with hydrogen fuel cells at over 80 sites. You were mentioning the 35 buildings that we launched one year. I joined in 2020, and over that five year span, we went from about 20 buildings to well over 80. It has been tremendous growth.
Absolutely. Your facilities too, you know, there is always activity going on. It is quite impressive to visit an Amazon distribution center. Very good.
You have another question?
Yeah. Ron, actually, all three customers, all four customers that we have had up to date, we have long-term service agreements with.
We have technicians that are embedded in your operations and, you know, a part of your team, actually. That is where it works best when they feel like they are a part of your operations. Can you tell everyone what that has been like? You and I, over the years, have worked on, you know, integrating our teams together and making sure they are delivering to their customer, the operations team, the equipment they need. Can you explain that?
Yeah. It made it an easy proposition when you went to the whole gen everything thing. I remember our Vice President at the time wanted one throat to choke, you know, kind of thing was how he put it. It does keep the finger pointing down the fact that you handle all of it.
With our techs, we have a meeting set up with them every two weeks and we talk through, do we have the spare parts that we need? You know, what are the big work orders that are coming up to get things ready? We exchange information every day on the gen drives that need repair or gen drives that they have repaired and are back in service. It's a good working relationship with them. The people above them, we're on the phone with them just every time we need it, and they always have the answers we need. It's great. It's good. Yeah.
You mentioned the one throat to choke, but I think that's important, right?
Is there value when you have a vendor that actually can get you the hydrogen, the infrastructure, install it, get it ready, and you just go and run with the system?
Yeah. You guys deal with hydrogen every day, right? You are the experts. When we brought it in, we knew nothing about hydrogen. Having somebody you can depend on and you know what's up to them. We've had along the way a few problems along the way. That is when Plug shines. When you get in the most trouble is when all the resources come out, and you know, whether that's the chemists or the engineers or people who deploy hydrogen, that's when you're working at your absolute finest. We've never run out of hydrogen at our site.
Those situations are golden, the opportunities to learn and improve. Yes. For sure.
You do, you have. We have, I think we have, which is important. How do you, I mean, any of you can answer these, you know, how do you measure that fuel cells actually, you know, perform better than other power sources in your operations?
I can take that. There you go. We've talked about it a few times today, but the refueling process is less than a couple of minutes as opposed to opportunity charging with lead acid or lithium-ion batteries. We've been able to optimize our operations with that save time and reduce our fleets in the building as well. Not having a charger per forklift also frees up some extra space for capacity and storing more product to sell. That is helpful.
We're reducing our reliance on the utility grid by the power savings that we don't have to spend on charging lithium-ion. That's important for Amazon. Yeah, it's huge. It helps us scale faster when we don't have to wait for the utility to provide that power for the charging .
I think that plays to what we were talking before in terms of being a partner for energy management. That's extremely important. We're beginning to recognize that. That's good. In the Uline case, how do you measure?
I remember 10 years ago when we sold our senior leaders on hydrogen, the case to be made was how much do you hate batteries. Once you made that case, then hydrogen became a lot easier to listen to. We do batteries really well at Uline too.
Even though that's the case, what keeps us coming back though is, like you said, the operators love it. It just, to go change your battery takes 10 or 15 minutes and interrupts their workflow. When you're filling up, it's two minutes and you're back on the job. We have people who love to work, love to get it done. That's why they love hydrogen.
Oh, that is really important. You mentioned that before too.
Yeah, absolutely. Everywhere we go, the operators are our biggest advocates. Once they try it, it's sold. Yeah. Yeah, we used to do demos to get people hooked, you know, and let them try it for a while and then have the operators sell it for us.
We still do that occasionally, but now we have a customer base that they can go and talk to other customers that are using it. Absolutely.
Jonathan, how do you measure, you know, how do you compare fuel cells to other power sources in Freezpak?
For us, you know, we run a 24-hour operation, right? That is very important, you know, because that keeps us up 24 hours a day, right? We do not need, you know, double the amount of fleet. We do not need extra batteries. You know, the guys are very productive. A big one that, you know, a lot of people, I do not know if they overlook it, but when I came from a battery operation and we had different shifts, there was always like this divide within like the first shift and the second shift with the batteries.
Oh, you guys didn't charge my battery, so I'm not going to charge yours. You know, all the time we had a bunch of dead machines, right? I think that solved it. There's no division now within shifts of you didn't charge my battery. You go, you fuel up, it takes five minutes, and then you're back up and running for four hours plus, you know. I think it definitely made us a lot more efficient, more productive. You know, square footage on the dock, right? You know, we get full utilization of our dock, right? Every square inch on our dock is all productivity. There's nothing there for chargers. There's nothing there for double equipment, just park there, you know. We take advantage of, you know, being 100% productivity on our dock and making full utilization of it.
Yeah, I think it's so, honestly, I think it's so satisfying to hear customers talk about productivity so much. He said productivity probably four or five times when, you know, he was explaining, Jonathan was explaining, you know, how you measure fuel cells. And that's what we always said, that productivity is the key for the success of fuel cells. You know, do you still see the value then? I mean, I think the answer is yes for everything that you have said. The best way to show that you see the value is, you know, with growth, right? I think we're going to be growing with Amazon next year a little bit.
Yeah, we keep coming back from Orso. Obviously, you guys are doing something right.
It's good, right? You are now, you know, doing this new facility as well. Yep.
We have three more buildings to add over the next few years. That proves, you know, again, you know, the best way to prove that a technology works is when you buy more, right? It's good.
And FreezePak, you know, we're doing new sites with them. Like Jonathan just, we talked a little bit this morning about the electrical grid capacity and selecting a site. They're doing a lot of greenfield sites. These are new buildings, you know, in certain areas. Jonathan, you and I have talked before, you know, talk a little bit about, you know, when you're selecting a site, how fuel cells and that solution plays into where you land your DCs and the power requirements in those areas.
Yeah, so when we, you know, select a site, you know, when we, you know, for the construction side of it, you know, we can save, there's a lot of cost savings when it comes to the electrical, you know, that we need that needs to be fed into the building, right? You know, we save on that. Also, it helps us, you know, just make sure that we maximize, you know, our, you know, our square footage wise, right? How are we going to develop the building? How are we going to, you know, structure it? Making sure that all of the dock and all of the freezers are all made for, you know, productivity. Yeah, that's really, you know, it really helps us, you know, make sure that we don't, you know, we're not, you know, really spending a lot.
machines, on batteries, and, you know, we know we can get good utilization out of the fuel cells.
All right.
Wonderful. If you met a customer that was thinking about using fuel cells, what would you tell them? I mean, what would you tell them to do to make sure that this is the right technology for them?
I'd tell them to talk to Meredith. She had the perfect answer for that one.
She would.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's a good answer. Perfect. That's good. What would you tell them, Kaylen?
Yeah, I would say, we've grown the expertise at Amazon thanks to Plug Power with hydrogen. Trust the experts and then, get to know the product yourself too.
Yeah. Amazon really has grown a lot of expertise around hydrogen.
Yes.
It's quite incredible. I think we are on time. I appreciate so much that you are willing to come and talk to, you know, everybody, the audience here about, you know, the solution. I hope that we continue—I know that we will continue doing business in 2026, and that's the way that we're gonna grow. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan.
Thank you.
Thank you. Honestly, it's the product of a lot of years working with customers that basically allows us to have these conversations, open conversations with customers that have been using our products and telling us that that's why they buy them, right? I'd say, and I repeated several times this morning, productivity is the key. When you hear your customers saying that productivity is the key, it's honestly, to me, it's really satisfying.
I said at the beginning of the symposium that, you know, when I was 20-something years old and they took me out of the lab and they put me in front of a customer, I said, "Oh, what I wanna do is to basically get technology and show customers how they can, they can add value." When you see that now happening, it's, I don't know, it makes me excited. We are gonna go to the next panel. This is gonna be a very interesting panel. It is called Energy Production at a Scale. We have Pierre T. M. Frank from Hi24. Hi24 is one of the largest, if not the largest, green hydrogen fund in the world. And what we are gonna hear from Pierre T. M. is what we have been talking about before.
If you are the one that is putting the money for this project to happen, what are you looking for? You know, what is it that you're looking for? Benjamin is gonna join us. Benjamin knows Pierre very well. Pierre is in France. Pierre T. M. is in France. Do we have him already on the screen?
Do you hear me?
We can hear you, but we cannot see you.
You see me?
I did my—on my side, it's working.
On your side, it's working. You can see us? Oh, now we can see you now.
I see you very well.
There you go.
I see you very well.
Wonderful. Thank you, Pierre T. M., for joining us. It's about 6:00 P.M. No, what time is it right now?
It's 8:00 P.M.
8:00 P.M. in Paris. Thank you for joining us at this time. Pierre, why don't you introduce yourself, tell us what you do and what your fund does, but also, you know, I would also like to add that we've been working with Pierre, Pierre T. M., for a very, very long time. Pierre was in Early Kid before, and Early Kid invested in Plug, and we've been partners for a very long time. Pierre has been working in the hydrogen business for a long time.
I think it would be too long to tell the story between Plug and myself because, and between maybe also a bit Andy and myself, but, let's not focus on that. I've been working indeed in the industrial gas industry for 25 years. The last 15 years, I was involved in managing all the technology companies of the group and also new markets. This is where we came across with Plug Power at the time, trying to develop the use of your technologies in Europe with the GV. We had a couple of moves in the stock market to support a bit the Plug dynamic.
It happens that 10 years after, when I had created a couple of the key bodies that are helping the sector grow, shared Hydrogen Europe, launched the Hydrogen Council and moved forward after the COVID, when we took the decision we needed a fund to help scale this industry at the right level, the first LPs joining were Plug with Chart and Baker Hughes, and then my former company, of course, Early Kid, Total and others. We built this company called Hi24, which is an asset manager, and we are deploying a fund now of $2 billion. Thanks to the support of those LPs starting with Plug. With Plug, we have a bit of a multilateral relation because it is, in a way, my customer, but it is also a partner. It could be also a supplier.
We'll come to that later. We basically have a team of around 40 people, a couple of people in New York, the biggest part of it in Paris and Zurich, and a couple in Singapore. We're invested into roughly 10 different companies, project developers, ongoing projects, like the largest one in steelmaking, STEGRA, or formerly called H2 Green Steel, but also we're looking at ammonia, methanol, or synthetic fuel projects. We're in all the key geographies, mostly Europe today, but a bit in North America, and also a bit in Asia. What's important is that we'll come to that later, with those $2 billion, normally we're gonna leverage more than $20 billion of investments. The issue is rather to find the right projects. I'll hand over to you.
That is a good segue to the next question. The issue is to find the right projects. How do you find the right projects?
Did we prepare this before or what? Yes, indeed, it happens to be not, it's simple in the words, but it's always a bit more tricky when we move into the dynamic of the project themselves. Obviously, you look at the site where the projects are supposed to be located to make sure they are properly suited for the size, usually the water, the exposure to renewable capabilities. You look at the renewable power and the renewable co-power cost, of course. You look a lot at the team because if the team quality is not the proper one, not only in developing, but in project management and execution, then it doesn't work. Of course, you look at offtakes, which is the key driving force.
This is something you don't have so much at Plug for your forklift business, which is one of the strong enablers of the dynamic of growth of the company. For more power to hydrogen, you need to make sure people are ready to pay the offtake. For that, last but not least, you need to look at the stability and regulatory situation of the countries you're in. This is where, in fact, most of the surprise often come. This is where you need to be very careful.
Can you elaborate on that just a little bit? Because it can be a positive or a negative.
It's true that, if you look, it's been now, it's been roughly four years since regulatory positions have been taking place, both in America, but also in Europe and in some Asian countries. There's been some heads-ups and downs. If you start developing a project, betting that there will be a pipe connecting a country to another one, and then suddenly the country, not to name it Denmark, says that the pipe's gonna come, but not in the same direction, then part of your offtake is basically lost.
If suddenly the second measure it takes is that in implementing the transposition of the European regulations, which are very, very nice, but very, very complex, and they take a regulation topic which is the lowest possible so that the need for developing RF and BO, which is renewable fuel of non-biological origin, namely clean hydrogen, if those are not big enough, then the refineries you're serving do not need the hydrogen anymore. Your project cannot grow the same way you were expecting to. The issue is not only that the countries have a regulation, but that they do not change. I prefer to have a relatively light regulation, which is not changing, which is basically the case of the U.K. The U.K. has a very strong regulation, but the subsidy program is steady and continues. There are other examples we can speak about later in the Nordics.
We've got also the situation of Sweden. Sweden is a country which is the less supporting countries for large industrial projects. The level of grants they give to a project is very poor. Because of the quality of the power and the quality of the mining they have, it still justifies to move into making steel. Sweden has not enough grant strategies compared to the other European countries. I'm not going to speak about France because France, we don't know what they have because they have no governments usually. It's taking a bit of time between the moment they announce something and the moment it's put into place.
Pierre T. M., we have signed a term sheet for a project that is still confidential, that is in the Nordics, in Europe. Without making this project public, can you explain maybe a little bit, what are the ingredients that allow you to sign a term sheet with us on this kind of project?
First, of course, we know Plug well, and we know your strengths, and you know you're very agile, you're very business-driven. All the signals we get from the electrolysis that you've built so far are positive, with a very good ramp-up from done capabilities, a very good reliability and efficiency pattern. I think that is a strong milestone. Second, we choose together, or you choose on your broader scene, you choose a place, which is good because the country in the Nordics is steady. It's very clear-cut on what they do. The customer is a very large refinery. We have a very clear-cut, vested interest to move into greening its hydrogen supply because it's a way to avoid developing more second-generation biofuel downstream, which are costing very a lot, a lot of money.
Basically, you can pay yourself the green hydrogen premium. Because of that, you've got a stakeholder which is there. You've got a good supply of technology, a country which is not moving. You've got all the key ingredients to make a project fly properly. This is why we basically decided to move, and we are developing together this project. To be honest, we are together, but we've not won yet because there is still competition in the game. We think we have a combination of skills, capability to invest, an appetite to take the risk, which is a bit unique. This is why I think we should make it happen, properly.
Wonderful. Do you, under your experience, you look at a lot of projects, and you probably are aware of all the projects that are in the market. Do you think that the rate at which FIDs are gonna be happening in the next 12 to 18 months is gonna accelerate a little bit?
I think what has happened is a bit what happens after a big hype is that you've been a bit of a flush of the non-relevant, the crazy, the too small, the too audacious projects which had no real, I would say, economic background. What we are seeing, even though people are saying hydrogen is not so good, is that still the figures are showing a 10 times increase of the number of FID and the value from $10 billion to $100 billion. It's very strong. To be honest, it's driven by China, let's be clear. Still, US is still very good with the dynamic of still ongoing with the PTC, which is still valid up to the start of project before the end of 2027. India is moving fast. Europe is going to be probably the next growth wave.
What we see, as far as we are concerned, is we have a bit less project to look at, but the ones we see are closer to FID, so less DevEx. They are bigger in size. The maturity of the technology has significantly changed. Remind yourself, all of you, you need to remind that back in 2020, the biggest project in the world was the one we were starting with Early Kid in Bacon Court, 20 megawatts. Today, you have basically 20 megawatt stacks being installed every week in the world. All of the key projects that are going to start in the next 18 months are between 100 and 500 megawatts or even more. The maturity of the technology in five years is very significant. I'm not saying everything is solved, but it's going very well. More steady, bigger, better stakeholders.
The biggest developers of the project today are the income bond players, which are not usually the best innovative players. It means they're relatively confident on the maturity of the technology.
Mm-hmm.
Because of that, the offtakes, the regulatory situation is becoming stable. The technology is mature. The projects are closer to FID. In fact, it's better return potential for us. We think we're moving into a next step now.
Yeah. It seems like, like we're moving into a phase where, and we feel the same thing. We discussed this earlier today that the funnel we have is of the characteristics that you were just saying. Projects are a little bit more mature. They are a little bit more, you know, serious, and projects that have better chances to go FID. I think we coincide on that.
Yep. I would add one thing. One. Sorry. Go ahead, Pierre T.
No, please.
I was going to say one thing that I find also very interesting, maybe just for the audience. The term sheet that we've structured for this project in the Nordics, one of the nice features of that is that it's a repeatable framework. In a way, capital is not a constraint. We need to have the right attributes in a project with a high creditworthiness offtaker, with the cost competitive power, a good location, deal to connection, and so on and so forth. Once we have those ingredients, our customers can decide that they can buy an electrolyzer from Plug, or they can decide that we're going to actually build and operate the project for them, leveraging capital from infrastructure funds like the one of Hi24 and Project Debt Partners.
This is an evolution that we're seeing in the market where the first projects were being financed on equity, and now we're moving into the project finance world, which is a massive, massive accelerator because it has a capital amplification effect that is really significant.
I conclude on that. I think if we manage to get this project through together, we may have orders exactly the same way. It is true that you can leverage. There is no issue of getting the money or the financing. The only competition we have today is the IA, which is far too big, but that is another topic.
That's another topic.
The money is there.
Exactly.
You can leverage equity with debt because people are more comfortable with the capabilities of those projects to deliver. We are currently negotiating other projects in South America with significant project finance. I think all the ingredients are there. We just need now to deploy at scale, and this is why you're there.
Exactly. That's why we're here. I think we got to the time. We're gonna do some Q and A. Any questions for Pierre T. M.? Do we have any questions? This was a very interesting panel. This is the team that brings the money to make the projects happen. I'm surprised there are no questions for him. You know, are there any other countries? I'll ask you this question. Are there any other countries in Europe that you think are poised for growth?
I forgot to name one that you probably like very much, which is Spain. This is where we spend a lot of the time because we are in a JV with a very large player called Enagas, and we are basically present in all the key basins. This country is basically walking the talk because they know that for them, there is no other way than to develop massively renewable. The best way to extract the value of the renewable is to transform them into hydrogen and to basically export it to countries which have far higher electricity costs. Spain is one of the countries moving very, very well, and we are very much positioned to develop there. I guess you are as well, so.
Yep. We are there too, as we have discussed earlier today. If there are not any other questions, Pierre, thank you so much. You should go ahead and enjoy your evening with probably a glass of very nice red wine.
If I have deserved it, I will take it. I'm sorry not to be here with you. I was planning to, but the agenda is a bit hectic right now. Next time, I will be there with pleasure.
You'll be, we'll be happy to have you next time here. Thank you.
Thank you.
Merci beaucoup.
Thank you.
Ciao. Thank you. The next panel is very interesting. It's a little bit different on the type of things that we've been talking about. It's an example, I think, of how Plug adapts to the market, you know, when there are changes in the market. As we all know, in the U.S. right now, the renewables and green technologies and all that are not necessarily, you know, the most fashionable thing, I would say. We got, in the big, beautiful build, you know, a good outcome, I would say. It's better than what we thought. We see that, you know, blue hydrogen is something that, you know, is much more supported by the administration and the market today.
What not a lot of people know is that in Plug, probably 20% of our employees come from the oil and gas business. We bought a company in Houston. The name of the company is Julfs for their liquefaction capacities, but they work in the oil and gas business for, you know, for all the time that they were operating. We also bought a company called Frames, and the same thing. They came from the oil and gas business. We have taken advantage of that, and we look at projects that are working with blue hydrogen. We are basically partnering with a company called Edgewood Renewables to put together a project that they're gonna be talking to us about today.
We're gonna welcome to the stage Steve Harrington, the CEO of Edgewood, and Michael Brown, who is the CTO, and Alan Sharkey, who is our A. How are you? Hi. How are you? Alan, perfect. Why don't we start like we have done with all the panels? You can introduce yourselves. Tell us a little, a little bit about what you do for Edgewood. I think you have a couple of slides that you want to, you want to show. You wanna introduce yourselves first?
Perfect. I'm Steve Harrington. I'm the CEO of Edgewood Renewables. We are a low carbon fuel producer, project developer that, you know, looks at using the different building blocks and the molecules and unique ways to capture all the tax credits that we can and help with the energy transition and the energy addition that's kind of happening right now. With all of our projects, we take a lot of concepts from the traditional petroleum industry and recycle them and take concepts that work to introduce them into the transition fuel space.
Yep. I'm Michael Brown. I'm a chemical engineer. I have a background at Exxon, but for the last 10 years, I've been developing renewable fuel projects focusing on biomethanol, sustainable aviation fuel, and renewable diesel. Wonderful. Using hydrogen as the main agent to convert and make these fuels.
Yeah. Alan?
Hi. I'm Alan Sharkey. I'm the Executive Vice President of Project Execution here at Plug Power. I came on board Plug about four years ago. My primary focus was building our hydrogen plants. As we are slowing down in that build a little bit, we are looking at other areas where we can keep everybody busy and add growth to the team. Partnering with guys like Edgewood really gives us that opportunity to utilize the skill sets that we already have in Plug through acquisition of Julfs or just through recruitment that we have done to execute our own projects.
Wonderful.
Good, yeah.
You wanna tell us what you guys are doing in,
Sure. So we have, you know, we started working as a team together at Edgewood about four years ago. The first, you know, project that we've spent a lot of time, energy, and focus on is out in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is a facility that will produce 9,000 barrels per day of sustainable aviation fuel, renewable diesel, about 1,000 barrels per day of biomethanol. And then it produces and uses within the system about 17 million kilograms of renewable hydrogen. Just for, you know, rough order of magnitude, that's about 125 million gallons of jet fuel and diesel and 15 million gallons of biomethanol. And then we, you know, uniquely use some of the, you know, hydrogen that comes off from the various processes to, you know, convert the biomass into the fuels.
All proven technologies, and that's kind of been our main focus. I think what we've done uniquely, you know, versus other folks is, you know, we really look at having two key customers. One is the, and the ultimate offtaker of the fuels, which we need to make sure we get them the product at a price that they're, you know, willing to pay for, but then also making sure that we have a project that's financeable, that can get to an FID, that can, you know, get the financing to get built. I think we've been able to marry the chemical engineering with the financial engineering, and then the, you know, the competency of Plug and some of our other partners to build projects that, you know, work from a financeability standpoint. They work from a commercial standpoint.
We've really been thoughtful about all those different types of things.
Absolutely. I think, can I, let me just mention why we find the partnership with Plug so valuable. As many of you know, hydrogen is a slippery little molecule. It's basically just a proton. Not everybody knows how to take care of it, how to check for it, and how to control it. What we do is you make hydrogen a couple of different ways. One way is you take electricity, electrolysis, and make hydrogen. With a fuel cell, you put the hydrogen back in, make water, and release, release electrical energy. What we do is we put the hydrogen back in and release chemical energy. We turn something that my girlfriend tells me I'm not supposed to eat, carbohydrates, into hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are fuels. Carbohydrates are like waste molecules, sugar, donuts, all that stuff that you were not supposed to have.
The way to convert the carbohydrates into hydrocarbons is that hydrocarbons do not have oxygen. Hydrocarbons do not, carbohydrates do. What we do is we take that hydrogen and we use the expertise of Plug to be able to build our hydrogen plant and to manipulate that molecule. What the hydrogen does is it finds an oxygen. When it is not looking, it comes up and grabs it on both sides and makes water. The water drops to the bottom. The jet fuel floats to the top. The reason that is interesting to us is that in a fuel cell, you combine the hydrogen and oxygen to make electrical energy. In our plant, we do it to make chemical energy, sustainable aviation fuel, methanol, and diesel.
The same expertise that Plug has in making the hydrogen, manipulating it, doing the fabrication of the skids, something we've really gotten to know, Alan Sharkey, at Plug. That's the expertise that's gonna make Edgewood successful.
Yeah. I'd say, you know, what we're doing with the end product is it's being sold and it can be, you know, utilized in engines, you know, trains, cars, planes, trucks today. These are all drop-in fuels or as we joke now, we call 'em plug-in fuels.
Plug-in fuels.
You know, these are, these are all end products that, you know, you don't have to rebuild the wheel. It's, it's all, you know, they're all drop-in fuels that can go in, in our planes, trains, trucks, you know. The biomethanol has a really large market in the maritime industry, which has kind of been touched upon earlier. Everyone knows where the jet fuel's going. That's kind of the beauty about the end products is there's an unlimited market. So long as you can figure out a structure to allow the customer and the financing to happen, you can create a lot of value.
It's just basically an e-fuel, a clean fuel that looks exactly like a non-clean fuel that you can use in any of the applications.
What we really focused on from the get-go was making sure we were the low-cost, low-carbon producer of e-fuels at large scale. While e-fuels will probably take another 10, 15, 20 years to kind of get to a state of development at a larger scale, you know, we've really focused on these transition fuels taking.
Transition.
Taking these waste, waste oils and waste ag oils, converting them into fuels that we can, you know, utilize today and tomorrow.
I think it would be interesting if you explain to the audience what you use as the feedstock. When you were talking about waste oils, what does that mean? In this particular project, where is that gonna come from?
Sure. For the Vegas project, we specifically focus on waste, you know, waste cooking oils, waste ag oils, any beef tallow. There are a lot of, you know, products that ultimately would've ended up in a landfill or, and then, you know, release methane or of the likes. Some of the other biomethanol projects that we've been working on with Alan and the Plug team have different kind of components. Some of them are bio woody mass. You know, ultimately what you're looking for is waste products that you can, you know, get the building blocks of hydrogen and CO2 from, to create these fuels.
They all use hydrogen as the main agent of being able to convert. You have to remove the oxygen to have energy. You use the hydrogen to remove the oxygen. In a fuel cell, you do that and you just take out the electricity, which is awesome. Some people need the more energy density of diesel and jet fuel. It is all still about hydrogen. It is all still about having the engineering expertise to be able to handle that assignment, which is, as we say, non-trivial.
Basically you take a cooking oil from restaurants and things like that, right?
Yeah.
Then convert it into.
Beef, beef tallow.
Beef tallow.
Chicken fat, corn oil, soybean oil, any plant or animal triglyceride. Any triglyceride.
You basically, you know, take out oxygen from that product, put hydrogen on it, and then you create these transition fuels for use in the industry.
That's exactly right. We think of it, or at least I do, 'cause I'm not a chemical engineer. It's a dirty pearl necklace. We introduce hydrogen to grab the oxygens off that necklace and just be left with the beautiful.
You wanna go through your.
Yeah. You can, happy to use these.
I think we're talking about these, but why don't you go through it?
These are just some high-level fact sheets on the Las Vegas project specifically. With all these projects, as you guys know, there's, this is, there's 10 businesses in one. It's real estate, it's finance, it's government relations, it's construction, it's engineering, it's chemical engineering.
Logistics and.
Logistics is a huge, huge component, commercial aspects. Luckily we've found great partners like Plug and others along the way because these projects take a village and you have to just find ways to align incentives with all your partners, which I think is something that we've really hit it off with Plug about. There is an entrepreneurial spirit at this place, even though it's a very large company. You guys do a lot of large stuff. We're obviously a much smaller, more nimble team, but we have a shared ethos. Just high level in Vegas, it has the total fuel produced on an annual basis.
Which is very impressive, the amount of fuels.
Just kind of what the site looks like. You know, we were very thoughtful and purchased a site at the start that had a ton of logistics. We're on the UP Rail Line, the Union Pacific Rail Line. It has, you know, tank and other logistic capabilities. What Plug is helping to fabricate and build, you know, it's a roughly $450 million project. The total build, Plug's portion of that is, you know, $150 million roughly. It's kind of what's highlighted there on the right side of the facility.
It is all skid mounted. It is being constructed in a factory managed by Plug so that these skids can be sent and installed more quickly and more efficiently. It is the same skills that Plug learned in doing your units that you are going to be able to now use for ours.
Okay.
We will use fabricators for that. Maybe Alan, you can, you can,
Yeah. I mean, this, this Jose is a perfect example of how we can utilize the team that we have built to do our hydrogen projects and also the acquisition we made in particular with Julfs in Houston. That acquisition, Julfs were well-known fabricators in the area. So fabrication for this project, which is our scope, is a lot. It's a whole lot of SPL. There's $150 million worth of fabrication that is gonna be managed by the Houston office. So that's really exciting. This gets us on our way with Edgewood, but opens a lot more doors in the relationship that we're building. We're about to start a feed study now, on a biomass, a bio, methanol plant in Louisiana. Looking, really looking forward to getting that off the ground. Doing a feed study should take us about six months.
A lot of work to do, but it's exciting times. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes. You wanna.
Just some more pictures. This is our general process, at a very high level, and it basically demonstrates how we utilize every single molecule in the process in order to get, you know, achieve a greater than 100% liquid yield. You know, we have very creditworthy, you know, Fortune 50 companies as the off-takers of the fuel. We've attracted blue chip capital from institutional, you know, private equity, infrastructure and energy firms. It's really just about aligning the pieces and having the puzzle click. You know, we've spent three plus years on getting to this point, but it's been.
It's there. It's about to.
We'll be FID in, end of Q1.
Wonderful. That's great. I think we are on time now. Maybe we go to questions. If there are any questions, we have a question there.
Yeah, we go.
Samir Zoshi from NC Wind, right? Just want to make sure, you're showing steam methane reformer right now. Is that going to be replaced with a electrolyzer or like?
Say that again.
Is that going to be replaced with the hydrogen from Plug?
Yeah. It's gonna make the hydrogen from Plug. Plug is responsible for the fabrication of the steam methane reformer. What we're doing is we're taking our waste molecules, putting 'em through a pre-reformer, kind of like a meat grinder where you turn all the carbons into methanes, and then we put only biomethane into the steam methane reformer. Most people use pipeline natural gas, petroleum, no petroleum. We are using all biomethane so that it makes, it's really, it's low carbon hydrogen. It's not really blue hydrogen 'cause we don't do carbon capture and it's not really green, but it's still a low carbon hydrogen and Plug is the one responsible for that.
you have a purchase agreement with Plug. Plug owns that component of the plant.
We, we.
Yeah. We, we're responsible for the fabrication of the equipment and also the design of it. So we'll design and fabricate the equipment. That will then be sent to an EPC contractor who's gonna do the install on the ground and we'll support commission and activities and so forth. Yeah.
This opens up new markets for you.
That's exactly what we're trying to do. That is what I was saying at the beginning, you know, we are adapting to a market here in the US that, you know, hey, you know, if there's hydrogen coming from another source that is not green hydrogen and we have the know-how to do engineering, to do fabrication, to do those things, we're gonna capture that revenue. And $150 million in revenue with good margin, I'll take it.
Yeah.
Okay.
We're really just, you know, converting the hydrogen into, you know, into biomethanol. And we view the biomethanol as just another expression of hydrogen. You're just adding a C and an O to stabilize it and be able to put it on a, you know, an oil, a tanker that's carrying boxes across the ocean.
He's really supporting the energy transition, you know, between what we have now and green. There's a, there's some solutions in the middle, right? And these are those solutions in the middle that are creating, you know, cleaner fuels that are exactly the same type of fuels that you use today, but from a different source. So that's,
Plug-in fuels.
Plug-in fuels.
Plug-in fuels.
There you go. Any other questions? No? Okay. Thank you so much, Steven.
Thank you.
Mark, really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks. I'll see you in a minute.
Yeah.
Okay. Now we're gonna be talking about our Gen Eco electrolyzers and, you know, how they have been adopted in, you know, in so many areas of the world. To look at that, we're gonna start with a video. Would you like to play the video? I find that pretty impressive. You know, you can see our electrolyzers installed all over the world. It's not just dots in a map. It's pictures of things that we have done and they're already operating. This is real. This is the things that we do every day. You've seen in there the site in Castellón once again. We're very proud of that one because, as I said, it was not supposed to be installed until, you know, later in 2025.
We already have it there installed, and we have accelerated a project by six months instead of, you know, delaying projects, which is what happens in this industry normally. We're gonna see another video about when the GALP team went to do the FAT to Dubai for the 10 megawatt arrays. The array that you saw there going in the truck is basically our 10 megawatt array. I hope that gives you the kind of the sizing of the type of projects that we're talking about, right? We started, we started making these fuel cells right here, and now we're making that type of projects. That array specifically is already in Portugal. And we have another nine arrays, as I said before, on the way to Portugal. They're on boats getting to Portugal before the end of the quarter.
That will make a 100 megawatt plant, pen plant that it will be unique and the only one of that size in Europe by the time that it gets installed. These are the type of projects that are gonna make a huge difference on, you know, where Plug is in the electrolyzer business, in Europe and really, you know, everywhere in the world. Finally, I'm gonna show you a video of, of Arcadia e-fuels. Amy is the CEO of Arcadia, and she was nice enough to do a little video for us so you can hear from her, you know, why, you know, Plug. Let's roll the video.
Hi, I'm Amy Aber, CEO of Arcadia E-Fuels. Thank you for allowing me to virtually be with you today. Arcadia E-Fuels is dedicated to producing sustainable aviation fuel to enable net zero drop-in replacement fuel to protect our environment and power our world. ESAP is a synthetic fuel made from renewable electricity and carbon dioxide. The first step of our process is electrolysis, and Plug Power has been a great partner for the past couple of years as we've worked through optimization studies and the completion of our feed study. Arcadia E-Fuels has announced three projects so far, one in Denmark, one in Texas in the US, and one in the U.K. We aim to bring a new plant to FID each year as part of our rapid and globally diversified scaling strategy.
This allows us to meet the growing market demand for e-SAF in support of the EU and U.K. mandate starting in 2030. We have chosen to self-produce hydrogen in these projects, and therefore our electrolysis plant is an important factor to our success. We chose Plug Power for our first projects after an extensive process comparing alkaline, PEM, and SOEC electrolyzer technologies. PEM was the clear winner in terms of overall cost, operability, and bankability. Within the PEM space, Plug came out on top due to favorable synergies on integration with our balance of plant, the ability to produce hydrogen at high pressure, and Plug's continuous work on improvements. As Plug is also a producer of green hydrogen, continuous improvements on electrolyzer efficiency and costs are not only a big driver for themselves, but also for their electrolyzer customers.
Plug is also working with us and our substation contractor, Hitachi, to optimize the electrical components to ensure we have the best capital cost. Their willingness for continuous improvement and ability to deliver electrolyzers today makes them the obvious partner for our projects. For each of our manufacturing sites, we intend to produce 110 tons per day of hydrogen and will be installing 280 megawatts of Plug's electrolyzers at each of our sites. In summary, we are very happy with the cooperation with Plug Power as we both have the desire to see more green hydrogen produced at the best possible cost. Thank you for the opportunity to share a bit about Arcadia E-Fuels and the work we're doing with Plug Power.
I don't have a lot more to add than that, really. It is, you know, as I said, it's repeating the type of things that we've been talking about, but you hear it directly from customers. Plug produces its own hydrogen. Because we do that, we are continuously improving our products and we want hydrogen to be produced at the lowest cost. This is what customers want to hear, and this is what other companies cannot offer 'cause they don't do their own production. I'm gonna invite to the stage, to Philippe Boivier, Alistair Liebman, and Benjamin. You come back to the stage. I will note that Benjamin is actually taking the space of Cyril, who is the CEO of Hi2Gen. He couldn't be with us because he got stuck at the border.
He called Benjamin and told him, "Hey, you know, I'm gonna give you some messages so you can share the messages with everyone." Very good. Thank you, Benjamin, for sitting for Cyril. Why don't we start with our latest win, Carlton Power. We announced that yesterday. It's 55 megawatts. It's a 130 megawatt project, 115 megawatt project, and one 10 megawatt project. You have been working really closely with them, Alistair. First, introduce yourselves. I almost forgot.
Do you wanna go first?
Sure. Philippe Boivier, I've been with Plug for 14 years in different roles, projects, product engineering. But most recently, we, you know, for probably at least eight years with Jose in technical sales. And as of recently, I'm gonna be leading electrolyzer sales as well.
I'm Alistair Liebman. I'm the European Sales Director for electrolyzers and applications.
I'm Benjamin Hecraft, not Cyril Dufosso, Chief Strategy Officer for Plug.
We, we've seen you here already, Benjamin. Okay. Now, Alistair, you're gonna tell us about Plug Power.
We made the announcement yesterday. Carlton Power is a U.K.-based energy company, and Schneider Green Coat is an asset management company with $8.5 billion in renewables. Their joint venture has selected us as the OM for 55 megawatts. As you just mentioned, Jose Luis divided in three projects across the U.K. Now, you've been talking today about successful hydrogen projects. This project has the three pillars for success. Number one, the PPA. They have got a signed PPA. Number two, subsidies. They received the subsidies for the hydrogen allocation, the first hydrogen allocation round in the U.K. Last but not least is the off-taker, and they have the off-taker. The Kimberly-Clark, the toilet paper and Kleenex production facilities in the U.K., will reduce carbon emissions by 28,000 tons per year thanks to this green hydrogen.
We're using that.
Yeah. Mike Benson, he's the sales director for Carlton Power. Unfortunately, he's not here today, but he wanted to be clear on why they selected Plug. Basically, this was not a random selection. We spent three years working on this project, and he gave us four main reasons. The first one is a flexible modular infrastructure that can be really sized to different megawatt sizes across.
We're using the five megawatt containerized solution for this.
Correct. Yeah. It's five megawatt containerized solution. The second reason is, this electrolyzer needs to come on and come off several times a day. Switch on, switch off several times a day to match timestamped renewable energy in the U.K. This is a core requirement for the subsidies. That was reason number two. Reason number three, they wanted a global supplier because this is the beginning of their projects. Number four, last but not least, long-term service agreement. Basically, we're really looking forward to get this partnership up and running.
No, and I remember too, it was really important because at the end of the day, this project is gonna be managed by Schneider Green Coat, right? Which is a investment fund in the U.K. We met with them also to talk about Plug and to talk about our financials. This is really important for them. And the type of things that we are doing right now and showing them that we can, you know, that we can improve, and we are improving the financials of the company with all the things that we talk about, also convinced them that working with Plug was the right thing to do. So we are a bankable company for this type of project, which is extremely important, right?
Exactly. Yep.
I will also add that we've discussed this before for the U.K., and I think Pierre-Etienne mentioned that as well. The U.K. has set up a different system because they are not part of the EU anymore. Their system, as I said earlier, is called the hydrogen allocation rounds. They've done round one already. The important thing that Mike told us, and correct me if I'm wrong if I didn't get this right from Mike when we were in London a couple of weeks ago, round one gives the producer the difference between hydrogen generated through, you know, basically brown hydrogen or gray hydrogen and green hydrogen. They get that difference. That already makes the project, you know, financially competitive, which I think is extremely important.
The other thing that I think is important for this system that they have created in the U.K. is that they have a certain amount of money that electricity users pay for, you know, green technologies. They have been able to separate that money from the budget from the country, from the government budget. That money does not get spent on other things. If you just take that money and put it in the budget of the country, probably it will get reshuffled. That money is especially and is allocated just for this type of projects. That guarantees that hard two will have the money and hard three will have the money. We are working with many, many companies on those allocations.
Yeah. In fact, Carlton Power and Schneider Green Coat are already looking at hard two subsidies for more, for the production facilities in the U.K.
Wonderful. Perfect. Benjamin, what did Cyril want to ask today?
No, we are really grateful to Cyril for actually making the effort. He was stuck five hours yesterday at the border and actually could not make it.
This is not a joke.
Yeah. He got stuck in the border between Canada and the US
, so. Exactly. Maybe I can say a few words about Hydrogen, what we're doing with them, and I can share a little bit what he shared on their project in Quebec. Hydrogen was founded in 2017. It's a hydrogen producer and developer that has been there for quite some time already. They have an incredible cap table. The investors are Trafigura, Hi24, we heard Pierre-Etienne before, CDPQ, Mirova, so big infrastructure funds. They also have Technipe. Cyril is a very seasoned CEO in the hydrogen industry because he was also the CEO of an electrolyzer company before founding Hydrogen. We have actually a big partnership going on with them.
We've partnered with them for some project developments in Finland. We've partnered with them for a project where we are producing hydrogen and methane in Germany, with green hydrogen, jointly. It's a company that we know well and a great partner. They have a project in Quebec, in Baie-Comeau. This is the largest project in Quebec to date. It's a 300 megawatt electrolyzer. It's a very mature project in the sense that it has secured the electricity, which is hydroelectricity from Hydro-Quebec, very competitive electricity. They have secured some, or they're in the process of securing some subsidies, and they have secured the off-take. The off-take is from a company called GOOPPC that is building and producing non-military explosives for mining and construction. They're producing green nitrate to have decarbonized explosives for non-military applications.
They wanna build green explosives.
They want to build green explosives. Exactly. We did this project that has not taken FID yet, but is in very good track to take FID. They are at the process where they're choosing who their provider of electrolyzer is going to be. We've done a lot of work with them for a long time, and we have been shortlisted. We're in the final rounds. I asked, you know, Cyril what I could say about that. He said that what makes Plug attractive is that we have obviously a competitive technology, but also proven technology, meaning it has been deployed. There are proof points that it works. We have that great relationship because we're working with him, we're developing projects with him, so he knows we understand what their requirements are.
I think that goes a very long way. We've been saying that in multiple ways all day long, but that's something that he stressed. It is a very highly advanced project. They expect to take FID probably at the end of next year, and we are now very well positioned to secure this potential order.
Have you mentioned that we buy hydrogen from them too?
Yeah. In Germany, in Velter. This is the, sorry, the hydrogen and methanation project in Germany.
Perfect. That's great.
Yes. This is a live project, a small one, but a real one.
Wonderful. Philippe, you've been meeting with a lot of customers lately. You know, what do you think we bring to the table to customers?
Just like Kimi mentioned, you know, like they're always the type of, the profile of companies that are looking to build large hydrogen projects are very, very professional and deep technically. We do support them quite a bit in their due diligence. You know, upfront, we'll beef with technical teams and explain why we believe our technology is best positioned to answer their needs, whatever they might be. A little bit further down the road, usually, you know, when we get shortlisted and they want to refine the project definitions, we'll have a team of engineers, multidisciplinary, join their front-end engineering or their basic engineering design package so that they can refine their overall project finances. You know, the way that I see it, it's more than a transaction. It's more of a partnership.
We do try to stand with clients the whole way. Of course, once the project reaches FID, you know, there's no substitution for experience. That's where we've shown that we can do it with all of those locations that we've deployed over the past 24 months. Helping the customer remove roadblocks when it comes to deployment. Finally, for these items to reach FID, we need to also ensure the bankability that, as I was mentioning, we need to ensure that we're gonna be able to produce the hydrogen like we're mentioning, with the ability that we're mentioning and the price we're mentioning. A combination of guarantees and LTSAs ensures that there's no surprises for the life of the projects, which is always over 10 years.
We work with them through the entire process.
Correct. We still.
This is, I think, the point that I was trying to make this morning. This process has a long time to happen, but we've been working with so many of them already for two, three years. We are right now at the end of that stage, right before FID, right before the projects are gonna get funded by companies like Hi24. By the way, the project that you were talking in Quebec is, you mentioned that, but I just wanted to kind of emphasize again that Pierre-Etienne, who was talking to us about how he decides if he invests in a project or not, has invested in this project. It is a real project. We're talking about real projects now. I think we are on time now.
I can open it to questions if anybody has a question for the team. No questions? I'll ask you a question then. How do you see the, you know, the, I've been talking about this all day, but you are there every day, Alistair. You meet with a bunch of customers. You went to Greece the other day to meet with a customer. I think, was that, was that to meet with a customer? No, but seriously, how do you see the market right now? Do you see things happening or, or?
Absolutely, Rosalie. I think you've been mentioning the Hydrogen Green Act in Europe. The transposition of Red Three in the different state members is key. We can see it in our pipeline. We discuss this on a weekly basis, but we have, you know, well over 150 megawatts in five megawatt containerized solutions. This is because they need to meet this new policy. I think the demand is just growing and we're here to deliver.
Those 150 megawatts, when do you think they'll go FID?
As long as you don't put it in my budget for next year, I think end of Q2. This is mainly due also, because of additional, due to additionality that, they need to take this into account and get these sites up and running before 2027.
You think I'm not gonna make that part of your budget for next year now? I think so. 150 megawatts, you said, right? Wonderful. The funnel is gonna be even bigger next time that we talk. How about you? What do you think about as the CSO of the company that the market is going and do you think projects happening or not, or, do you see activity?
No, we definitely see a pipeline that is way more qualified today than it was a few years back. I think we, as we were saying in the panel with Pierre-Etienne, we also see projects maturing because now they rely on external financing, project finance, which requires a different set of attributes than when the market is starting. I do believe that the market is maturing and we have a big number of potential orders in the funnel that can materialize. There are a number of projects where we are in the final rounds competing with one other player. There are other projects where we've been selected, but the project is still maturing.
We also have all these projects where we've been working for years now, like Carlton Power, where we are at the decision point and this is moving from pipeline to backlog pretty fast. This is a highly positive thing I think.
I have to say that we also have another set of projects that we don't know yet how they're gonna pan out, but there are companies in the DLX space that have talked openly about exiting the market. They also have projects that they were selected for. We'd had several customers come to us and say, "Hey, you know, this company's not gonna be our choice anymore because they're not gonna be in this market anymore. Can you come really quickly and do all the engineering and do all those type of things?" We don't have a lot. It's just happened, you know, recently, maybe in the last three weeks or so, but we are working through the opportunities that are opening up because there are companies that are exiting the market. This is a difficult market.
We talked about it before. Some companies, you know, were opportunistic. They just wanted to see, you know, if they could make a quick industry and a quick market with green hydrogen in the last three, four years. As they exit, it's an opportunity for us.
I think you're stressing a very important point. I was talking to the managing director of an infrastructure fund in the US, 10 days ago, about this, one of our former competitors exiting the market. He was telling me when we think about which type of electrolyzer players we want to pick for our projects, typically one thing is they need to have sustainable financials and this and that. There's another element that they don't always factor in, but they need to factor in, which is how committed is that company to the market. You can have a very large company that has a wide variety of business that decides that one day, "Yeah, this is nice, but actually I'm, it's not a core business for me.
I'm just gonna stop this and shut that initiative." They're not there to support their customers. Our customers know that we are there to support them with hydrogen, with anything that touches hydrogen and around. That's a big differentiator for us as well. I would add also the capacity to execute. Some people are making projections about what they can do with large projects, but when it comes to shove, how do you build 250 megawatts for a project while the investment we've made over the past few years, like Gigafactory in Rochester and this, you know, what you're seeing here, we're building them in serial production allows us to be able to deliver at scale. That is also a huge differentiator for us.
We are committed to this market. Hydrogen is Plug and Plug is hydrogen. This is what we're gonna do. I think we have a question. Oh, wonderful.
I was gonna ask that question, but I think you guys covered it a little bit. I think it's public knowledge that Accelera Cummins was the one which was announcing about, possibly thinking of, moving out of that business or maybe re-repositioning it. The question is, like a company like Cummins, which is pretty big, right? And they have a lot of strength and they had a decent product, I thought, but maybe not. When you go into that competitive environment with these kind of projects, what could be the reason that they are not seeing that kind of demand or growth, versus Plug maybe, which is probably, I can see that you have more interest, with future projects.
Is it just the product performance or is it, as you said, probably it's the legacy business which is kind of pulling them down, saying, "Okay, we are not getting enough profitability, so we'll hold on to this, for a later date"?
I have an opinion on that, but it's an opinion, right? I mean, I think that this is difficult. This is not an easy business. We are working really hard at it and we've made mistakes and we are rectifying some of those mistakes, but obviously financially, you know, it's taking a toll in the company. I think companies like Cummins, that are industrial companies, have much less tolerance for these type of situations, right? Sticking around when the market is not moving at the pace that you want. If it's not your core business and you can say, "You know what, let's just put it to the side. If I need to do a write-off," which they did a pretty, a pretty big write-off for this amount of money, "This is not looking good for us.
We have an industrial set of solutions that look much better. We thought this was gonna happen in a couple of years. It didn't. We move away, right? This is why I said before, you know, Plug is hydrogen and hydrogen is Plug. We, that's what we do and that's what we're gonna continue doing and we're gonna make it happen. We're gonna stick around and we're gonna figure out the way to make the market happen. When it starts growing much faster than it's growing right now, still growing right now. I mean, three years ago we sold $5 million in electrolyzers. This year it's gonna be $200 million in electrolyzers. If that is no growth, what's growth, right? The market is not moving at the pace that people thought. These companies are not willing to stick it.
They're exiting. Their loss are our win. I'll go for all those projects.
I would just add, I don't know what are the drivers of this specific company and how they approach that, but I would say as well, when you want to commit to a market, you also need to bring in the skills and the frameworks that allow you to compete in that market. One of the things we've realized very early on is that if we were going to be serious about the electrolyzer market, having the technology from Gainer was an incredible strength because they had a great technology, but we also needed to bring in the skill sets of the energy market, of the oil and gas market. That is why we've made some of the acquisitions we've made.
When you operate in a totally different industry as your main market and you do not necessarily have the same level of commitment, that also probably makes it a little bit harder. That is just, you know, not Cummins specific. It is more of a broader comment on one of the reasons I think we are being successful in this market today, is that specifically.
Good point. Okay. I think we are at time right now. Thank you so much, Philippe.
Thank you.
Thank you, Alistair.
Thank you.
Now we have a break. I almost forgot. It's a good thing that I look at the screen. We have a break. What is it? A 10-minute break. So 10 minutes, you can, you know, walk around, talk, and then we'll be back in 10 minutes.
Please find your seats and silence your devices. Our program will begin in five minutes. Please take your seats. Our program will begin in two minutes. Please welcome back to the stage Plug President.
Facility, which was started just as I come on board to Plug, as a permit electrolyzer plant with liquefaction. As we sit here today, you know, we have a very well-defined roadmap on how we, how we will build a plant and how we will take it from the project development team, and then go into like a conceptual feasibility study on the plant. During that conceptual feasibility study of the plant, the first phase, we'll start to kind of look at, we'll build up our basis of design. We'll do a heat and material balance, which will, that allows us to kind of look at our primary process blocks and size them accordingly. One of the key things that we're doing through all the early stages of plant development is trying to see, is it viable, right?
Is this plant gonna work? Do we have the right technology? Have we selected the right partners, the EPCs? And then really start to build an early budget for the project, right? And use like a stage gate process where we have, you know, a class four estimate, which is plus minus 50% on the estimating side and say, okay, this is where we think we're going. And then we take it through that stage gate and then hopefully bring it to yourself and Andy.
You mentioned the EPCs. I'm gonna ask you this question because 80% of the times that I sit down with customers that are looking at building these type of plants, they talk to me about, you know, the EPCs. They tell me, you know, because there are not that many. We planned to be operational. Louisiana, I felt like, oh, it's already on. Great. Wonderful. It kind of happened, you know, really, really quickly. I'm sure these lessons that you learned were applied to Louisiana. This is why it got built a little bit faster, right?
Yeah.
Right? We did not know and we learned. With the EPCs, kind of the same thing, right? The EPCs did not know.
It was a first.
We did time and materials and, you know, that one took us overrun. This is, this is what I think, and I deal with customers every day. This is what I think they value, right? 'Cause they go and say, you've, you've gone through that. You already made those mistakes. Andy, are you gonna end up doing the engineering panel after all, or is it gonna be Luke? Andy, perfect. I am gonna give Andy the stage. He's gonna cover this panel. That way I can get a little bit of a rest after the entire day. All yours.
I've got the stuff, huh? There you go, José.
All right.
This is the last panel. We practiced yesterday. I told them I'm gonna ask whatever questions I feel like since this is the last panel I'll ever be on. Karen, one of the things that I think's really cool what you are working on is machine learning and what it can mean for Plug in the future.
I think it's cool too. As background, I am a chemist.
Are you a chemist, Karen?
I'm a chemist by training.
Let me tell a story. Till likes it when I tell a story. I was at a DOE event.
Yeah.
Karen was a speaker and she was so irreverent and nobody in the DOE is irreverent. I said, I wanna hire her. Go ahead, Karen.
Anyway, what's fascinating about electrochemistry is for a hydrogen molecule, you create two electrons. Electrochemistry is inherently tied to data. When you're doing all this electrochemistry, you're always producing electrons, which of course you can track. I see people nodding. It's really, electrochemistry is inherently linked to data. Getting here to Plug, there's so much data, but we have to be smart about it. I was very fortunate, we were able to work with a university to develop machine learning algorithms and we are really using them now. In 2026, the reason it's exciting to talk about this is you won't see this in a product, but it's all happening behind the scenes. We have machine learning that we can test, we can use to see when some components might fail on a gen drive system.
We're going to be breaking in our stacks faster in production using less hydrogen and faster manufacturing throughput. We are looking at accelerating our testing by using machine learning to predict the future. What's fascinating about it is there isn't a big chemical tie to it. We can't say what chemistry is happening, but you look at the patterns and it's really fascinating. It really does work. I just want to say that we came to Plug and we set up a really nice underpinning of data here and we are going to, we're using very modern machine learning and it will be in your products next year. It's super exciting.
How's all that help you, Moni, as you develop new products and.
Yeah.
How do you really think about how it makes our electrolyzers so much better?
Yeah, I can never.
I promised a question online that you would tell 'em how you're gonna reduce precious metals.
Oh yes.
As part of this machine learning.
Absolutely. A couple of things. I mean, from the data standpoint, we work with our stacks with the best conditions possible. As soon as we go to the field, Ron and Sierra, we get thrown with surprises and thanks to the data that comes back from the field, we learn a lot of things. It's not any different in the electrolyzer space. We learn a lot about how the stack integrates with the system and how a customer uses the system and how it impacts the stack again. In terms of getting it back into your question on utilization of catalyst, the industry's about 5 gigawatts per ton of iridium. It extracts about 5 gigawatts, or at least it takes about 5 gigawatts per ton of iridium to make hydrogen.
There's only about seven to eight tons of iridium that gets excavated. If people can look up iridium excavation, it's actually a byproduct of looking for platinum and nickel. It's not easily found. It's a treasure hunt at the best. You have to kind of secure that iridium for scale-up of these electrolyzers and you have to generate as much hydrogen with that iridium. There's a lot of science behind reducing those iridium content in the electrocatalyst and actually making sure that the process scale-up doesn't waste a lot of iridium. The iridium that you put in the membrane actually ends up converting the water into hydrogen molecules. It's electrochemically active.
All of this is great stuff, but once it goes to the field, if the water's got impurities and things like that, then there's an interaction and we learn that from the data as well. It's easier to demonstrate, let's say, 10-18 gigawatts per ton in terms of iridium utilization. Eventually we wanna be at 30 by the end of this decade, 2030. We can show that in the lab. As soon as we go into the field, we start learning interactions and we start making our stacks robust. We start making our systems robust. I think kind of coming back into the picture, it's always great to demonstrate progress in the lab. How you learn in the field is where the biggest jump is.
I think as we have the number of electrolyzers we have, as you guys know, is a lot and increasing every year. We're getting a lot of the data back and making true progress, in the systems in the field. A long-winded answer.
Moni here, how long have you been around?
I shouldn't say that, should I? Twenty-five years on and off between batteries and fuel cells. So a lot of electrochemistry experience and chemical engineering, background as well.
You run all our stack stuff, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I run with an exceptional team in Concord, Rochester, and in Latham. Obviously you guys know that we acquired technologies from Gena and this technology is 30 years old and we have improved it over the years. There are so many million gigawatt hours of learning in this product. I am actually thankful for the team and all the scale-up activities that the Rochester team does with Paul Sullivan here. Congratulations guys. Great job so far.
My buddy Steve, how long have you been around?
I started with Plug in 2012.
Okay. 2012. And we've had you figure out the design of our, there was electrolyzers that run in Georgia. Who designed them?
That was my team. Yep.
That was your team.
Absolutely.
With Mani's team staff.
Yep. Absolutely. We took it in as a component.
Steve, you, before that, you worked on our GenFuel systems, which you still have responsibility for.
Yep.
How do you think about all this data that comes in? 'Cause now you got data coming in from New Zealand.
Already have with such a large fleet, we have almost every variable actively playing out daily, whether it's a high demand upload, upstream wind, upstream solar, downstream natural gas coming in, whether it's hot, cold, good running pumps, old pumps, those kinds of things. We can see in real time each dynamic as it plays throughout the system. We can make trade-offs on that to decide what we wanna deploy and where so we can optimize the efficiency of the molecule for the client, but also for us as the distributed network.
We're really moving Karen into predictive maintenance?
Yes, it's exciting.
It's exciting.
Yes.
Luke, you and Jeff Brown and Jessica are working on hydrogen efficiency. How's all this data? And maybe tell us why hydrogen efficiency is important.
Yeah.
Especially versus maybe some of the competitors and how you're thinking about it.
Yeah. So, cryogenic hydrogen, you know, making hydrogen a liquid, a cryogenic liquid is wonderful. It's also very challenging. It boils at, you know, very, very low temperatures, which means it's really hard to hold and store and move and transform. And so when we talk about efficiency, we're talking about keeping that molecule as a liquid as long as possible until we wanna transform it and we wanna use it. If we let it warm up too fast or you don't do a good job of storing it, you'll, you know, it'll vaporize, it'll turn into a gas, it'll build pressure and you'd have to vent it off, boil off, right? So efficiency is super important to, you know, maximizing, you spend all this cost making a molecule, making it a liquid.
I wanna make sure I move it, get it to the customer and let them consume it, right? Or it's just wasted, you know, cost and money. You know, what we've done, kind of some of the discussions earlier today as well, is that you have this kind of end-to-end network and all this data that you've started to collect out of it. You start to really understand which levers and which pieces really make an impact and which do not, right? That helps us, you know, be more cost-effective. It helps us deliver a better product to our customers. What we see is things like, you know, how and when do I move the molecule? How do I schedule my routes? You know, what is the best way to distribute it?
When should I run the plant and when I shouldn't run the plant? How does that affect the gen fuel design? You know, cryogenic pumps want a certain quality of liquid. They want a certain, you know, a set of conditions to operate optimally. If I don't, I'm not sensitive to that, you'll have a very inefficient operation. It's very complex, complicated. It's a fascinating problem though to think about how you have really the entire chain you're starting to pull the levers with. If I don't have access to that, that makes it really hard. If I give Steve's gen fuel the wrong quality of liquid or super warm, you know, or don't do a good transfer, there's nothing he can do in some cases. You know, the efficiency's gonna be what it is, right?
By having the whole chain, that really lets you start to lean in and pull the levers and optimize everything, right?
Luke, the way I look at efficiency is it saves us money. It also means each of our plants really are producing more hydrogen.
You gotta.
Yeah.
Effectively for customers. It's really important. It is critically important.
Right.
We'll do a lightning round. I will start with the veteran here of Plug.
Second veteran.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me, Moni, what excites you the most in 30 seconds about the work you get to do?
Yeah. I, first of all, enjoy working with the team, chatting with the new challenges. There are particularly two topics that we're very proud of, especially connecting an electrolyzer stack to a renewable intermittency space requires the stack to turn down a lot, which means the stack needs to have specific chemistry to be able to turn down the hydrogen all the way down. We have to actually manage the hydrogen crossover. We have to manage the chemical degradation that comes along with turning down the electrolyzer stack. I'm pretty excited about it. We have patterns that have come out in that space and we've actually demonstrated a lot in that space. Andy, I think I'm almost done, so I'll leave it to you.
One last, tell me, how much improvement you're gonna make in the efficiency of the stack?
Yes. Thank you for that. Normally we are about, the industry's about 48-50 kilowatt hours per kilogram and we're at the low forties, which is about 20% improvement in efficiency. This is big. This is not just incremental, right? This is transformational because 20% efficiency increase means 20% more hydrogen, to your point, for the same renewable power that's dumped into that electrolyzer stacks. That's a lot in terms of levelized cost of hydrogen. The durability, we're also working on durability to make sure we reduce the levelized cost of hydrogen there as well.
Just a quickie, Moni. You heard all day from folks about the biggest costs at electrolyzer plants for efficiency, and Moni's fixing that problem. Steve, what are you most proud of?
I think I'm most proud and most excited of the work we're doing at our test facility that we've launched for the first time here. We're breaking ground. We have concrete board and we have equipment landed at a facility where we'll have a fully set up GenFuel infrastructure with a completely instrumented cryogenic tank, onsite liquefier, and a whole host of various compression equipment available to us. We're really able now to dial in exactly on the life cycle of that molecule as it first becomes the coldest hydrogen, all the way through it becomes that high pressure gas that the customer utilizes. We'll get a lot of learning from being able to narrow in on it. You'll see a lot of changes in our GenFuel architecture because of that.
Cool. Karen, beyond machine learning, you can take it another step then.
In 2025, we worked a lot on automation, and I think you'll be very impressed. We're going to do a lot of automation next year, a lot of equipment rolling in and looking forward to improving the quality and taking the products to a new level with automation, which will also produce a lot of data, which will be exciting too.
Yes. Luke.
More data.
Last but not least.
I think two things excite me. One is I think you're at such an interesting inflection point of where you've built this network that you can leverage in ways you haven't thought about. I think the other piece too is I think we have a team that all is really dialing in and focusing in on critically important things to us and to our customers in the industry. Having that alignment and motivation and drive, I mean, you, when those teams are gelling, that's when you make headway.
I would say our lead director will tell me he's most excited about the virtual power plant your team's building.
Me too.
On that note, we're gonna take some questions for these folks. Any questions?
This is Samir again.
Yeah.
Will you explain the iridium value chain and, if you want to make advances in getting into that chain?
Yeah. I'll, yeah, the iridium value stream, kind of coming back to the point. There's gonna be seven tons per year kind of activity going up to the 13. We don't see that peaking beyond 13, which means we're gonna have to reduce the iridium loading significantly. There are multiple ways of looking at it. You look at, you know, how do you distribute the iridium in dispersion in terms of ink formulation, in terms of support structures. Also, how do you make the ink? How do you formulate it so that you don't waste a lot of ink in a roll-to-roll process? We're actually attacking all of those angles, but we're trying to get down, I mean, to get to the 30 gigawatts per ton number I mentioned, you have to be sub 0.15 milligrams per centimeter square.
That's kind of the target that we have in our minds at this point in time.
Is that a 30 gigawatt magic number or can you exceed that?
Good question. It depends on how much you wanna scale. How do we look at how many electrolyzers are going to be out there in the next five years? Your utilization of that iridium has to match up with the scaling of electrolyzers. We have a rough ballpark number that we're gonna have the leading market share for electrolyzers. We're kind of working within that assumption that we're gonna have to be within that space at this point.
Thank you. Good luck.
Other questions for this group? I see one over here.
Yeah, I guess I just wanted to follow up on that test facility that you're all launching and maybe you could expand a little bit more on specifically what you're looking at testing and what that might do to the end product. Thanks.
Yep. Sure. The test facility is in our Spokane facility out in Washington, and it has all of the equipment that we use today, but we're also introducing a host of different technologies that haven't been launched into our product line yet. This includes different compression styles, different pump vendors, and it also with the liquefier. We can modulate what's actually happening in the tank instead of just seeing it play out in real time. We know there's consequences out there. Like Luke said, not all hydrogen is delivered equally, right? There's warm and there's cold liquid hydrogen. Depending on what you get consistently at site, you can use different equipment. We want to be able to see that in real time in our own walls and get the data and know how to produce it.
I think one important item, it's right by the university, Washington State University campus.
Yes.
We really do collaborate.
Yeah.
That campus, you have professors who are the leaders in cryogenics in the world. Our team collaborates with them, and it's been a real beneficial collaboration. On that note, Jose, it's time for your team to come up here to take questions. Thanks everybody. I appreciate it. I thought, I think I said I would host and let you guys.
Exactly.
Direct the questions. I'll lose my seat. Any questions for this team up here? We have one here. Dendrinos at RBC. I wanted to go back to the $8 billion funnel and maybe you could expand a little bit on what that looks like. I guess maybe the, maybe the tenor, what can we see potentially becoming out in the next couple of years versus longer dated opportunities? Thanks.
That's mine. The $8 billion funnel is, as we have discussed before, it's a funnel that we've been building for the last three or four years. Many of the opportunities, the opportunities that we wanted to move up to the funnel were opportunities that, you know, we understand where they're going with the different items that we've been discussing the entire day that are necessary to get a project to fruition, to FID. It is difficult to know what projects are gonna be, you know, converting to FID or not. FIDs and getting a project to conversion, it's a lot of things need to come together, right?
I'm gonna say that, if, you know, if I had to, you know, guess, it's probably, if you, if you think about, you know, one of the Allied Green Ammonia projects coming to FID, which we believe they, they will. You think about what Alfred said, that, you know, we will, we will get orders early because we are the, the long lead time. That can make a huge difference by itself, right? I mean, you're talking about 3 gigawatts just in one of the projects. That is one of those step changes that we could see. We also see that there are projects in the 100-200-300 megawatt that are very close to that. Some of them with some of the companies that are, we are already working with, right?
When you really think about refineries, 25 megawatts or 100 megawatts is a pile-up for them. They need much more than that. We expect that we will convert a fair amount of the funnel. I don't wanna give a number, honestly, because if I give you a number, you probably are gonna hold me to that. I don't have anything to prove that all of those projects are gonna go to FID. As they go FID, you will know. We will make big, big announcement like we did with Carlton, and you will see, you know, how we progress, in time.
I would say, Jose, they are progressing.
They are what?
They are progressing. You have people who have input power, who have output power, who have offtake.
That's what I was saying, that those projects that we have in there is because we've been working with them and we know they have the elements that they need: power, land. They are closed or they already have government funding and they are closed or they already have offtake. With those, you know, you put together a project and then it goes FID. And there are many of them that are basically right there.
Yeah. I mean, you, you've talked today about the fact that this is a real funnel versus all the excitement in 2022.
Exactly.
Yeah. Next question. I'll get you next. I'm sorry.
Two, two questions actually. Paul, do you want to make updates to that slide that shows profitability in 2027, 2028 based on this expanded funnel?
I will next year.
Okay. The next question is for the energy management applications. You already have an installed base. Is there any plan to go back to your existing customers with already deployed solutions to say that you can add to this with your energy management capabilities?
I think you.
I could not hear the question really well. The what?
It's difficult here because you're behind the speaker. So you have to really.
Basically, can you upsell to your existing customers?
Yeah. I think absolutely. I mean, our customers have invested in infrastructure, in operations. They're using hydrogen. Ways that we can work with them to provide more value around the energy on their facilities, like we talked about this morning, opening up capacity or helping them qualify for other types of incentive programs with the grid, anything like that, absolutely. You know, we'd be trying to work with them, 100%.
Yeah. I think there we go back there.
Thank you, everyone. I guess maybe just to go back to the pipeline, could you maybe elaborate a little bit on what that looks like from a geographical basis? I guess, has the shift in the company's like financial position really helped make things a lot more realistic on that?
I didn't hear the beginning of the question.
The question is about the pipeline, Jose, about geographical distribution.
Oh, geographical.
As well as a question about the stronger financials help you with customers.
Yeah. So.
I don't know why I can.
We have you a little bit closer to the speakers, but now we can hear it better. I think they changed it. The majority of the projects that we have right now in this funnel, in this pipeline, are projects that are in Europe. We discussed that in the U.K. as well. We just closed one. We have projects obviously in Australia. You have, you know, Allied Green in Australia, but we have other projects also in the pipeline there. We have a couple of outliers there that could be really big, Uzbekistan. Customers saying that they're gonna, they're gonna continue buying. We heard new customers on why they buy. We are gonna have also, and I mentioned that this morning, but, you know, a very good profile for the margin of the company.
Yes, we have a strong funnel there too. Okay. There we go. We got a question here.
Thanks, guys. On the electrolyzers, these big 2 gigawatt, 3 gigawatt projects, can you remind us how the revenues and the cash flow would kind of work with such a large project like that in terms of the phasing and how that would flow through?
I think that's you, Paul. It's typically you don't deliver it all in one big chunk in one short period of time. It's over a period of time. Two things happen. First of all, we work with the customers to set up a cash flow stream where they pay deposits upfront and then they make milestone payments over the period of time as we deliver and deploy equipment and work through the processes. Then commensurate with that, typically projects like that scale, we would do revenue over time as a percentage of completion. We will recognize the revenue as we kind of build it and deploy it and work through the milestones over that duration. That's generally how that works.
Perfect. And then, material handling, sounds like it's going well in the U.S., but is there any particular reason why internationally you maybe haven't taken, you know, the products to Europe or to Asia?
Can I answer that?
Yeah.
We do have the products in Europe. We have, and Asda was here, you know, a couple of years ago. We have installations in the U.K. with Asda. We just won two big projects with BMW in Germany, similar to what we do with BMW here. They know that they can use the technology. Having said that, you know, the growth that we see in Europe for material handling at this moment is not what we see here in the U.S. The reason is, there are a couple of reasons mainly. You gotta have a business case. The productivity business case needs to be there, and you gotta have the hydrogen available. In the U.S., you have many more companies that have larger distribution centers. You have Amazon, you have Walmart, the distribution centers are generally larger, okay?
200 to 300 forklifts. We're going even to a lower number, especially you have special cases like freezers. You can even go to a much lower number. In general, you need a certain amount of fuel cells on site. The other thing that you need is that they are used, you know, with high utilization. Like you, you really move product through. If you just have one shift, it's really difficult to justify, you know, a more expensive technology when you can charge batteries. What happens in Europe is that distribution centers are more distributed. You have more distribution centers, more regional, and they are smaller. The size by themselves, they are smaller. Even Amazon sites are smaller in Europe, okay? That's a challenge for the business case.
The other side of the equation is you gotta have hydrogen that you can deliver to the site and needs to be, it needs to be economical. In the US, we have liquid hydrogen. We actually added to the liquid hydrogen availability in the US. In Europe, you don't have liquid hydrogen. You gotta deliver gaseous hydrogen. Deliveries of gaseous hydrogen are more expensive. The hydrogen, the molecule itself is also more expensive when you, in the European market. Those two things really make the business case a little bit more difficult. Not impossible. There are cases where we have the business case. Andy mentioned Leipzig with BMW, the Munich project with BMW, another one of the plans that we're gonna transform this year with BMW, Asda.
We have projects, but the growth is gonna be a little bit more contained until we have hydrogen at the right price, and then the cost of the technology goes down, we're gonna be able to achieve more, more, more opportunities. You took me to a site in Spain where they had electrolyzer, right?
What was that? Sorry.
You took me to a site in Spain where they had an electrolyzer.
Yeah. We went to this site, with a company called Stef. This company specifically is a frozen products company. So batteries don't work really well there. That's where we had, you know, an advantage for that particular site, okay? The other thing is they didn't really, we didn't really have good price hydrogen for them in Madrid. This is actually right outside of Madrid, next to the airport. They said, "Hey, why don't we try with hydrogen generation on site?" The advantage here is not anymore, you know, electricity or no electricity is batteries don't work really well in, in, inside of, of a freezer. Basically we install a small electrolyzer that produces gas, then we put it into a buffer container and then pressurize it and put, and put it into the system.
The amazing thing about this project is that we built it on a mezzanine. Basically, the electrolyzer is on a mezzanine with storage on the mezzanine, and it's 100 meters distance from a military base. We were able to pull the permits, we were able to build it, and the site is there running and customer is happy. We do have opportunities that we can make it happen, but I don't wanna get you excited that we're gonna get a big, big growth in Europe with material handling. Electrolyzers in Europe are what's gonna make us grow.
Next question. Yes.
Thank you. I'm Amy from Delta Taiwan. As being a supplier with Plug, what would you say is the most meaningful way you suggest as a supplier we can work with Plug to deliver the customer value to your customer in 2026 or afterward? Thank you.
Should I answer that?
Hey, Dean, Dean.
Why don't you answer that, Dean? Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the biggest thing is, similar to what I'm focused on here for our customers, is on-time delivery, high-quality product, and cost. Rick, who runs our supply chain and procurement organization, has a fantastic team that is hell-bent focused on that and working with suppliers who fall short on that to get to that level. I can certainly work with you and get you in contact to be a supplier, but if you wanna know what the requirements are and what you need to do to be successful, that's it.
Dean, Delta's actually doing some advanced work with Rick.
Yeah.
they are really the, you know, premier power system company in the world. They bought the company I own, so I know that.
They know how to invest.
I know that for the stationary product long-term, we think Delta's a perfect partner.
Yeah.
From a technology point of view, and, you know, I can testify for them.
Yeah.
A lot of my people, old people work for them.
Yeah, absolutely.
Any other questions? There's one more. We.
Yeah, I guess one more here. On the stationary products, on the earnings call, you mentioned, kind of entering into the data center space. I guess if you could just elaborate a little bit more on, you know, what the timeline is, what the opportunity set looks like for that.
Yeah. I'm one minute to take it.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I do not want to overstate it. And, you know, I try to touch on it a bit today. Hydrogen's always a challenge. You know, electrolyzers and material handling's gonna dominate this business for the next five years. There are opportunities we're looking for providing auxiliary power backup with the partner we're working with. That being said, if you go back to my original talk today, as pipelines in Europe become more available, José talked about the challenge of gas and liquid in Europe. As that becomes more available, you can really start thinking about how you can use our stationary products as peaker products at data centers. It would make economic sense. And José, you know, I expect when you hand over the reins to the next CEO, you'll be talking about how this market's a big part of you, part of the future of Plug.
Absolutely.
I do not think you'll last 17 years.
17 years.
I know his, I know how old he is.
I know.
He looks good for his age. He looks really good for his age. I really appreciate folks who are on the line digitally. I really appreciate all the folks who devoted a day to spend with us at this facility. I think it's clear that we have a great new leader, one that I 100% support, one that I'm thrilled with, one that'll do things, some things much, much better than I do. I am really pleased with that. There's a great, bright future for José. And José, we have a great leader to take us there. To be fitting, you really should close out the event.
Thank you. Thank you, Andy. First of all, you know, following Andy on this role is an honor. I have to say that I've worked with Andy for 12 years now. I've been, you know, in the business for 35 years and mainly selling as, as I said at the beginning, my passion. I don't think I've learned as much as I've learned with the team at Plug, with Andy at Plug. This has been, you know, an incredible ride. I think it's gonna get even more fun going forward. I think the important thing here is, as we've been talking about, we've done the right things based on where the market is today. Plug is set up for success. We have an incredible opportunity with a funnel that we know we're gonna be able to convert into growth.
Growth is gonna bring profitability, and we're gonna be able to meet the targets that we need to meet. That's what we're gonna, I'm gonna concentrate on, executing on the, on the strategy that we have, getting the company to profitability, and always, always having customers at the center of our strategy. With that, I really appreciate that everybody came to, to the, to the symposium. I really thank all the, all the panelists, all the customers that actually came here to talk to us. Everybody online, thank you so much for attending the symposium. You know, until next year, we have another fun one. Thank you.