Hi everybody, thank you for joining us this afternoon. Our next presenting company is Zeo Energy Corp, which is traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol ZEO. Here to tell you more about the company is Zeo's CEO, Tim Bridgewater.
Thanks, Tom. Thanks for joining us today. A little information on Zeo Energy . We are a residential solar sales and installation as well as maintenance company based in New Port Richey, Florida. We took the company public via SPAC in March of 2024 and have been trading on the NASDAQ since that time. We recently completed our second acquisition. We made an acquisition post the public merger of some assets in our space that were from a bankrupt company called Lumio. Absorbed those at the end of last year, and this year we have just closed on acquiring an energy storage company based in Houston called Heliogen . Let me give you a little bit of background about our company. This is a safe harbor forward-looking statement, meaning you can't trust anything I say, but you can to some extent. Zeo highlights what's different about our company.
We are founder-owned and operated. Insiders own over 60% of the company. We're dedicated to the growth of the business and continuing to see it prosper. We have a sales team of about 300 sales reps who go out and knock doors. That is the strength and the engine of our business. We've been profitable since 2019 with positive EBITDA. We didn't need to raise capital when we went public, so we just went public with the SPAC sponsor, Energy Spectrum, which was a private equity group out of Dallas-Fort Worth area. We have historically grown better than the industry up till 2023 when high interest rates started to turn the industry down and there were a lot of shakeups, a lot of bankruptcies like Sunergy, Sunova, Mosaic in the industry.
Went through a lot of turmoil because of high interest rates and bad cash management and huge corporate overhead for some of those big public companies. We are now poised for the market recovering and growing in the coming years ahead of us. We are methodical in terms of the states that we're looking at. We're in about six states with substantive operations of sales and installation and maintenance. We haven't had to put on a lot of debt onto the balance sheet, so we're a fully funded business in that regard. A little bit about our sales organization. The way that we're operating is we have dedicated salespeople, 300 of them in the field. They go out in the summers primarily, and then they'll do blitzes, but it's a seasonal business for us today. We have a manager that oversees a group of closers and setters.
The setters go out and knock doors and get appointments set, and then the closers will come in and close about half of the presentations that they make to those customers. We're selling consumers on solar panels on their house and batteries in their garage to provide them lower cost of power than the utility company is currently charging. With the growth in utility pricing in the future, we feel like this business will go on for a long time. It's a large TAM, but a small penetration right now. The strength of our business is really this engine of the sales force that we send out. In addition, we've been working on, as I mentioned earlier, the acquisitions are a part of our growth strategy. There's been a lot of orphaned systems out in the marketplace, so we can provide maintenance to those contracts for a fee.
We're also acquiring and moving into diversification to the commercial energy storage space. We're doing that through this acquisition of Heliogen and providing molten salt and compressed CO2 storage technologies to AI data centers, large manufacturers, mining companies who need energy storage to make the dispatchable power more available to them. As power demand increases in the country, that's been a greater demand for long-duration, meaning over nine hours of energy storage for those customers. We also have an affiliated partnership with a leasing company where we provide the long-term leases, 25-year leases, so we provide returns for tax equity investors. The customers are solid 740 FICO score customers, residential business.
A lot of companies like Sunrun and Sunova have made a business of that kind of segment in the industry where they're providing financing, and that's one of the areas of growth that we will have in our business. Right now, we're dependent on a couple of other finance partners, but we want to take more of the financial benefits on our balance sheet over time and grow in the third-party financing for the leases. The big beautiful bill changed the incentives to own versus lease a system on a home for the consumers, and the incentive now is to lease so you can get the maximum benefit of the tax credits over the next three to four years.
Energy efficiency, additional services are also part of our acquisition strategy as we look forward about how to grow our business and provide more offerings to the homeowner, as well as providing services in the C&I, the commercial and industrial, or behind-the-meter industry for power users. Our value proposition to the customers is that we are selling them a system that should be a lower cost of power for them, certainly over the long term, if not immediately, but that they can fix their understanding of their cost for power instead of being subject to the increases that the utilities have and the volatility in that market. I think most people are looking for ways that they can avoid the risk of the grid in Texas and California.
They've suffered a lot of blackouts or problems, fires, grid failures, and people can own their own power, produce it on their home or at their business site, and not be as dependent on the grid or the utility to deliver their power. Also, customers can monetize any excess power that they produce during the day and get credits for it at night, or they can put a battery in so that they can be completely independent of the grid and just pay for a connection fee in some cases. Because we're vertically integrated, we sell, we finance, we install, and we maintain. Customers can work with us, so they know that it's a one-stop shop for anything.
A lot of the sales groups that are out selling don't have a sort of responsibility after they make the sale, and we are vertically integrated, and we think that is better for the customer. In terms of the market right now, the U.S, lags behind the rest of the world in many cases for penetration of rooftop solar on residences. Germany has a 12% penetration, Netherlands 24%, Australia 38%, California itself, where we're at, is over 20% penetration. They mandate that solar be built on new homes, and the market's going to continue to grow even past the ITC sunset, which probably peters out in about 2029 for residential customers. Battery storage, coincidentally, continues in terms of the ITC benefits until 2032 when it starts to trail off and it is eliminated in 2032 and is limited in 2034.
We have a lot of catching up to do to get to a 10% penetration. That's basically 5 million homes that currently have solar on them in the U.S. Doubling that to 10 million isn't a stretch, and that's the growth that we see going forward, especially as interest rates come down, it makes it more attractive. By comparison, two companies that you can compare us to, one is Sunrun, which is the 800-pound gorilla in our space, much larger market cap, obviously, but they have a lot of debt. We have pretty small debt on the balance sheet. We didn't need it because we were cash flowing when we went public, and the acquisition that we just made helped to strengthen our offering or cash on our balance sheet.
SunPower went bankrupt and then was bought out by Complete Solar, and they have a similar market cap but are heavily leveraged comparatively speaking. We think those are some comparables you can look at when you're looking at Zeo Energy . When I say we're fully funded, we've been positive EBITDA in our history. Going public, more GAAP expenses and things we have to recognize, stock that we give out and things like that. In 2024, we had a positive EBITDA but a negative income. This year, we're halfway through. The second half of the year is when about 65% of our revenues and profitability comes in because we're seasonal as a business. We also took a big hit with the Sonova bankruptcy. They went bankrupt and we had exposure like a lot of companies in our space did, and we've kind of gotten through that now.
Overall, the market turmoil in the last two years in the residential solar space looks to have been put behind us now, and both our sector and our company as well are poised for great growth in the coming years. We look at different aspects of our business to grow. Number one is we're growing organically. We're recruiting more salespeople. We're opening new states. We're looking at acquisition of sales organizations or vertically integrated EPCs in particular states and growing organically in that regard. We're also exploring complementary services for the home in roofing, HVAC, other services that the homeowner needs so that we can be able to provide a larger suite. We're expanding also into servicing existing customers who have solar in the markets that we're in, and we can go in and have a profit center around providing services to them.
As mentioned, we've made two acquisitions since going public. One of the assets of a bankrupt company called Lumio, which closed in November of 2024, and the Heliogen acquisition, which just closed on August 8th, which I'll have Cannon speak a little bit to, our CFO who's here with me going forward. That's how we view the world in terms of growing our business. Here are the market trends for what we believe benefit our business. We are a solar and storage company as we move forward, looking into the C&I space for solar and renewable energy storage, as well as the residential space, which is our core market. There are seven drivers of our growth. There's continued load growth, driven hugely by data centers, but also by just rising demand for power, which is going to increase the cost of energy and the demand.
Long-term economics favor PV solar, which is one of the lowest costs, if not the lowest cost of energy production available. Utilities continue to raise their prices, which helps us to provide cost savings to our customers on an immediate as well as a long-term basis as they look forward in terms of having a 25-year fixed price that they can know what they're paying for their power. Additionally, utilities are starting to warm up to virtual power plants where they take the capacity of the batteries in the homes and in the commercial businesses, and they'll pay for that capacity on a subscription model. Coupling that with the residential solar provides resilience. It helps the grid management and is an additional source of capital for either the TPOs that own the systems or the homeowners themselves.
We also established a TPO ourselves to help support our business model where we are providing long-term leasing. We bring in tax equity investors, and we provide them depreciation and ITCs, investment tax credits, where they then get the benefit of that non-cash return, as well as some cash return on their investment. We have a long-term financing structure available for our customers to enjoy a lower cost of power. The energy storage market looks very, very favorable by comparison to the traditional wind and solar industry. The big beautiful bill allowed energy storage, which utilities need, homeowners need, commercial companies need. They allowed the ITCs to extend all the way to 2034. Energy storage also, which is a segment that we're growing into, has great growth potential. Finally, there are a lot of orphan projects out there with the bankruptcies of SunPower, Sunrun, Titan, Lumio, the other large companies.
There are a lot of homeowners and customers, commercial customers that need maintenance and support for their solar installations and batteries, and we can provide that in the markets that we have established our service teams in, which is where we're selling right now. I'll jump ahead to this slide. There are slides in the appendix. I get to 38. Thank you. The projection of load growth, I think, underscores why you should invest in Zeo Energy and in this sector. The insatiable appetite for power, for Bitcoin and AI data centers is on the... I heard there's... One analyst said there's $240 billion of projects right now being built to try and satisfy that growth and the demand for load. There's been $29 billion of price increases this year for just the incremental increase in power prices for customers across the board.
I think the more that you see AI and the NVIDIAs of the world going to hire 1,500W chips, that growth is just going to continue for the foreseeable future. We are a small piece riding that wave, and we feel like the growth is baked into our business. Let me turn a few minutes over to Cannon Holbrook, our CFO, to talk about the acquisition that we made of Heliogen .
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon. Heliogen was brought to us as an opportunity, primarily as a balance sheet play for us to begin with. I'll segue back to Tim on this. We paid about $10 million in stock, and we received about $14 million in cash. For us internally, as Tim saw in the financials, it's been a tough year or two for the solar industry space. Being able to bring that cash onto our balance sheet at a reasonable price was super helpful to us. What we see with this Heliogen acquisition is we paired back the business. We've kept a small group of engineers in the power space, this engineering team. What Tim didn't say is that he has experience working in utility and commercial scale power implementations, solar implementations, etc.
With this move into the storage space, we feel like we have an opportunity with this small team of individuals to be able to work with companies to drive storage into these AI data centers. Heliogen, just as a quick background, if you aren't familiar with them, when you drive from here to Las Vegas, you see those massive solar fields that they're shutting down, that glass. That's what Heliogen did, was they built that. The basis of what they built was to shine solar into, just like you see in Vegas or south of Vegas there, into a pot where they heat molten salt. That was what Heliogen's business was. The solar array that they used, the mirrors that they used to heat that up didn't work. That business is really what failed and cost them a lot of money to put that together.
However, their core business of creating that salt, that molten salt and storage is where the secret is. Tim's going to explain that, but as we walk through what the opportunity is here with them, it's being able to say, hey, they have this expertise in energy storage. Molten salt is one of those opportunities. Compressed CO2 is another opportunity to use that business or use that model and use those engineers to drive the needs that we're seeing in the industry and the space today. That's where that is. I'll turn that back over to you.
Thanks, Cannon. This is ticking down six minutes. Is this just to go to quick Q&A, or do I need to get Q&A in the six minutes? Oh, okay. Let me just run through quickly the slides then, and we'll open up to some Q&A here. Basically, you should look at our company as a residential and commercial storage business in the renewable energy space. We provide engineering and consulting services, power, heat, water systems, but primarily focus on storage solutions for commercial and utility scale projects. Compressed CO2 and molten salt, I'll talk briefly about, and then I'll leave the deck available to you. You can kind of go into more in-depth analysis. We have a lot of information in the appendix for you to go. The salt storage is highly efficient when you go over a nine-hour storage period. We have the technology and the team with this acquisition to provide storage. If you have a big solar field, you can store the power and create base load power, which you will pay a premium for, versus $0.029 power from just PV itself or from wind.
The storage makes it highly valuable from those production facilities. Right now, you can't get power from the utility. If you can build these things behind the meter, then you've got a great business model. We're building these on behalf of customers, doing the engineering and technology design right now with Heliogen. The second technology that we're going to be deploying, which is very exciting, because both of these are below $0.10 levelized cost of energy for round-the-clock base load power, which is really quite phenomenal in terms of compared to what's available today. In the CO2, this is gas, compressed CO2 that becomes a liquid. That energy is stored as a liquid. When you gasify it, it spins a turbine. Very simply, it also throws off some cold water, and that can go into cooling a data center. We take the heat to help run our storage process.
It's highly efficient, almost 85% efficient RTE, round-trip efficiency. We're working on these two systems with potential customers to deploy these in the U.S., market primarily. This is a 100 MW facility that's being built in China. There's a company that's got a 20 MW facility built in Italy, and they're doing a project now in Wisconsin. This technology, I think, will get a strong foothold for anybody that demands longer duration storage. Lithium is pretty competitive in the four to six-hour storage size, so it's harder to compete because they're driving costs down pretty dramatically. When you go to nine-hour, ten-hour storage, this is the technology that's going to win the day, I think. I'll leave the last four minutes for some Q&A.
I can get started. If anybody has questions, just feel free to raise your hand and I'll bring the mic over to you. Obviously, a lot going on, Tim, with the new projects that you have here. As you think about the sales function for a separate but related business, how are you identifying opportunities? Talk about maybe the go-to-market strategy for this new offering that you guys are getting into.
Great question. With Heliogen, we have a pipeline that they were working on already. We have an existing pipeline of projects with some significant customers that are going to spec our technologies into their existing projects. We have retained some business development people from that team to continue selling and marketing. We're going to go to shows for the mining sector, for steel and cement manufacturing, our natural partners as well. AI data centers are just, I mean, the demand is insatiable. We're in conversations on several of those projects now with developers and with hyperscalers to consider this technology. Google made an investment in this technology, and we know we're on the right track. They vetted it. They decided it's the right long-term, long-duration energy storage technology going forward. We're excited about that.
Is it just for the webcast so folks can hear it at home? Appreciate you bearing with us. Did you say that it was $0.10 per kW hour for 24/7 solar with backup CO2?
That's right. Yeah. The levelized cost of energy, production plus the storage that you can run for 24 hours, is below a $0.10 cost per kW hour.
Does that include sort of a 24-hour backup beyond that? Because sun doesn't always shine, right? We don't always have nine hours. Sometimes you need a day or so of storage.
It is more expensive if you say I want to build a PV field, for example, to fuel the entire storage. Whereas the mix is you are going to buy off-peak power when it's cheap, and you are going to buy during the summertime, you get negative pricing. The battery actually works as an arbitrage vehicle to get the lower cost of energy. Sometimes the utilities will pay you to take power and to charge our battery. At off-peak times, it will be cheaper for us to get that power to charge the battery. Then we deploy it constantly out of the system, and the CO2 is cycling through, or the molten salt, in the case of the molten salt, is constantly providing the power to run the turbine 24/7.
If you were completely islanded, for example, in a mining facility, it depends on how much the civil costs are from the remote location. That aside, you are probably at about $0.13- $0.14 LCOE. That is, I think, sustainable for a 30-year period. The thing about lithium is lithium degrades 1%- 2%, whereas this is constant for 30 years. You do not have the degradation as well in the storage. As a long-term energy storage technology, it is a much better play for the end users of the power.
We have time for one more question. I think I saw another hand raised. Perfect.
Hi, Tim. My question is on the storage part. Heliogen, my understanding, they specialize in the C&I, that sector. Is that right? They don't specialize in residential customers.
That's right. Yeah, residential storage, those batteries are commodities. There's lots of different companies producing them, and we're selling them into the homes and installing them, then looking at ways to monetize the capacity. On the commercial side, they're larger projects. It's a different, two different businesses, certainly. Heliogen only has built their technology and their engineering team around the molten salt energy storage system, which is perfect to retrofit a coal-fired power plant. You can take the steam turbines and fuel them with molten salt to run the turbines. There's lots of applications of this technology to kind of make up for the demand that's in the marketplace. Right now, they were starting to shut down coal-fired power plants. Now they're trying to get them back up because of the demand for power. This storage technology can play a role in making those more economically viable.
Okay. The original targeting for Zeo Energy was residential and now moving into the C&I.
That's right. We're diversifying and adding more C&I. We were already doing some commercial and industrial projects, solar on the rooftops of warehouses and buildings and things like that, and energy storage. We're moving to a larger scale in the commercial sector with this acquisition.
On the residential side, the storage product, does Zeo outsource it or make it in-house?
We outsource. We buy the commodities. It's like the panel manufacturers. Panels are commodities. We're paying the market price for those when we install them. Our value is sales and installation and financing. The manufacturing, we use Enphase for our inverters almost exclusively, microinverters on the panels. We're using domestic now produced panels by Qcells and Mission and some others because you get more ITC benefit from domestic content installing on the residential. The batteries, Tesla Powerwall, Franklin batteries, Enphase batteries are all the batteries that we install in the residential homes.
Okay. For the outlook, I don't know if you announced that yet, for the outlook for 2025, what's the breakdown in between residential and industrial?
Right now, we just closed the acquisition in August. 2025 is pretty much all residential revenue and profitability with a small amount of project development that we're seeing come in now from Heliogen . I would say we're 95% residential, residential storage and solar system panels and then We expect.
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