CEO of Zeo Energy, a NASDAQ-listed company. We are in the residential solar business primarily. You can see it from our picture on our investor deck slide. We sell, install, and service residential solar systems, and I'll go into a little more detail about our business. This is the safe harbor forward-looking statements, and just to make sure that whatever we present today is not an offer or solicitation, but forward-looking statements. Basically, our company is a construction company that we started in Florida in 2019 selling residential solar systems, grew very quickly during low interest rate days, and the business grew. We bought an installation company in Florida, then we expanded to multiple other states. Our business today has two primary focuses.
The Residential Solar is our core business, and long-duration energy storage is designed for commercial and industrial projects, in particular attacking the data center arena. We made an acquisition last year that I'll go into a little bit later in the presentation. The Residential Solar market has been quite volatile over the last several years. There have been large bankruptcies of Sunnova, SunPower, a lot of smaller companies. There's been a lot of turmoil and turnover as interest rates went up. The market kind of pulled back, has been flat for the last two years, and we see it now coming out and looking forward to growth in 2026 from our segment at least. The long-duration business is a company we acquired in 2025.
Basically, a company called Heliogen was doing concentrated solar for industrial and commercial uses and had a storage technology that we found very attractive. We acquired the company for assets on the balance sheet, namely cash, and then wanted to take their energy storage business and present it to the data center business, which obviously everyone knows is booming. On February 18th, we signed our first MOU with a data center Gigasite in central Utah to deliver 280 MW of storage, and we are now expanding that area of Heliogen as a new division in our business. Basically, our business is designed around a summer sales model, so we send over 300 sales reps out into the field. They knock doors and sell door to door.
The business is concentrated in a few states. We're not a national company. We're a more regional company focused in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, among other states. We have historically beat the industry. Right now the industry looks like it's gonna be flat to declining a little bit in the coming year, and we see good growth on our prospects for 2026. We went public. We didn't have any debt. We still don't have very much debt on our balance sheet, and we sell, install, and finance these systems through finance partners who bring long-term lease financing to our customers. The way our business is set up is we have a sales manager.
There are closers who are out in the field, and then there are door knockers that will go out and knock on anywhere from 50 to 150 doors a day. They will set an appointment, and that appointment is set. About 50% of the proposals that are presented close for a sale, and then we get the permits, the engineering design, and take the project all the way to completion. At which point the finance partner, lease company, will pay us for the install to I think once the power is turned on and connected to the grid. One of the strengths of our business and I like the summer sales model, a lot of companies in pest control and home alarm systems and others have used a similar direct sales model where we have door knockers that go out and canvas different areas and then set up appointments with those customers. Our value proposition basically is focused on providing a lower cost for the consumer.
Today, the homeowner pays the power company, a utility bill on a monthly basis, and our objective is to come in and be able to put solar on the rooftop and lower their overall cost per energy. They will still have to connection feed to the utility, but basically they're getting power from the solar panels on their house. In certain states, they can sell excess power to the grid and then get it back in the form of credits. Other states, batteries are more efficient as a storage of that energy versus putting it to the grid, and then we'll install batteries on some of the homes that put the panels on as well.
Customers want to have a more reliable ability to control their own power and if there are outages or grid problems or skyrocketing prices from their utility.
By putting solar on their home, they control their own power and they can finance it over a 10, 15, 20, 25 year period, depending on the kind of financing they would like to have. The customer can also, as mentioned, monetize excess power by sending it to the grid and then getting that back for the evening timeframe when their solar panels are not producing. We are seamless in that we provide sales, installation, financing alternatives, and the customer can deal directly just with us relative to other customers. The states of operation where we're currently licensed covers all of these states from California, Texas, Florida, the three largest solar states, as well as Utah and Colorado. Our primary focus right now where we're seeing most of our Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois with some in Michigan.
Our sales teams are hitting the ground right now in March and April, and we'll be at full capacity later on in the summer. We are a capital-light business model in that we don't buy inventory and store it in warehouses and then put it out in our trucks. Instead, our trucks show up, our distribution partners drop ship to the site the day of the installation. That allows us to be more nimble and grow into new markets more easily where our sales reps are having success in the sales model. The great thing about residential solar is that there's a huge TAM right now in a lot of other countries in Europe and other places like Australia. It's 20-25% penetration. In the U.S., it's only approaching 8% of homes.
That's basically about approaching 100 million homes that could have solar rooftop, and only about 8% of those or 8 million houses have that. There's a lot of opportunity for growth in the U.S. market. We expect now that interest rates have come back and stabilized, the market has had a shakeout over the last couple of years. We expect a return to the high growth in the next couple of years, where you're seeing 25%-50% year-over-year growth in the residential solar business. To give you kind of an idea of where the trends are heading, a lot of pressure on the grid from AI data centers has caused the price for power to go up in communities.
Consumers are paying more for their power and utilities are announcing new increases of, you know, 5%-15% in different markets. That trend appears to continue, and we see the growth for solar to continue to be attractive as the lowest cost of source of power, both at the utility and commercial scale, as well as providing an alternative to growing utility costs for the consumer. At the same time, we see that load growth driving more demand for power and storage in the commercial and industrial sector. In August 2025, we acquired Heliogen, in part to have a product engineering services and storage capacity to present to and provide to AI data centers and power producers that are trying to produce power behind the meter versus tapping into just the grid.
We see that area of growth as being very compelling in our business and early innings right now. We're trying to break in and carve out a piece of our future supporting the AI data center boom. Heliogen specifically on that front is a long-duration energy storage technology that utilizes molten salt as opposed to lithium batteries to store energy for long periods of time and to produce it for an end user using, you know, 10 plus hours of storage. That's the definition of long duration. In the molten salt arena, we use two technologies right now that our engineering team are experts at, compressed CO2 and molten salt. That stores the energy until it's needed by the end user.
There are projects around the world that use molten salt, and it has a very high temperature that stores the energy. Then when you're ready to run a steam turbine off of that heat, it provides the energy on demand. The acquired was a spinoff from Idealab, and the company came with $13 million of cash on the balance sheet and has allowed us to enter into the market by signing an MOU with Creekstone recently to develop the project that I mentioned earlier. The benefits of energy storage basically are that you can get the power demand behind the meter, so you're not dependent completely on the grid.
A lot of these projects are stalled because you have 2-3 years that you have to wait to connect to the grid, and then they can only give you a limited capacity. Whereas if you build your own solar, wind and store that power at the site, you have a lot more ability to control your own destiny. The compressed CO2 technology, which I'll get into the details later on in the presentation, provides storage of CO2 in liquid form, and then you heat it and expand it, and it spins a gas turbine to get the power. Those are the ways in which these large industrial and commercial projects can have their own data center power on site and utilize it whenever they need it.
Typically, you're seeing large PV fields charge the energy storage systems, but you can also get off grid or off-peak power from the grid to charge it at night and things like that, so it can be super efficient. The data center demand, as everyone knows, is really driving energy pricing and it's a constraint here in the U.S. markets. People are looking for behind-the-meter, off-the-grid solutions. We believe that the two solutions that we're providing can compete at below $100 per MWh cost for power.
We hope to be able to update the market with further progress on our Creekstone project and other projects that we're working on in the near future, as they look at our solution, our engineered solution for storage. In our experience, energy is the gating issue for these data centers to really expand and grow, as well as policy issues in different states that can make sure that consumers can keep their cost of power as low as possible, and the data centers aren't pushing the power cost onto the grid and the utility, and then the consumers are forced to pay that. There's a lot of policy discussions going on.
Right now, the dollars that are gonna be invested, you know, over almost $1 trillion a year now going into the development of power and data centers to meet the growing demand of the AI boom. Basically we are taking power from photovoltaic fields, in some cases, natural gas turbines and turning that into a storage system that can provide energy to the end users on demand. Oftentimes our solutions are combined with reciprocating engines, with gas turbines, and they allow the end user to have the power that they need on demand. Our Creekstone project, which we're very excited about, is our early entry into the field. This is a project that we have been following for quite a while and working with the development team.
They have announced the Series B round of funding in November to get started. They have to deliver their first 300 MW of gas-fired turbine power in the first half of 2027, and that it will be followed by our project, which should provide them 280 MW of power and storage to support the Gigasite center. The company recently announced a 15,000-acre lease that they closed with the state of Utah on their roadmap to have their first gigawatt developed and operating in 2027, 2028.
We feel like this is a good example of other projects where we're working on right now to provide the engineered solution for energy storage on site behind the meter and we hope to have more projects to announce in the future. We've been revenue generating since 2019 when we first started the business. We went public in 2024 through the first three quarters. You can see the results here. I see that Cannon is with us and Cannon, would you like to talk a little bit about the numbers and the results? Our 2025 numbers will be out soon, and we'll have a full year to share. Cannon's not there, so.
Okay. Do you wanna come in my office?
Okay. He's not on. Cannon, go ahead. We can hear you, Cannon. Go ahead.
You can hear me?
Yeah.
From the 2025 perspective, you know, we've released through Q3. We'll have our Q4 numbers and the year-to-date numbers out here shortly for the year. You can expect to see that from a revenue perspective, we've been about similar to what we were last year, on the revenue side. I think that's what I can say right now until the financials are released.
Yep. Our business basically is cyclical. We have a first quarter where we're just installing a little bit from last year and our sales and recruiting for sales reps, and the sales reps hit in Q2, and we make our money in Q3, then it tails off in Q4. We have a kind of a seasonal cyclical business, which you can follow on a quarter-by-quarter basis, as you look to what we're doing. The trends right now following the industry, which we think are great tailwinds, is this continued load growth demand across the grid. We feel like that allows us a lot of opportunity to sell residential solar and provide savings to our customers. PV solar continues to enjoy better pricing, lower costs. You see a lot of utility scale.
I just flew back from California, and when you look out in the west, there are just, you know, a lot of utility scale solar projects being built to try and meet the energy demands. That's true for the consumer on his house, for commercial and industrial projects, as well as utilities who are continuing to build solar to help supplement their demand for energy on the grid. It's typically tied when the energy is at its peak, so solar produces energy versus when it's not in demand at night. That's huge advantages for solar. Prices are coming down. There's more domestic content. The legislation that the Trump administration passed last year continues to provide investment tax credits for investors who invest in solar and provide capital to our industry.
Utility price inflation, as I mentioned earlier, continues to provide opportunity for us to save customers money. There's an additional advantage in the virtual power plants that utilities are working towards utilizing installed batteries in homes and in businesses that they can leverage as a source of power, and they'll pay a capacity fee for those. You'll be seeing and hearing a lot more about virtual power plants, VPPs. That trend also is something that is beneficial to Zeo Energy. We're also looking at ways to provide long-term financing with partners.
We have good partnerships with LightReach, with GoodLeap, with Propel and other products that are coming on board to provide financing for the consumers so that they can save money on a monthly basis and also have opportunity for lowering their overall demand on the grid that can be sometimes unpredictable. Energy storage continues to also enjoy investment tax credits through 2032, and more and more people are wanting to have energy storage on site in their business or in their homes, which we also see as a positive trend. The market opportunities, our company has made 2 acquisitions over the last couple of years. We see the market continuing to shake up provides us opportunity for additional M&A opportunities as we go forward. Our business grows through several methods.
We have organic expansion through the markets that we're in. We also are expanding into roofing at strategic M&A opportunities. Let me just open it up here for questions by closing on, you know, these two technologies that I mentioned earlier. Compressed CO2 is an interesting technology that takes CO2 out of a dome, stores it in liquid to charge the battery, and then when the time comes, it depletes the liquid form and turns it back into a gas and spins a turbine, a gas turbine. That is a very efficient model. Google has invested in this technology in a company called Energy Dome, and our engineering team is at the forefront of spec-ing these types of technologies in the market. With that, I'll kind of turn you to our...
This is one of the sites of an Energy Dome project in Italy that has a dome and a compressed CO2 there. Those are some examples of projects that we're working on. With that, I'll leave it open for some questions here as we close. Okay. Hearing none, thank you so much for your time. Zeo Energy, ZEO on the NASDAQ. Thanks.