Plug Power Inc. (PLUG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Presentation] Look around. We've reached a pivot point. The fossil fuels that powered past generations can no longer keep up. We deserve to step up to an energy system that's smarter, cleaner. It's time to rev up and get on the green hydrogen highway. At Plug, we are reimagining the energy ecosystem harnessing the next generation of truly green hydrogen, and the only company bringing it end-to-end to our customers from production, packaging, distribution and usage. This isn't an incremental change. It's a revolution. We've already deployed more than 50,000 fuel cell systems for e-mobility, more anyone than in the world. And now we're building an end-to-end solution that is more sustainable, more efficient, powered by a new hydrogen network growing across the country and across the world. A state-of-the-art giga factory and multiple green H2 plants that will yield 500 tons of green H2 by 2025. We're already transitioning some of the world's largest brands to a hydrogen ecosystem, with new partners coming online every day. Plug hydrogen is here, and it's fueling the future.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world turning into our symposium. I'm Andy Marsh, CEO of Plug Power. I'm delighted you made the time to be with us. Today, Plug Power is building out North America's first completely green hydrogen end-to-end supply chain network with the Plug Power name at every step of the process. That's hydrogen production powered by renewables, the storage, the transport, the power electrified application. Look, no other company in the world is in a better position to build out the clean, green hydrogen ecosystem that will be required to shift the world to a zero carbon economy. Look, Plug is the one company that can do it. We know how to do it all. We've done it all. That's the point. Look, I'm a dreamer, but what I'm dreaming about today is not some far-off future. We already have built the future. If you look around, green hydrogen generation: done. Electrolyzer production and sales: done. You look at our gigafactory in Rochester, New York, PEM fuel cells: done. And when it comes to fueling stations and network across the nation, Plug has done 165: done. Transportation, material handling, stationary backup power and power generation, clean sky for electric flight and more applications: done, done, done. Our green hydrogen ecosystem will not only allow us to cleanly power an incredible spectrum of applications but also help others develop the market for even more applications. I believe when Plug Power wins, everyone wins. The applications that are empowering in our first wave include our business in material handling; ground support equipment; stationary backup power for data centers, hospitals, railroads, telecoms and governments and stationary power generation for microgrids and utilities; aerial solutions from commuter and cargo planes to UAVs and on-road e-mobilities, like the fleet and fueling stations; our HYVIA joint venture with Renault in Europe. Over the next few hours, you will hear a great deal more from our team about all the applications we're developing around the world, leveraging Plug Power's green hydrogen technology. So let's start hearing from all our speakers today. I'm here with Preeti Pande. She's Plug Power's Chief Marketing Officer, and she's one of the newest members of my senior staff team. She's building and leading a world-class team, ensuring that Plug Power corners and wins the green hydrogen category on a global scale. And boy, she's done it before in her career. She's launched and developed technology platforms across North America, Asia and Europe, and there's never been a more perfect time for her to come join Plug Power as we enter new markets with advanced technologies in the electrolyzer fuel cells and, of course, green hydrogen space. Preeti is here with me to tell you about Plug's latest journey on the green hydrogen highway. Preeti?

Thank you, Andy. Plug is here now. We're the only company truly enabling a complete and end-to-end green hydrogen infrastructure and all that, that entails. And we're doing just that with many partners right now. Green hydrogen unlocks the potential of a clean energy future with diminishing reliance on carbon-based energy, allowing companies to achieve their business objectives and truly be sustainable. I think we all believe deeply that sustainable energy must be the future. Anything short of that is just not an option, not really. We hear a lot about solar and wind, and these are absolutely central and necessary parts of sustainable energy future. But they are just parts of the overall architecture, if you will. They're just part of the overall interconnected system of generating and delivering energy to where it's needed, when it's needed for a sustainable energy future. Green energy needs to be stored in volume and cost effectively. Green energy needs to be transported easily. Businesses need ways to efficiently convert stored energy to useful work when and where it's needed. This is green hydrogen. It's real, and it's ready now. It can stop waiting and start doing. In fact, this is what we have to do if we want to affect real change. Plug has been focused on hydrogen for almost 25 years, and now we're the only pure-play green hydrogen company with a commercially successful integrated product line. Around the world, we don't see anyone else in our position. Plug is different. We really understand hydrogen, and we really understand the ecosystem needed to make it practical and a cost-effective reality. We're not a new company. We've been at this a long time, and we're perfectly positioned to win and to help you win. We're focused on being practical, on really making this happen. That's why we're looking end to end, and we're the only company doing this. First, we refined fuel cell technology, adapting it for early markets like material handling equipment. Then we quickly became the leader in this market. And now Plug is ready with green hydrogen-based products for mobility and stationary power. Next is global expansion of our strategy and green hydrogen solutions. We've made some big production investments to make this happen, and we'll share those with you today. We have many projects in place, and we'll share those. Today, you're going to see the technology ecosystem we bring together to make this real, to create hydrogen in a green, sustainable carbon-free way using wind, solar or other green generation technologies, to store it effectively in large volumes and to transport it where it's needed, and to convert it at the point of use into a useful form for your business needs. We are working with companies like Amazon, Walmart and BMW solving big problems sustainably. We've learned that making this work requires an end-to-end solution and an obsessive focus on each customer's needs. Major benefits are already being realized. We've partnered with leading firms in joint ventures that we'll talk about, and we have new products in the pipeline that double down on these investments and take them to the next level. This green hydrogen movement is important. You all know that. You all feel that. And that's why I assume you're here today. We need your support to make this happen. We need to support renewables together. We need to debunk myths around the green hydrogen to remove barriers to rapid adoption. Help share with all the stakeholders what's really going on in green energy, the successes that are really happening and how a green energy future is actually ready to take hold now. So the central takeaways we think you should have from the symposium: a green energy future is upon us, ready to happen. Green hydrogen is a vital enabler of the overall future along with wind, solar, hydro and batteries, and it's ready now. Plug has deep, deep experience, has pulled the ecosystem together and can be your partner to decarbonize your businesses and contribute to a sustainable world. And we have the resources at Plug to do this with you. It's time for action. We invite conversation to effect real change. Let's engage. Send us your questions, and we'll have an opportunity to dialogue with you at the end of the symposium. And don't forget, click below for some really interesting on-demand content. I'll see you at the Q&A. Enjoy the symposium.

It's my pleasure to introduce Sanjay Shrestha. He is the General Manager of our hydrogen energy business, and he joined Plug Power 3 years ago. And quite honestly, he is one of the best hires of my life. He's been a catalyst for our acceleration in so many areas even when he isn't directly involved by reminding me, Andy, go faster. Just as an example, the purchase of Giner and United Hydrogen, the basis of our electrolyzer and hydrogen generation business. Sanjay was critical in sending the strategy as well as identifying the target. Boy, he is a forward thinker. And that's why I asked Sanjay to run our green hydrogen generation business. And the hydrogen energy business under his leadership is building out the first green hydrogen network in the U.S. and already expanding rapidly into Europe. So get ready because Sanjay has a way of firing people up about the potential of the green hydrogen ecosystem. So Sanjay.

Thank you, Andy, and good morning, everyone. And once again, welcome to our third annual Plug Symposium. As you've already heard from Andy and also as we've been saying for some time now, green hydrogen solution is a must if we want to meet zero carbon target and the Paris accord by 2050. Furthermore, green hydrogen can help accelerate this unfolding energy transition, displace diesel and help decarbonize multiple industries, including power, transportation, traditional energy as well as many industrial applications. And as Preeti just talked about as well, the time for green hydrogen is now. And by the way, the cost of green hydrogen, even from our first plant in 2022, is expected to be substantially lower than what we're paying for gray hydrogen in the market today. And more importantly, everyone, our customers are asking for it. Now we at Plug Power have built the necessary building blocks and a robust platform to establish ourself as a large global green hydrogen energy company. This will translate into substantial revenue, cash flow, all while providing significant benefit to many stakeholders. This, of course, includes our shareholders, employees, customers, supplier and more importantly, global citizens as we all must join force to help tackle the climate change issue that need immediate attention. We must act now. Now before I go into the detail of our plan to execute on our long-term vision of becoming a leading global energy company, its impact on our financials, let me take a moment to recap on some of the strategic priorities we have accomplished in the last few years and talk a bit more about what else is going on, what are the actions and the steps we're taking. And as some of you might recall, during our first symposium in 2019, we highlighted our strategic goal to transition from low to zero carbon hydrogen solution. To accomplish this, we executed on our vertical integration strategy and closed on 2 strategic acquisitions: Giner ELX, our electrolyzer business; and United Hydrogen, the only private company that successfully built large-scale liquid hydrogen plant other than industrial gas companies in the U.S. You'll hear a lot more about our accomplishment and outlook for electrolyzer business from Ole Hoefelmann. Now following this acquisition, we had talked to you all about 100 tons per day of green hydrogen generation capacity by 2024 during our last symposium. We also talked to you about 2 locations for green hydrogen plant that we're looking to build by the end of 2022. Well, I'm very pleased to report that we're well ahead of schedule in accomplishing these goals. Since then, we have told you all that we want to get to 500 tons per day by 2025 and 1,000 tons per day by 2028. And instead of just 2 plants, we are looking to break ground on 3 plants this year. And instead of by the end of 2022, we plan to have 2 of these green hydrogen plants producing in the summer of 2022. Furthermore, we have also announced a 2-ton per day green hydrogen gas plant, which would be operating in Georgia even before the end of this year, and this will be the first gaseous green hydrogen plant in the U.S. We're also working on several strategic initiatives to further enhance what we believe is already a very strong position in green hydrogen generation and delivery ecosystem. These are some of the things we're evaluating: working with partners, liquid tankers for hydrogen, what else can be done in the liquefier space in terms of reducing the energy consumption as well as the lead time and also building our logistics capabilities. Now before I go into the detail of our long-term execution strategy, I just want to take a moment to talk about what's happening in the hydrogen market here in the near term. Look, we're managing this near-term situation by investing in assets such as high-pressure tube trailers, liquid hydrogen tankers and drivers both internally and from third party. By the way, one situation was difficult with a tight supply. We even moved hydrogen from West Coast to Southeast to support our customers' requirement. We believe our investment in these assets and resources and also coupled with the recently added hydrogen capacity in Texas by one of our supplier will certainly help manage through this near-term tight hydrogen market until our green hydrogen capacity comes online in the next 12 months. Here's the bottom line, guys. Our goal is to never let any of our customer run out of hydrogen, period. Now back to how we plan to execute on our long-term vision to become a leading global energy company. We broadly structured this in 3 phases, where each phase is going to represent an order of magnitude increase in end demand and our capacity build out. And in the initial phase, at this point, we're laser-focused on building a first-of-a-kind, force majeure-resilient, green hydrogen generation network in North America. We're starting construction of 3 plants this year, 2 with the nameplate capacity of 15 tons per day and 1 with 45 tons per day. We plan to exit 2022 with about 70 tons per day of green hydrogen nameplate capacity. By the end of 2023, we plan to exit with nearly 200 tons per day of nameplate capacity, are well on our way to exit 2025 with 500 tons per day of green hydrogen generation capacity. And by the way, 4 plants by the end of '22, over 6 by end of '23 and 13 before the end of 2025, up from a single plant that we have in Tennessee today. What does the second phase of our growth look like? Well first, you should expect to see expanded growth of hydrogen generation network outside of North America as well as look at bigger and significantly larger plans within North America. And as some of you might already know, we have a partnership with ACCIONA. We're exploring multiple location in Iberia to build several 15 tons per day liquid green hydrogen plant. And similar to what we've done in North America, we're also going to be building a green hydrogen generation network in Europe as well. And by the way, during this phase of our global expansion, there are going to be 3 key factors that will keep driving the cost of this green hydrogen down, very similar to what we saw with the decline of levelized cost of energy in the renewable space in the last decade. What do they include? Reduction in CapEx, continued decline in the cost of renewables and also decline in the cost of capital with various forms of wanting capital to invest in this sector. And in the final and the third phase of this growth, we will be looking at a scenario where ourself and the industry are approaching the scale of today's fossil fuel industry, a scale that justifies the vision of displacing diesel. To put this in perspective, it will require 200,000 tons per day of green hydrogen to displace diesel just in Class 7 and 8 trucks in North America. So what does this new energy landscape look like? And the question is, can this even be done? It's the right thing to do, but can we do it? And the answer is yes, it can be done. But this will require some new way of thinking through what does this new energy landscape look like in this unfolding energy transition? By the way, we think that liquid plant will probably max out somewhere around 500 tons per day. Therefore, the future green hydrogen plants would likely have to be kilotons, 1,000 tons per day, 2,000 tons per day, that is going to need 2 to 10 gigawatts of electrolyzer and renewable capacity. We'll be looking at dedicated, massive multi-gigawatt scale wind and solar farms providing power to this kiloton-scale plants practically in the solar and the wind belt here in the U.S. as you can actually see in the map. This hydrogen will be transported via pipeline in gaseous form, and we'll have liquid delivery for the last mile to varied end market application, somewhat similar to what's happening in the fossil fuel industry right now. And this transitions will ensure many things. This will continue to improve economics of green hydrogen. This will help in decarbonizing electric grid and frankly, phase out fossil fuel generation, including coal and maybe even natural gas, transform natural gas pipeline into hydrogen delivery network, and this will turn domestically produced low-cost electron into high-value hydrogen fuel. Now let me talk about capital requirements and return on these plants for a minute. As you all know, we have ample capital to execute on our first phase of growth. We have $5 billion of cash on hand. Our first 15-ton plant is going to cost us about $100 million in CapEx. And by the way, when we expand in the same location, the plant #2 is going to cost us $75 million for that exact same 15-ton a day. And based on where the market is today, what do we think the cost of this hydrogen molecule is going to be, we see a payback from our plant of somewhere around 7 to 10 years with project IRR at 15% to 20%. By the way, this does not assume any back leverage. It does not take into consideration the benefit and the impact from recently applied DOE loan guarantee application and certainly does not take into consideration a scenario of national low carbon fuel standard credits or a pending legislation related to production tax credit. In addition, we do see meaningful opportunity to recycle capital once we build these plants, which is going to allow us to fund our long-term growth with internal cash generation as well. And by the way, some of this could look like back leverage, green bond issuance as well as collaborating with some of the large low-cost infrastructure capital as well. Now when we build this first-of-a-kind green hydrogen generation network, this will also help accelerate demand for many new fuel cell applications, because this will actually ensure that hydrogen is going to be available all the time, and more importantly, you can actually get green hydrogen at or even lower price than current market for gray hydrogen. This new application are expected to create a multiplier effect for our green hydrogen demand, we believe. Just to put that in perspective, a forklift consumes 1 kilogram of hydrogen per day. That is the majority of the demand today. Light commercial vehicle is 6x more than that, 6 kilograms per day. Class 8 truck is 50x more than that. And by the way, if you're talking about 24/7 1-megawatt stationary product, it is as much as 1 tons per day. All it takes, guys, for us to load our 500 tons per day plant and capacity is 5,000 Class 8 vehicle and less than 300 megawatts of stationary product. We are sold-out in North America once that happens. And again, so when you take into consideration our capacity demand acceleration scenario that I just talked about, and at about 500 tons per day, we're looking at our hydrogen fuel revenue of about $700 million. We believe there's potential for upside. And by the way, this actually already represents 15-fold increase from 2021. And at this revenue run rate, even before national low carbon fuel standard credit or any type of production tax credit, EBITDA margin will be in line with our corporate target of 20%. With proposed production tax credit, EBITDA margin can be substantially higher. While $700 million in hydrogen fuel revenue by 2025 represents 15-fold increase, we see this as a tipping point of growth curve with the next phase of growth representing potential sale of 5,000 tons per day, and a scenario for 50,000 tons per day in coming decade as green hydrogen begins to displace diesel. Now let me recap. We have a clear path to building 500 tons per day of first-of-a-kind green hydrogen generation network in North America by 2025 and a clear strategy to expand in Europe and globally on our path to 1,000 tons per day of capacity by 2028. We have the team, right strategic partners, all the building blocks to deliver on our strategic priorities. We're embarking on our mission to become a category king in this $10 trillion global opportunity. As we build our first-of-a-kind green hydrogen generation network and make green hydrogen economical and more importantly, ubiquitous, it accelerates proliferation of many fuel cell apps, thereby accelerating cost reduction for this application and substantially increasing demand for green hydrogen, creating a flywheel effect. If history teaches us anything, it's that change is constant. As the birth of the American petroleum industry in 1859 in Pennsylvania allowed kerosene to supplant whale oil, with Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla then building Niagara Power and electrifying the city of Buffalo, displacing kerosene, we see a similar road map of green hydrogen eventually displacing diesel. And this change, this energy transition is one that will not only become globally economical but globally sound for the future of the planet. I am now very pleased to share with you all a video of our first green hydrogen plant in Georgia. Thank you very much. [Presentation]

Again, I'm very pleased to introduce our next presenter here, Jose Entrecanales. He's the Chief Strategy Officer and also Commercial Development Officer for ACCIONA. And some of you already know that we're working with ACCIONA to build multiple liquid green hydrogen plants in Iberia, and ACCIONA is one of the companies that are deep in the renewable energy space with some of the biggest presence in the renewable generation in Spain and Iberian Peninsula as well as on a global basis. So given what they bring to the table from the renewable energy perspective and our know-how with the hydrogen business, we believe this is a fantastic partnership and couldn't be more excited to have Jose here with us today and all the work that we plan to do together.

Thank you, Sanjay, for the invitation. It is a pleasure to be here today. Let me start by briefly describing who ACCIONA here is and then comment on how we see the development of the green hydrogen industry in Europe and the key role that renewable electricity generation will play in that development. Acciona Energia is the largest 100% clean energy generation company in the world with 11 gigawatts of installed wind, solar PV, CSP and hydro assets across 16 countries and 5 continents. We started investing in renewables some 30 years ago when the industry was born, and it's been a long and sometimes difficult road to get us to where we are today, where no one doubts that renewables are the energy of the future. And it's been thanks to 4 key pillars that we've been able to live through with some success, if I may say so, this journey. And those are reputation, financial stability, social purpose and innovation. And I would like to highlight innovation, which is at the core of everything that we do at ACCIONA and at the core of our efforts in the green hydrogen space. It is the mindset with which we've approached our business for the last 20 years. To give you a few examples, we were the first company to vertically integrate and set up our own turbine manufacturing company in the year 2000, Acciona Windpower, now Nordex, we were the first company to sign a renewable energy PPA in 2006, the first to operate a solar PV plus battery storage plant in Europe in 2012, the first to apply blockchain technology to certify the renewable origin of electricity in 2018, and we were the first to install a floating solar PV plant in Spain in 2020. And as we look forward, we see green hydrogen as the next frontier in the energy transition. And together with our partners, our ambition is to lead the way like we've done times before. The momentum that we're seeing globally, but particularly in Europe, behind efforts to decarbonize the economy is, in my opinion, nothing short of impressive. Currently, net zero targets in force and under discussion, as you know, cover around 70% of global emissions, the EU being among the leaders in this pack with the Fit for 55 package that has recently been published. These targets will encourage countries to address decarbonization in the hardest to abate sectors where hydrogen can play a key role. In fact, almost all EU countries have gone a step further, and they're either working on or have already published a hydrogen strategy, Spain among them. However, for this industry to take off as we expect it to, as it relates to renewable hydrogen, its growth will, to a large extent, depend on the availability of plentiful and competitive renewable electricity. And the trend in this respect is easy to identify. Over the last decade, the cost of solar PV has fallen by over 80%, onshore wind by 40% and offshore wind by around 30%, undercutting the levelized cost of energy and every other electricity generation technology available. And it is a trend that is expected to continue, perhaps not at the same speed but certainly in the same direction as the global installed capacity continues to grow. It is worth mentioning that for the world to meet its net zero objectives by 2050, the share of renewables the total clean energy supply needs to rise from 27% in 2019 to 60% by 2030. And in this context, we believe we have found in Plug Power the perfect partner to seize the opportunity that lies ahead. The combination of Plug Power's expertise with ACCIONA's knowledge as it comes to the sourcing of renewable electricity, I am convinced will be a winning combination. And it is in that hope that we have partnered to tackle the Spanish and Portuguese markets with the creation of a joint venture company. And the first few months of market [ timing ] have been extremely positive, with an increasing number of clients showing interest in working with us to develop green hydrogen solutions that help decarbonize their operations. And worth mentioning, we've also started working on the design and locating sites for a large 15-ton per day plant, which we expect will be a landmark project in Spain. All very exciting, a very exciting initiative. To conclude, I think the time is right, the ingredients in terms of political support, technological development and private demand are all there. And we are extremely excited to be working alongside the Plug Power team to make this initiative a reality. Thank you again for having me.

Since Sanjay presented just a week ago, we've added to our offering for a hydrogen ecosystem. We made an acquisition just today for a company called ACT, and ACT provides cryogenics technologies to Plug Power. It gives us the opportunity to provide liquid hydrogen tanks. It provides us the opportunity to provide liquid hydrogen storage as well as hydrogen mobility fueling, which we believe is critical for ports. I'm so excited. They're a great addition to the Plug Power team. And during the coming months, you'll be hearing more and more about our activities with ACT. So we'll be telling you more soon. I'm so pleased to introduce Marco Alverà. He's the CEO of SNAM, the Italian energy infrastructure giant. Through its subsidiaries, SNAM also operates in Albania, Austria, China, France, Greece and UAE and also the U.K. Last year, SNAM joined 6 other companies to form a global coalition called the Green Hydrogen Catapult. Marco and his partners believe the race is on to make green hydrogen pricing competitive with fossil fuels. They believe it will in happen the next 5 years where green hydrogen will be at $2 per kilogram, and I think this is really important, delivered using existing infrastructures and pipelines. I'm so happy to introduce to you Marco Alverà.

Hello, everybody, and thank you to Plug Power for inviting me to this important symposium. My name is Marco Alverà. I'm the CEO of SNAM. SNAM is one of the world's largest gas infrastructure company. We have the second largest gas pipeline network in the world, over 40,000 kilometers. And we have one of the largest gas storage sites, facilities over 9 different fields. We're present across Europe. We're present in the Middle East and entering the U.S. market, working also in India and in China. We are a true believer in hydrogen. We've been the first to blend hydrogen in the natural gas pipeline system to deliver it to 2 factories. We believe, like finally the rest of the world finally believes, that hydrogen will play a key role in a fully decarbonized system. We will have electrification go up from the current 20% to around 50% or 60%, maybe even 65%. But the rest of the energy system that today is based on coal, oil and fossil gas will gradually shift hydrogen as well as to biofuels. And SNAM wants to be a leader in both. Hydrogen will allow renewables to grow faster because it will help renewable energy be balanced when there's no wind and no sun. Like we've seen recently in the U.K. when the wind drops, you really have a need for stored energy to step in, and that's a role that hydrogen will play. At SNAM, we think that hydrogen will come down, green hydrogen in cost significantly. We have launched the Green Hydrogen Catapult together with world leaders in wind energy and solar energy with some of the world's largest companies. We will present this at the COP26 with a strong commitment to deliver green hydrogen below $2 a kilo, which is around $50 per megawatt hour in the next 5 years, so by 2026. When we presented this plan to the U.S. government, the Department of Energy studied it carefully and came up with the Earthshot that you all know of, which is to deliver green hydrogen below $1 a kilo, which is around $25 a megawatt hour before the end of the decade. Why are these 2 numbers important? Because $50 a megawatt hour or $2 a kilo is oil parity, and $1 per kilo is coal parity. We now have trains in the U.S., 99% of trains are running on diesel. These can be very easily and quickly switched to hydrogen. The same is true for India where all the trains are still running on diesel. So hydrogen can leapfrog those sectors that haven't electrified, but we firmly believe that the main role for hydrogen will be in the hard to abate sectors like making steel, like making cement, like making glass, like making ceramics. These sectors that need either hydrogen as a feedstock or that need hydrogen to reach very high temperatures. We believe we are a world leader in electrolyzer capacity through our stakes in De Nora and ITM. We want to grow this capability. We have a big team of R&D and are working on finding the best future technologies for electrolyzers as well as for fuel cells. We are the first, we announced a week ago, the first to build a hydrogen ceramics factory. We are the first, we understand, to test hydrogen in the glass manufacturing factory. We're working on making green steel from hydrogen as well. But we also think that hydrogen will play a big role in the power sector. As I mentioned earlier, to balance renewables when there's no sun and there's no wind, hydrogen can be easily stored underground and produced, turned back into electricity when necessary. We're seeing right now a surge in gas and heating and electricity prices. Hydrogen will also play a key role for heating. I don't know if directly into people's homes or at the district level, but in the winter in the East Coast of the States, in Northern Europe, in most of China, we consume 6, 7x more energy in the winter than we do in the summer. And because solar will play a big role and there's much more sun in the summer than in the winter, we have this countercyclicality that we need to balance, and that will be done through hydrogen. As mentioned with the trains, hydrogen will also play a big role in the mobility, whether it's ships, airplanes, trucks for long distances, trains. And we see more and more car manufacturers talking about hydrogen, not only Toyota. Yesterday, we were in Paris with the CEO of Renault, my friend, Luca de Meo. We're planning to work together with them and hopefully also with Plug Power to build hydrogen infrastructure. We are essentially a hydrogen infrastructure company of the future, converting some of our existing pipelines to hydrogen pipeline, some of our existing pipelines to CO2 pipelines. Some of our existing pipelines will remain for biomethane, which is one of the most noble forms of renewable energy. So good luck with the rest of the symposiums. We're believers that green hydrogen and blue hydrogen, where it makes sense, so long as it's done without CO2 and without methane emissions, can really help the world get to net zero much faster and much cheaper than was thought before. So we think [indiscernible] will be a big success, and we think the industry needs champions like Plug Power to really push the envelope quickly into new territories where we can collaborate and make it happen together. Thank you very much.

So next up is Ole Hoefelmann, General Manager of our electrolyzer business. After we purchased Giner, I was looking for someone who would really scaled this business, someone who had a global perspective, understood the hydrogen industry, had a business mindset and, like all Plug employees, love competition. Ole instantly came to mind. He checked all the boxes. Now Ole ran Air Liquide's U.S. hydrogen business. Together, we collaborate for years in the industry association, especially on government policy. And already at Plug Power, he has done an exceptional job negotiating the Plug-SK JV. I mentioned he's loves competition, not surprising for a former Division 1 tennis player. Well, let me turn it over to Ole to tell you about our vision for the electrolyzer business.

Andy, thank you for the introductions. During last year's symposium, we were excited to share with you that we had just brought onboard Giner ELX and its world-class PEM electrolyzer technology. I'm excited to share with you today the great progress we have made during the last 12 months to build on Giner's world-class PEM technology and develop best-in-class electrolyzer solutions. We've made great strides and are bringing to market competitive, reliable and safe green hydrogen systems and large-scale plants. Our solutions range in capacity from 50 kilograms of hydrogen per day to thousands of tons per day. Before I get too much into what Plug has done and where we are going, let me take you back to our core technology, the PEM electrolyzer stack, its integral role in the greenification of hydrogen and how it works. What makes green hydrogen, anyway? Hydrogen itself is simply an atom, the simplest atom, 1 proton and 1 electron. So hydrogen isn't harmful to the environment. How we power the process of isolating and producing large volumes of hydrogen is the factor that determines the color designations we assign to hydrogen. Brown hydrogen and gray hydrogen are derived from coal power and natural gas power, respectively. We label hydrogen blue if the CO2 released by the gasification or steam methane extraction processes used by brown and gray hydrogen is carbon captured. Cleaner, yes, but not green. Hydrogen gets to be called green if its production process is powered entirely by renewable energy sources like wind or solar. Green production employs a method called electrolysis using an electrolyzer, the heart of Plug's green hydrogen revolution. What is an electrolyzer? It's a system that applies an electrical current that is generated from a renewable source, in the case of green hydrogen, to water, H2O. The current splits the water, creating hydrogen. So now we've converted electrical energy, electrons, into chemical energy, hydrogen. This chemical energy can then be stored indefinitely as a gas or liquid to later fuel whatever application you have that needs power. Central to the electrolyzer is a component referred to as the stack. It is within this stack that the separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen occurs. Today, there are several competing technologies being offered in the market: alkaline; solid oxide fuel cell; and polymer electrolyte membrane, or PEM. Our PEM has technology many advantages, some of which include a compact footprint, which is important as we scale to 50, 250, 500 or 1,000 megawatt, the ability to operate intermittently, adapting to our customers' energy profile, ensuring the lowest cost of hydrogen for our customers and not requiring hazardous electrolytes, simplifying service and maintenance. The PEM stack is a differentiating technology. Our PEM stack is the most robust, reliable and tested electrolyzer stack technology in the market. Our stack technology has been and continues to be operated under the most trying and stringent environments. Since the early 2000s, nuclear submarines have relied on our technology to produce hydrogen for fuel and oxygen to ensure a livable environment for the submariners on board. As you can imagine, these units operate 24/7, 365 days out of the year. These systems do not break down and keep on going. This is vital. Modularity and scalability are 2 big features that differentiate our offerings. At the beginning of this year, we released our flagship 1-megawatt stack, building on our robust technology currently used underneath the sea. This development is the foundational brick for our electrolyzer solutions. As we move from selling stacks to selling electrolyzer systems, we have added the balance of systems and balance of plant to our stacks, resulting in 1-megawatt, 5-megawatt, 10-megawatt and 20-megawatt systems. We've also designed multi-megawatt arrays and building blocks for plants as large as 1 gigawatt with the output capacity of 500 tons per day of green hydrogen. We're using our own electrolyzer technology to build out 100 tons per day of green hydrogen. By the end of 2022, we expect to not only be the world's leader in producing green hydrogen using our own technology, but also to have designed and built the world's largest green hydrogen facilities. We not only bring design and build experience to our customers, but also operations experience, which we will continue to leverage in our product development and innovation. We are ambitious. We believe the world needs green hydrogen solutions and needs them quickly. To meet our ambitions and our customers' ambitions, we're continuing to build out our competencies around the world, both organically and through partnerships and acquisitions. These competencies include customer service, sales and application support, engineering, manufacturing of stacks, manufacturing of systems, service and operations. In the last few months, we have grown our physical presence from, first, the U.S., to now include Europe and Asia. While we are able to service the rest of the world through our current teams, we expect to have local presence in all major markets by the end of next year. A few more words about our technology. As the availability of renewable energy increases and the cost of renewable energy decreases, electrolyzer solutions around the world are becoming more competitive. As this occurs, the differentiator for any electrolyzer solutions provider will be the investment made, but more importantly, the solutions' capability to adapt to the customers' energy profile, minimizing the total cost to produce green hydrogen. I'm confident that through our team members' experience and through our innovative technology, we can offer our customers the best solution for their needs. The strength of Plug is not only that we use our own technology to produce green hydrogen, but we have technology and offers that cover the complete green hydrogen value chain, starting with green hydrogen production, through electrolysis, through liquefaction, distribution as well as fuel cell applications for mobility and stationary offers. For example, we're the only company today that can offer customers a turnkey fuel cell solution for material handling. This is a market that Plug developed with strong customer support. We can give customers the option to produce green hydrogen on-site or have it delivered. Plug offers the complete green hydrogen value chain. Although we've made great strides during the past 12 months in developing electrolyzer solutions, we're just at the beginning of executing on our ambitious strategy. We recognize and appreciate the work done by governments and policymakers around the world to encourage and enable industries to transition to a greener world. We also see the lead many of our customers are taking in moving into a greener world and are excited to be working with many, many pioneers in the green hydrogen ecosystem. We recognize and accept the role we play in continuing to drive costs out of our offers. We do this by achieving scale through our gigafactory in Rochester, New York. We're building over 1 gigawatt of electrolyzer capacity. We work closely with our partners and vendors to optimize our supply chain. In some instances, we collaborate to develop next-generation components. Through our own R&D efforts, we reduce rare metals in our stacks and improve efficiencies. On a more fundamental level, we recycle our raw materials, which we're already doing in fuel cells. Through the work we're doing on our systems design and through our gigafactory, we expect to deliver large-scale electrolyzer plants at around $500,000 per megawatt within the next 12 months. Further cost improvements are targeted to be delivered to the market by 2025, achieving a step change by increasing our current density by 60%. Increasing the current density will lead to higher hydrogen production with the same size stack as we offer today. So what is our ambition? Since the creation of this business unit, we have scaled up quickly. We have scaled engineering, manufacturing for stacks and systems, sales applications and service. This effort will continue through next year. We will need around 300 megawatts in electrolyzer capacity for our own green hydrogen production. Our sales and applications teams have been very, very active. To date, we have signed over 50 megawatt in 1-, 5-, 10- and 20-megawatt systems to be delivered in 2022, and we expect that to grow over 100 megawatt. Our sales pipeline is robust endeavors, both geographically and from an industry application point of view. We have signed business in Europe, the U.S. and Asia Pacific. Some of the markets in which we have seen a lot of activity include mobility and natural gas blending. In the mobility segment, our electrolyzers are connected to hydrogen refueling stations for forklifts, cars and trucks, while the natural gas application is to either blend green hydrogen into a natural gas pipeline or a gas turbine. As we look into the future, we expect to have an installed base of over 3,000 megawatts of our electrolyzer solutions generating over 1,000 tons per day of green hydrogen. As you can see, our future is bright. We have made great progress during the last 12 months, and we'll continue to develop and offer electrolyzer solutions that enable a myriad of customers and industries to achieve their goals of creating a greener world by reducing emissions. Our ambition is using our technology to make green hydrogen cost competitive. We are making green hydrogen the molecule of choice. [Presentation]

It's my pleasure to be here today with my friend, Dr. Andrew Forrest. As you know, he's known throughout his native Australia and around the world, not only for his business acumen, but I think, more importantly, for his deep commitment to helping others through ethical entrepreneurship. He's the Founder and Chairman of Fortescue Metals Group. Dr. Forrest is aware of the heavy carbon footprint of the mining industry. He is dedicated to solving that problem. So I'm so honored to have him here today not only to talk about his views on green hydrogen, but about the exciting prospects both of us can do in together Australia. So let's jump in. Andrew, it's so great to see you again. And as you know, have we many people around the world watching the symposium. I would like you to tell them a little bit about the company you started. I always love entrepreneurs and how you started Fortescue and where you're going in the future.

Thank you, Andy. Look, it's a deep question for me because there's so much emotion involved in it, Andy. We started with an impossible dream that we could take on some of the biggest companies or the biggest companies in the mining world. We'd go into their most profitable region, the region which accounts for their balance sheet, accounts for the majority of their profits for decades, and we'd split it up and we've become a major player ourselves. That's in iron ore, seaborne iron ore in the Pilbara. Everyone wrote us off, Andy. They just said, "That's absolutely impossible. This guy's mad." But you wind forward, been over a decade and a half now, and we're one of Australia's largest companies. We go blow for blow with those very big companies. We are the lowest cost, most efficient iron ore producer in the world. We produced net EBITDA the other day of about USD 16 billion for the year, net profit after tax over $10 billion. So it's been a dream which has come true. But we're not really an iron ore company, Andy. We're a leadership and management company, which used a belief and a vision to create a huge company. Now we now have a base. We have a very substantial industrial base, which we want to send green. It's -- the trouble in paradise with Fortescue is that it's a heavy carbon-emitting, heavy manufacturing, heavy industry company like the thousands others out there, which cause global warming. But that's our opportunity, Andy, to send our company green and then to take on the fossil fuel sector, which is even bigger and uglier and hairier than the big iron ore -- the major miners of the world which we took on 15 years ago. But hey, Andy. Like you, we know how to do this. We're going to produce green hydrogen, green ammonia, green electricity in proportions equal to them. But of course, ours won't be polluting the planet.

So Andrew, a lot of folks think hydrogen and ammonia is a pipe dream. What do you think it's a great solution for the mining industry, say, versus the lithium batteries?

It's that miracle molecule. I mean it's fantastic, is hydrogen. For anything which needs higher revolutions like our big trucks, airplanes, hydrogen is perfect for it. I mean hydrogen fuel cells are going to work really well. We invented the world's first hydrogen fuel cell haul track in 3.5 months, Andy. You can come over here. You can drive it around. At the same time my team were inventing that truck and changing the drive engines of these huge trucks to hydrogen fuel cells, they were also putting green ammonia into a ship's engine, green ammonia into our train engines and seeing them run successfully up over 50%, 60%, 70%, up to nearly 100% green ammonia. So that's fantastic. And you use green ammonia when you want slow revolutions like these huge ships, which go all over the world. They run at between 60 and 100 revolutions per minute. I mean really slow, perfect for ammonia, perfect for zero pollution ammonia. The whole shipping world has to switch to it. And then, of course, with hydrogen, that's what we can run our trucks on, our vehicles on. So I see it as a miracle molecule. And wherever you've got mobility or wherever you need to transform hydrogen to something else like into ammonia, like in the fertilizers, into iron, into steel, you just can't get a better molecule. One catch with hydrogen, Andy: it's got to be green. You've got real hydrogen for environmental. You've got real hydrogen and then you got a fake hydrogen for environmental purposes. Fake is when you've got carbon in the supply chain. That's obviously fossil fuel. Real is when there's no carbon in the supply chain, and that's renewable electricity.

Thanks. Now, Andrew, you also, I believe, thinking about shipping green ammonia around the world. I'm here in Korea. What kind of opportunity do you see that for your company?

Well, you're in Korea now, so you would have a good handle on it. Many of your customers and the people who we know super well, Andy, also know you and they know Plug Power. They really reference us and say, "Hey, tell us about Andy. Tell us about Plug Power." We say, "Fantastic guy, fantastic company, invest with confidence." But yes, right now, just in coal-fired power stations in Japan and in Korea, you can put green ammonia into those coal-fired power stations. 50% or more, you can drop their emissions by 50% or more overnight, Andy. So that's in the most basic technology. But they're also looking at really great technology themselves. Where you are, you've got this wonderful company, the Hyundai Motor Group, just like the other wonderful companies who have invested with you, SK, 2 great worldwide companies. Hyundai tell us they want to be green hydrogen for everyone, everywhere, for everything. And they're going to start making green hydrogen fuel cells available to all their cars by 2027. So we think that green ammonia and green hydrogen has such a huge future, Andy.

Well, Andrew, I wouldn't be much of a salesman without saying it seems like our visions are very similar. So what do you think we can do together?

Andy, we need you guys to come into Australia with us, joint venture with us as quick as you can because we're running out of time. Our little planet's cooking and the world is impatient now, Andy. There's any amount of capital, provided your projects are great. Andy, working together, we can create fantastic projects, both in North America and in Australia. We've got enough solar and wind energy in Australia to really fire the world. But let's not just talk about Australia. You've got solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, all sorts of other beautiful forms of free renewable energy all over the world. But in Australia, Andy, we know it well. We can get you guys growing quickly in joint venture with us. And we want to do manufacturing here in Australia, simply put. The solar panels, the wind towers, the electrolyzers we need in such scale that we need produce to them where we're going to use them. And that is in Australia, Andy, and we're really looking forward to getting to work.

So Andrew, it sounds like we have a deal. We're happy to come down Australia, form a company with you, build fuel cells and electrolyzers in Australia and dominate the world together. So we're really looking forward to doing that.

Well, Andy, look, huge congratulations to you and your team at Plug Power. I really admire the fact you've got a great team around you. I really look at leadership, not for how great the person is, but how great the people are around them, and Andy, you're great leader because you've got great people around you. We feel confident in dealing with your company. We know that the hydrogen fuel cell has an inexhaustible future. We've got to make that future available everywhere we have pollution. We cannot leave a planet, which has a very high standard of living, but is not going to last. We have to have a plant with a high standard living, which is going to last forever.

And Andrew, and we'll create lots of jobs for lots of people all around the world as we do it.

Certainly.

So I really I really appreciate you taking the time with us today. And look, we're just honored that you would spend this time with me and Plug Power team. So thank you, Andrew.

Absolute pleasure. And to all your investors and everyone watching all over the world, please note that green energy, green hydrogen, green ammonia and hydrogen fuel cells powered from green hydrogen is our common future.

I couldn't agree any more. So thanks again, Andrew.

Thanks, Andy. Cheers.

Good morning, everyone. Plug Power does move fast. About 2 days ago, I had a wonderful interview with my friend, Andrew Forrest. And after that, we've signed a letter of intent to build an assembly facility in Australia to support not only Australia but New Zealand. It's going to be a big market for both of us, as Andrew talked about, gigawatts worth of deployments. I'm really excited. And next year, we'll be doing megawatts worth. So stay tuned. So more of the Plug Power symposium to come. Our next speaker and my friend for over 10 years, Pierre-Etienne Franc left his role as Vice President of Air Liquide, Hydrogen Energy World Business unit earlier this year to become the founder and CEO of FiveT Hydrogen fund. FiveT was created to help build the foundation of the hydrogen economy by launching a private infrastructure fund and financing clean hydrogen only, and I emphasize clean hydrogen only infrastructure projects. He believes that clean hydrogen will help transform and decarbonize the global economy, and in addition to saving the environment and I agree with this 100%, represents a vast value creation opportunity. It's why we're a cornerstone investor in the FiveT Hydrogen fund. And so I am so pleased to welcome Pierre-Etienne to talk about this great venture and our great partnership. Pierre-Etienne?

Thank you, Andy, and good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for this occasion that you give me to speak to you at a very special moment for FiveT Hydrogen, and I will tell you a little bit more about that in a minute. First, we need to step back a second and look at the situation in the world for hydrogen. The latest figures show that close to 500 projects have been announced and represent worth 600 billion of investments. They cover the whole world, especially in the countries which have put in place large hydrogen support policies, which are 30 countries. They embrace the world value chain. Some are very, what we call, giga-scale projects, 37 of those. And I think Andrew Forrest before has spoken about some of that. But we all know that nothing is going to happen with our policies, regulations and massive financing skills to engage the financial community. This is the way it's going to move, and it's the way it's going to become a system play, with all the parties engaged, industry payers, policymakers and financial committee. This is the root of what we have launched with FiveT Hydrogen basically 6 months ago, giving the industry its first infra fund enabling the joint work between the key industry players and early financial ones to start support the scaling moves. Where are we now? EUR 800 million of commitments have been announced a couple of days ago, a strategic partnership with one of the key world leader of asset management, Ardian, and an exceptional team. And this is just the beginning. We announced our intention back 6 months ago to be a catalyst for the developing hydrogen industry, capitalizing on the combined expertise of the FiveT Hydrogen team. Soon after, thanks to you, Andy, and thanks to Jill and Lorenzo from Chart and Baker Hughes, we received the first financial support from the American players. We were very grateful to you because you were convinced of the relevance of this collective approach, and it has [indiscernible], of course, to move forward. As we have done when we envisioned at the time when I was at the Air Liquide Group, the Hydrogen Council, this was going to bring together sectors and people that need to intensively work together to align the visions, the metrics, the ambitions and to scale up. We were aware at the time as we have been for the last 10 years within the Air Liquide Group of the need to work on alliances to bring together and share everyone's skills and talents to win. We have done it in the mobility sector in the clean production of hydrogen. In the FiveT adventure, we needed to go any way faster and stronger given the stakes that we have in front of us. To do this, we needed to work with the leading fund manager. This is why we joined forces with Ardian, a major player in fund management with a brilliant [ patient ] and team ready to accomplish the [indiscernible] as well, in the creation of a dedicated AIFM regulated fund, a joint venture called Hy24 that will develop its own regulated funds. It goes without saying that we cannot build a new world without relying on the leading players, which know technologies that are needed for that and have the already strong infrastructure for that, especially when they are also very surely committed to move quickly and strongly towards recovered hydrogen. This is the case of the ongoing initiative that was being started already more than 1 year ago, at the time led by Air Liquide, TotalEnergies and it was the key leverage for us to make this [indiscernible] move with Ardian a significant one. We had an intense competition to win their tender with many key asset managements in the space, but I think the unique combination of the skills they bring and we bring enabled us to win. We are -- now together into this clean hydrogen fund, as you have seen, we have already gathered close to, in fact, a little bit more than EUR 800 million, so more than $1 billion with, I think, 10, 12 companies joining and more to come. And of course, we are going to launch this fund, subject to the regulation approval. We're going to launch, aiming to have a split between financial and industrial players. Today, we're going stronger from industrial players, which is fundamental, of course. But the coming months, we will move into financial ones. We have first one with AXA, of course. I would like again to thank you, Andy, because your initial trust into what we started with FiveT was critical to win together with Ardian because we brought in this U.S. player of investors, and that brings the fund into a very international place immediately. As far as FiveT Hydrogen is concerned, much remains to be done, of course. Of course, we need to build that clean hydrogen firm with Ardian. We must continue to set up, to [indiscernible] utilization, to raise additional funds from financial investors, but also to make sure that the team is gathered and we move into the investment phase, which is, of course, the critical objective of this fund. We are already working on several deals, which are growing to be, I would say, the pillars of the cornerstones of the fund investments. To be very simple, we're going to look at large deals where we will take tickets at minimum EUR 30 million to EUR 50 million up to EUR 150 million. It means that we will be mostly looking at scale and mature technologies projects. We will not go alone. We will mostly go in partnership mostly as a minority player because we do not intend to be leading that. We're intending to be the partner of new efforts, new projects, new needs and to work with the pure players and the key infrastructure leaders in that space. Thereafter, for FiveT Hydrogen itself, we will tirelessly pursue the task of catalyzing the skills to support the development of the sector. To this end, we are finalizing the structuring of a network of key experts, which are going to help us develop not only this infra fund, but other initiatives in the future. They will also enable us to continue to play a role as where I believe it is to accelerate the hydrogen economic development, thanks to those very dynamic initiatives. So I wanted to thank you for listening to me and to thank everyone that has been with us to make this very huge achievements in the last 6 months. And I look forward, of course, to working with many of you in the future. Thank you again. Thank you, Andy, again, for this occasion.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to all those participating in the Plug Power 2020 Symposium. I would like to thank you for attending this panel discussion titled Hydrogen Pipeline, Long Duration Storage and Transforming Energy Infrastructure. I'm Tim Cortes, CTO of Plug Power, and I will be the moderator for our discussion today. I would like to introduce our panel of experts that we are fortunate to have today to share their insights. First, we have Chad Zamarin from Williams. Williams is a leader in providing infrastructure that safely delivers natural gas products to reliably fuel the clean energy economy. Headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Williams owns and operates more than 30,000 miles of pipelines system-wide and handles approximately 30% of the natural gas in the United States that is used every day for clean power generation, heating and industrial use. Mr. Zamarin became Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategic Development for Williams in June 2017. He oversees enterprise-level strategy, business development and customer relationships, management and responsibility for government affairs, communications, community relations and project analysis. Next, we have David Andrews from Evercore Investment Banking. They are the #1 independent research firm in the Institutional Investor all-America Equity Research survey since 2014 and recently rolled out research coverage across the energy transition value chain. Mr. Andrews is Senior Managing Director and COO for Evercore's Energy Group. Mr. Andrews has over 33 years of experience and has advised a broad range of customers on strategic transactions, capital raises and restructuring. His current focus is on the energy transition theme and is currently advising several companies in the energy storage and hydrogen sectors. I'd like to thank you both so much for being here today with Plug. So let's get to our questions. The first question is for Chad. This is actually a 2-part question. How does Williams think about the future of hydrogen as it relates to pipelines and energy infrastructure? And will you please elaborate on how hydrogen fits within the Williams strategy?

Sure. And thanks, Tim, for having me and certainly to Plug Power for hosting us today. We are very excited about hydrogen and its potential complement with pipeline and energy infrastructure that we own and operate. When you think about what we do, at the end of the day, we move natural gas from areas of supply to areas of demand. And we do that every day. It's been -- natural gas has been one of the largest drivers for greenhouse gas emissions here in the United States as we displaced coal power generation within increasing use of renewables and natural gas power generation. So there's a lot we've seen that we can do with our infrastructure to have an emissions reductions benefit. And when we think about moving natural gas today, we also focus on what can be those energy sources of the future that our infrastructure can move for our economy. And so hydrogen has a really interesting opportunity for us to scale up. When we think about opportunities at Williams, we are a large infrastructure company. As you mentioned, we move over 30% of the nation's natural gas. We're focused on 4 key areas with respect to energy transition and what we call new energy ventures. And the first area is making sure that whatever we do has an emissions reduction benefit. We need -- we were the first company in our space to commit to an emissions reduction goal, 56% greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 and an aspiration to be net zero by 2050. We charted out a very clear road map for how we believe we can achieve that, and hydrogen is part of that road map that we've charted. So emissions reductions, first and foremost, we need to see that benefit. Two, we need to invest in opportunities that are going to have a good economic return. We've got a -- we're a business. We've got to figure out how to make these opportunities economic. We also want to play to our strengths. We want to make sure that whatever we're investing in plays to the strengths that we have, our scale, our infrastructure, our capabilities. And importantly, number four is whatever we do needs to be scalable. We are, again, a large company moving a large amount of energy across the United States. We want to make sure that we can have a significant impact in order to benefit our customers and frankly, our entire country. And so when we look at hydrogen, it checks potentially all 4 of those boxes. There are still a lot of questions to be answered. But when we think about something that will have an emissions reduction benefit, it will have an economic opportunity that we think will make sense, it fits within our strategic capabilities and importantly, we think it could be significantly scaled up. So that's why we really like the potential for hydrogen, working within the existing infrastructure model that we've created that has today, primarily moving natural gas, but we think poised to move the energy in the future. We think hydrogen can play a big part of that.

Fantastic. David, there are several pieces of legislation that are being considered today at the federal level. Tell us which ones you think can be the most significant to today's topic of pipelines and long-duration storage? And how does the investor community view that government support?

Yes. So the most obvious one is the infrastructure bill that the Senate's passed, and I believe the House is scheduled to vote on it next week. And that's going to put $9.5 billion kind of focused on hydrogen. A big chunk of that will be to develop hydrogen hubs, right? So this is a perfect example of kind of, as Chad was alluding to, is you just can't produce hydrogen and then figure out what you do with it later, right? It's a purely integrated approach. And investors like that model. They welcome public funding, specifically when the funding is designed to derisk new technologies and new solutions, right, to eventually reach to a state where private capital can come in and follow. So I think it's going to be -- continues to progress. I would expect more legislation. State of California is doing their own thing as usual. And then Europe is out there stating specific hydrogen targets. So it will be -- ultimately, to be successful, it will be a public-private partnership model. But investors are welcoming that public funding.

That's really great to hear. Chad, so what is the role of the current energy infrastructure to advance the hydrogen economy from your perspective?

Yes. I think it's -- this is where things get really interesting. And the opportunity set, I think, is pretty broad. I mentioned we moved natural gas primarily today. But if you think about hydrogen, it is a form of energy that we think could very well be suited for our infrastructure. We can produce natural gas in -- across the nation in supply basins that range from the Rockies to the Marcellus and the Utica in the Northeast, to offshore Gulf of Mexico. We produce natural gas where the supply is abundant, and we move it thousands of miles across pipeline infrastructure to where demand is, without losing energy along the way. We can store massive quantities of natural gas underground, overproduce it in the summer months, store it and deliver it when needed during the peak winter demand season. So we've got a model that we've proven works to move natural gas, and we believe can work to move hydrogen. So when you think about developing the hydrogen economy and our existing infrastructure footprint, you think about places where you could find good power resources, renewable power resources, where we can find abundant wind energy, solar energy, other forms of energy that can drive hydrogen production and efficient cost and at scale. And we can -- and I can promise you that if you find that, you're going to find pipeline infrastructure that already exists. We can leverage that infrastructure, move that supply from where we can produce it to virtually any consumer across the United States. I mean we produce gas in Colorado that we can deliver to utilities in the Pacific Northwest and utilities in the Northeast and New York City. There's no reason why we can't find the very best locations to produce hydrogen and use that infrastructure to move it, to store it and to deliver to it to the customers when they need it. And so we're really excited about how that -- we think that infrastructure model lends itself to supporting and scaling up with the hydrogen comp.

Great. So how does Williams go about understanding the risk of participating in the hydrogen economy, particularly from a market perspective?

Yes, that's a great question. And we are -- the good news for us is we touch already most of the companies that we think will have a demand for hydrogen. We deliver to utilities. We deliver to -- both for power generation and for home heating, we deliver to industrial companies virtually across the entire United States footprint. And there is a demand, there is a demand for cleaner and cleaner energy sources. And so we're already having those conversations with our customers to understand how they want to participate in this market. Hydrogen is a little bit more nascent than some of the other renewable technologies. We understand the market for renewable natural gas. We understand many of the incentives and credits for solar power generation, wind power generation. We've got to see a more, I think, defined landscape for how the hydrogen economy will develop. But the good news is, I think that the customers that are going to be seeking it are already pushing forward with ideas that can bring that to bear.

So what about the technical risk, potentially thinking about embrittlement of existing pipeline systems due to the introduction of hydrogen and the long-term storage?

Yes. Yes, that's an issue we are already working on. There have been several studies done and more being done as we speak. We feel pretty hopeful that we're going to solve that issue. We are very confident that there's a level at which we can blend hydrogen into the existing infrastructure before we would see any potential problem. We also think that newer infrastructure is likely going to be much more compatible to a higher, if not pure level of hydrogen transportation. But I'm also -- my background, I started my career as a metallurgist in the pipeline industry. And hydrogen embrittlement was one of the first things that I worked on. And it is an issue that typically we see from welding processes that introduce hydrogen into the steel. So the concern is that hydrogen is a small molecule, smaller than methane and then it could migrate into the steel and cause embrittlement. We haven't seen evidence of that yet. It is a concern that's been raised, but we're working on studies and if there's one thing that I know about our industry, we have been very, very good at figuring out how to extend the life of our infrastructure and how to repurpose our infrastructure to do more was originally intended for. So I actually think the largest challenge from a hydrogen technology perspective will likely have to do with how we can put hydrogen into a fungible system.

Fantastic. So Chad, can you please share some example hydrogen projects that Williams is considering today?

In Wyoming, we have a very large footprint. We have in the Wamsutter basin over 1 million acres that we operate across, and we control many of those acres both from an ownership perspective and a surface rights perspective. Wyoming has a tremendous renewable energy resource. The problem is it's far away from where the demand is. For decades, we've tried to develop renewable power in Wyoming and move it to California and other markets where the demand is significant, but the challenge has been building the transmission infrastructure. It's not -- the challenge is not the development of the renewable power. It's how do you get it to the customers that want it and that need it. And so what's neat about our infrastructure in Wyoming, via pipelines, we're connected to utilities in the Pacific Northwest and California all the way across the country into New York City. So we looking are at developing a hydrogen hub in Wyoming where we could have literally hundreds of megawatts of renewable power production tied to hundreds of megawatts of hydrogen production, put that hydrogen into our existing infrastructure and deliver it to customers in the West and even cross into the East.

Yes. Pretty exciting. So David, what comparisons can you make for hydrogen to solar and wind development 15 years ago from an investment point of view?

Yes. So as we know, solar and wind had an advantage, right? Because -- If you look at -- as we've been talking about the 3 big buckets, production, distribution and end use, right? Solar and wind really had to worry just about the production, right? Most of that electricity, even though generated DC, right, and you had to stick it into the grid. So that like -- once you produced it, you didn't really care kind of where it went. So it had its advantage. In addition, the inputs generally were free, sunlight and kind of wind. That being said, we did not have the success of solar and wind companies did not go up and to the right ever since we started, right? There was some bumps in the road. And so -- but everybody feels like hydrogen is on its way to maturity, and now solar and wind are right now generating electricity cheaper than fossil fuels, right? So the real question is, how do you manage the increased use of that. So there is the similar kind of buzz around that. And I think it's going to be important for everybody participating in the hydrogen economy, right, on all 3 components of that is to avoid the bumps that you saw in solar and wind. So candidly, probably we're relying too much on government assistance and not focus so much on reaching some kind of cost parity. Because, again, as we talked about before, that opens the floodgates to new capital and new development.

So David, of the 3 general buckets for the hydrogen economy, if you think about production, distribution, storage and end use, where do you see the potential for the most value add?

Yes. It's an interesting question because if you read all the financial media right now and buzz, and I know Plug has been a big supporter of this, right? The focus is, drop the cost of electrolyzers and drop the cost of hydrogen produced, whether it's down to $2, $1.50, $1, right? And that clearly has to happen. If that doesn't happen, it's kind of game over, right? But nobody -- there's -- I don't think there's any doubt, maybe it's just timing, like how long it's going to take us to get there. On the end use side, I would also say there's no doubt if the hydrogen is there, we can find an application for it. Now there's some debate on where it should go first. Should it go into long-haul trucking? Should it go into the existing hydrogen market? Fertilizers and petrochem, right, marine transportation, industrial heat, cement and steel, right? There's a lot of debate on where that hydrogen needs to go. But I think if it's there, there's no doubt that you'll find the use for it. I think the most interesting place for step changes in the development of this ecosystem is in Chad's world, right, the midstream, right? And that is not only are we need to transport this in gaseous form or liquified form, in some cases, right? There's companies out there looking for smaller scale distributed solutions, looking for hydrogen stored in oil and hydrogen stored in solid state, right? It's unclear what the scale of that can be, right? But inevitably, when you're thinking about an energy source, right, the one advantage fossil fuels has is natural gas, coal, oil, you name it, right, has inherent storage already built in. You don't think of it as storage, but the energy is stored in those products. And so as long as you have a big pile of coal, you can run your power plant for a long time, right? As long as you have a salt dome and natural gas, you can run a power plant for a long time, right? Hydrogen is a different animal, so we're going to have to store this hydrogen because Chad alluded to this a little bit, but it's not only the supply of hydrogen that's imperative, it's surety of that supply, right? Nobody is going to spend the money. It's like hey, you can't just prove to me you have hydrogen, you got to prove to me that you can have hydrogen every day, 24/7 for me to do what you want to do. So surety supply is just as important as supply itself.

Yes. We talk about surety of supply every day at Plug Power for our customers. It's critical that we have hydrogen for them every day, all the time. So I'm glad to hear you completely agree with that. Regarding hydrogen, what do you think the biggest misconception by the financial and mainstream media is and also with the general public.

Yes. Look, I think everybody created hydrogen in, I think, their sixth or seventh or eighth grade lab, right? You did the electrolysis of the water, you have the 2 test tubes, 1 had hydrogen, 1 had oxygen. They say, here's an energy source that comes from water and they go, duh, right? And I'm not talking about [indiscernible]. But generally, people tend to gloss over the technical challenges. And whether Chad is talking about hydrogen embrittlement or the cost of transportation, the cost of storage, right? It is a much tougher technical challenge that we're facing. And oh, by the way, how long have we built out the natural gas infrastructure in this company -- I mean, in the country? Like decades, 50, 60, 70 years, right? We're trying to jump start it and build this out quickly inside a decade, at least to scale, with hopefully it'll be massive by the time of 2050. So people tend to just immediately jump into, well, it's duh, it's easy. And they don't appreciate the challenges that it takes to achieve what needs to be done.

Some great points. So Chad, what, if anything, would you add to what David said about the misconceptions with regard to what you hear every day or what the challenges that Williams is facing?

Yes. I think it is very consistent with the themes that David just talked about. I think what troubles me the most is, I think, just a lack of recognition regarding the existing energy infrastructure in our country and how we transition to a clean energy future, or a cleaner energy future. You hear a lot of emotional rhetoric around wanting to effectively retire existing industries and build new industries. And when we think of ourselves at Williams, we don't think of ourselves as just a natural gas transportation company. We think ourselves as an energy transportation company. And if our customers and if our regulators want us to move a different energy in the future, we think the best capabilities to figure that out are those same companies that have proven their ability and those same industries that have proven their ability to deliver energy. We can produce hydrogen. We can put it into transportation systems that don't lose it along the way. We don't lose any of the energy along the way. We can store it in vast quantities without that energy depleting, net storage depleting over time. Batteries don't do that. We can store this energy and we can deliver it when it's needed. If we can do that, I'm not sure that people fully appreciate that opportunity. And then when we think about -- and I agree with David, I mean we built this infrastructure. It's irreplaceable, and it's getting harder and harder to build new infrastructure. And electrification is going to be important. But I can tell you, as hard as it is to build pipelines, it's even harder to build power lines. And so we're going to need all hands on deck. I mean in all kind of solutions that we can bring to bear. And so I hope that we can kind of dispel that misconception that hydrogen is some new stand-alone opportunity. I think it's how do we connect the pieces of what we already know how to do, layer in some of the new technology that we need. But we're creating just an enhancement of our economy, we're not having to do away with what we've already been able to accomplish and start from scratch. And so that's what we try to talk to folks about when we try to highlight the opportunity with hydrogen.

Great. Well, thank you. So gentlemen, we've come to the end of our time today. And on behalf of the entire Plug Power team, I would really like to thank each of you for taking the time to share your insights and expertise on this very, very important subject. So thank you very much. [Break]

Jose Luis Crespo is our General Manager, Material Handling. Previously, Jose was in charge of Plug's Global Sales. His success in building relationships with Amazon, Home Depot, Stellantis and many more Plug customers is why I asked him to take on our Material Handling business. Frankly, today, we would not have Amazon as a customer without Jose. He developed a great understanding, and this is really important of Amazon's needs and help transform our value proposition and offering to make them our largest customers. Now he works every day to expand our relationships into other applications also with Amazon. He does this by partnering, and partnering is core to Plug's DNA. We believe that without a shared vision, the global climate goals cannot be met. You can have confidence, and let me tell you confidence, that Jose with his partners will help us get there. Here is Jose to bring you up to speed on the material handling side of Plug. Jose? [Presentation]

Hello, everyone. I hope you are enjoying the presentations of our third symposium. We are now going to talk about material handling. As you have seen in this video, Plug Power enables material handling operations to run with higher productivity using green hydrogen. Warehouse productivity is always a central concern for our customers with high utilization fleets. The pandemic has magnified the importance of moving products into the end customers' hands as efficiently as possible. And Plug has increased the productivity of all of our customers with high utilization fleets by offering a solution that operates at constant and full power compared to batteries. We have made greater strides in the market and expect to see many more ahead of us. But first, let's look at where we are and how we stand against our 2024 targets that we set in our 2019 5 years symposium. In fact, let's see what our 2019 presenter forecasted at that year's symposium.

So the size of our market opportunity in material handling, our value proposition, as I just described, the growth drivers that we bring in to the market to make easier for customers to adopt the technology and the potential with existing customers and with new customers makes us very comfortable that we can achieve $245 million in gross billings this year and grow to $750 million by the year 2024 and we can go from 30,000 [ generalized ] total deployments this year to 125,000 in the year 2024.

Wow, that guy really knew what he was talking about. Two years into the execution of that 5-year strategy, here's where we stand with those targets. Our target is to reach $750 million in revenue in 2024, and we will be over $450 million in revenue in 2021. We also set a target to achieve 5 pedestal customers by 2024, which we have attained in 2021. And of course, we will continue to add more pedestal customers in the next 3 years. We have installed 52,000 fuel cells by the end of 2021. And we will have deployed more than 165 refueling sites by the end of 2021. Clearly, we are on track to delivering on or exceeding our targets by 2024. And we still see enormous potential in the market. As we have said before, every single electric forecast in the world is a forklift where we can put a fuel cell in. In North America and in Europe alone, in 2021, there are more than 4 million forklifts in operation. That number will be 5 million by 2030. When we expand our lens to include the rest of the world, the number swells to 10 million electric forklifts that Plug can put a fuel cell into, which creates an enormous potential for Plug Power. This is how we see the market segmented. 15% of the market is in large fleets of 200 units or more, 2 to 3 shifts for these fleets. This is where most of Plug's installed base of 52,000 units is, which means we have about 8% penetration in this market segment. 25% of the forklifts are in the medium-sized fleets with more than 60 units, mostly 1 to 2 shifts for this. And the remaining 60% of the fleets are classified as small, meaning fewer than 60 forklifts. These are low utilization fleets. We expect to continue to grow in the large fleet market where we have proven value to our customers, but we also plan to expand our customer base in the medium and small size segments to propel us into hyper growth mode. How do we expand into the medium and small-sized fleet segments? Most of the customers in those markets used lead-acid batteries. And even though total cost of ownership of fuel cells is lower than lead-acid batteries in high utilization fleets, the initial cost of the technology is a bagger for quick adoption. We are steadily taking down this last obstacle, initial cost. And the more we approach parity with the cost of batteries, the easier the decision-making process for our customers will be. And that will propel our growth in the market. Our current market share in the U.S. and in Europe combined is 1.2%. By 2024, and based on our 2019 5-year plan, we are projecting a total market share of 2.7%. We're aiming to achieve initial parity with lead-acid batteries in the medium-sized fleets by 2025. With this, we will be able to capture a 4.5% share of the market in North America and Europe. Furthermore, we're putting a strategy in place to achieve cost parity with lead-acid batteries with the small fleets in 2030. By that time, we could reach a 30% market share in North America and Europe. Potentially, this strategy will lead to $1 billion in revenues in 2025 and close to $4 billion by 2030. And let's keep in mind that this analysis only covers North America and Europe. And we expect to see upside coming from other areas of the world like Asia as we expand globally. These are the enablers that will allow us to reach cost parity by 2025 and 2030. We will use the improved cost of green hydrogen that Sanjay has talked about. We are improving our stack technology and creating more efficient fuel cell platforms. We are creating hydrogen infrastructure solutions aimed at the medium- and small-sized fleets for the consumption and installation needs. Plug created the first commercially feasible market for fuel cells, material handling. And as we enter the next phase in the development of the green hydrogen economy, material handling is expected to continue to grow, taking advantage of the world-class ecosystem that you have heard about during the presentations today. Green hydrogen generation, electrolyzer technology, new refueling station developments with new applications in the market, bringing economies of scale to our solutions. Come and join us for the exciting years ahead. [Presentation]

Hello. My name is David Minnick, and I am the Executive Vice President of Global Manufacturing of Plug Power. I'm thrilled to introduce you to Plug Power's first Innovation Center gigafactory. Our state-of-the-art facility has the capacity to produce 2.5 gigawatts of total electrical output of which 1 gigawatt will be electrolyzer capacity. When fully loaded, we expect to produce 7 million membrane electrode assemblies annually and 60,000 fuel cell stacks each year. I'd like to take a closer look at the tremendous scale of this facility and hear from the team firsthand.

Welcome to the Rochester Innovation Center, home of the world's first and largest PEM fuel cell and electrolyzer gigafactory. At full capacity, we'll be able to produce 2.5 gigawatts of electrical output as part of a larger corporate strategy to accelerate the adoption of green hydrogen and a carbon-free ecosystem. This facility positions Plug Power in the Rochester region to be the leader in PEM technology, economy of scale and revolutionizing the industry.

Our facility is 155,000 square feet and utilizes many advanced manufacturing techniques. The floor layout has been highly engineered to optimize our efficiency and maximize our throughputs. Through our economies of scale, use of high-volume automation and new raw materials, integrated design of the facility lends itself to significant cost reductions and performance improvements. We are working hard with engineering to develop and manufacture the next generation of fuel cell and electrolyzer technologies.

A unique automated plate stamping machine will convert raw stainless steel into ultra-thin bipolar plates. This facility will produce over 2 million plates annually at full capacity. These plates will then be assembled into 60,000 stacks for various customer applications.

A bank of 24 laser cutting and welding machines will be used to finish the bipolar plates. The use of robotic gasketing will apply the final seals before they are assembled into the stacks.

Our facility will utilize roll-to-roll coating technology to manufacture world-class anode and cathode electrodes for both MEAs and electrolyzers. Over the past 3 years, we've manufactured 1.2 million linear meters of anodes and cathodes and expect to continue that pace into the future. In the innovation center, we will utilize state-of-the-art development coating technology to continue our pursuit of low-cost, high-yield and improved quality electrodes.

This facility supports high-volume manufacturing at scale for fuel cell and electrolyzer business units, a dozen hot presses turn rolls of coated material into 6 different MEA architectures for fuel cells and electrolyzers. Our innovative assembly process has enabled us to cut cost by 35% in the last 3 years.

Our coated bipolar plates are combined with our MEAs in stacks to form PEM stacks which are used in our fuel cell products. Our best-in-class stacks provide industry-leading power density, high durability and the significant cost savings at volume.

Renewable electricity is critical for developing net zero emission ecosystem. Here in Rochester, we use green hydrogen produced by Niagara hydropower to test out our electrolyzer to make green hydrogen not only in New York State, but around the world we are leveraging renewable electricity to make green hydrogen.

The Plug Power Gigafactory is a world-class technology research and development center, supported by collaborations with suppliers, partners and universities. Our team of engineers, chemists and material scientists are continuously innovating the next generation of MEA and stack technology.

We understand the critical role our fuel cell and electrolyzer technology plays in the use and production of green hydrogen. Our state-of-the-art analytical laboratories use extensive analytical methods and tools to increase the durability of our systems. These postmortem methods will help us continue to globally source new materials, qualify new suppliers, increase reliability and reduce costs.

Our state-of-the-art fuel cell and electrolyzer gigafactory is not only driving industry scale, but also energizing the green job economy. Our innovative team is continuing to grow. We're 150 employees strong and hiring now. Come join our team.

Our Rochester Innovation Center has changed the game for hydrogen infrastructure and fuel cell production around the world. With our wealth of fuel cell expertise and manufacturing know-how, Rochester is the perfect location to host Plug Power's first PEM stack and electrolyzer gigafactory. But the Gigajourney does not stop there. Perfecting the model in Rochester has laid the ground for Plug Power to propagate our gigafactory network globally creating thousands of green jobs as we scale up. Follow the green highway to visit us in Rochester in 2022 and globally over the coming years.

Congressman Joe Morelle represents the 25th district in New York, which includes Rochester, the site of our new PEM stack and electrolyzer Gigafactory, which you just saw Dave introduced. He's a member of the Congress' hydrogen fuel cell caucus. He's a strong supporter and has a strong record supporting zero carbon goals in public policy. Congressman Morelle is now with us to talk about the impact our new Gigafactory is having in his district and the importance of hydrogen technology to the country. It's my pleasure to introduce Congressman Joe Morelle.

I'm Joe Morelle, and I'm proud to represent Rochester, New York in the United States Congress. I can't tell you how grateful we are to have Plug Power uplifting our local economy. The Plug Rochester gigafactory is exactly the type of advanced manufacturing investment and growth we need to facilitate. This factory alone means over 300 jobs for the Rochester region. Jobs that not only strengthen our economy but also focus on creating new solutions, solutions to pressing issues like the climate crisis, which poses an existential threat to the world as we know it. We need bold, unprecedented action to combat this crisis and protect our planet. As the leader in green hydrogen energy production, Plug Power is taking action to transform our economy and put us on the right path. I'm proud to stand with so many who work to protect our environment by supporting measures that reduce our carbon emissions, protect our critical natural resources and ensure our planet's well being for future generations. In Washington, I'll keep working to pass aggressive legislation that will ensure the federal government does everything possible to address the climate crisis. Because the each day we fail to act on this crisis can threaten the future of our children and grandchildren, and frankly, the long-term viability of our planet. I'm so grateful to Plug Power for their commitment to creating jobs, strengthening our economy and building a cleaner, more sustainable future. Working together, we can make enduring and significant change. Thank you for all the work you do and God bless you.

Henrik Hololei has previously served as Deputy Secretary General for the European Commission and in many prominent posts in the Estonian government. Today, he is the Director General for the European Commission's department for Mobility and Transport, a position he has held since 2015. The European Green Deal has committed to EU to climate neutrality by 2050 for transport and mobility. That's an aggressive timeline to reduce emissions by 90%. Henrik has identified hydrogen as the fuel of the future that will help achieve this goal. And he's [indiscernible] a common European effort to further develop in innovative hydrogen solutions. Please welcome Henrik Hololei to this symposium.

Dear participants, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great pleasure to speak to you today, although I would have so much preferred to be with you in person. As a convinced believer in strong transatlantic partnership, I always enjoy visiting friends in U.S. There is no doubt that clean green hydrogen will play an important role in transforming our economies and societies in the years and decades to come. Let me explain how I see the way ahead and the role and relevance of European policies. The coming years will represent an important moment for the transition towards more sustainable transport and mobility system as also stipulated in the European Green deal. Today, when we are on our way out of pandemic, we know that we need to build back better and build back sustainably. For the transport and mobility sector, this means the reduction of greenhouse gases of 90% for 2050. Accordingly, the commission published its sustainable and smart mobility strategy last December. Among the available sustainable fuel solutions, clean hydrogen is extremely valuable, particularly in situations where direct electrification is impossible or impractical, too complicated or too costly. For the transport sector, to reach climate neutrality by 2050, hydrogen should provide around 20% of the transport fuel mix. Low carbon synthetic fuels derived from hydrogen would need to contribute an additional 20% of the mix. Today, however, hydrogen accounts for less than 2% of Europe's energy and is primarily used to produce chemical products. In addition, 96% of this hydrogen production comes from or through natural gas emitting in the process significant amounts of CO2. However, the potential is there. There is no doubt about that. And to exploit this fully, we must set targets, we need a road map, and we need everyone pulling in the same direction. The EU hydrogen strategy responds to this need. It foresees that between 2025 and 2030, hydrogen becomes an intrinsic part of our EU energy system. We need at least 40 gigawatts of renewable hydrogen electrolyzers by 2030. We need to be producing around 10 million tons of renewable hydrogen. The European Clean Hydrogen Alliance is taking us closer to these figures. It now counts more than 1,400 members, large and small industry players, national and local public authorities, civil society and other stakeholders. All are committed to building an entire hydrogen economy in the EU. For this industry to kick in, we need also an adequate regulatory framework. It is a must. In July this year, in the so-called Fit for 55 package, the commission adopted a set of concrete proposals in this regard. To support hydrogen in transport and mobility, we proposed to strengthen regulatory and market-based measures. To give you an example, with the alternative fuels infrastructure regulation, we propose binding targets for member states to ensure a sufficiently dense, widespread high-quality hydrogen refueling infrastructure. To start immediate decarbonization of the aviation sector, we have proposed the ReFuelEU Aviation Regulation. This would require fuel suppliers to blend in growing levels of sustainable aviation fuels, including e-fuels. We are also preparing an industrial alliance on renewable and low carbon fuels to scale up production and bring the most promising SAFs to commercial maturity. In parallel, we are moving forward with the preparation of the clean aviation partnership with significant investment from the EU budget in research and the demonstration of disruptive technologies in the aeronautics industry. The decarbonization of shipping will pursue a similar path. With the proposed FuelEU Maritime regulation, we foresee emission reductions for ships in operation and at berth based on annual greenhouse gas intensity. This should increase the share of renewable and low carbon fuels in the fuel mix of international maritime transport without creating barriers to the single market. Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, the stage is set. Hydrogen will play a significant role in Europe's future energy mix, including that for transport and mobility. Thank you very much for your attention, and I wish you a successful symposium with many fruitful exchanges. The future is ours to make. Thank you.

Plug Power is thrilled about HYVIA, our joint venture with Renault. HYVIA integrates the entire hydrogen mobility ecosystem in really a unique way from the vehicle to infrastructure and turnkey services for customers. Luca de Meo is the CEO of Renault S.A.. He's had more than 20 years experience in the automotive sector, including stints with Toyota Europe and the Fiat Group. Look, Luca knows the challenges commercial vehicles face in reducing emissions, and he's helping blaze a trail for the industry to make the shift to hydrogen fuel cell solutions. Look, he's been a wonderful joint venture partner for us, and I'm so excited to welcome him to our event.

So hello. I'm happy to share this moment with you and my vision of sustainable mobility and hydrogen mobility in particular. So here comes green hydrogen with HYVIA. As you may know, Renault Group aims to achieve carbon neutrality in Europe in 2040 and worldwide in 2050 as well as having the greenest mix on the market by 2030. Hydrogen mobility complementary to electric mobility is part of the story. It's about carbon-free mobility that enables zero CO2 emissions, increased range and the shorter refueling time. These attributes are particularly meaningful for light commercial vehicles, we think, extending autonomy for high loads and intensive use. And here comes HYVIA, a joint venture between Plug Power and the Renault Group dedicated to hydrogen mobility. HYVIA was created last June, and I think it's moving very, very fast. HYVIA joins the expertise of 2 leaders, Plug Power and the Renault Group. Renault Group has 100 years experience in light commercial vehicles, the European leader of electric LCVs with 40% market share and the pioneer of hydrogen LCVs since 2014. Plug Power, on the other hand, has 20 years of experience and is present in Europe for more than 10 years with the major, major expertise in fuel cells, refueling stations and electrolyzers. So joining forces allows HYVIA to offer a complete and unique ecosystem with fuel cells LCVs, refueling stations and electrolyzers. That means production, distribution and LCV mobility. We actually targeted a 30% market share in hydrogen powered LCVs in Europe by 2030. This is a huge challenge, but up to our passion and engagement. In fact, today, I'm near the first H2 prototype of HYVIA, just unveiled for European markets. Renault Master Van H2-Tech, a large van for transporting goods and HYVIA's hydrogen refueling station for green hydrogen distribution. Those are the keystones of our ambitious portfolio to be deployed in territories and professional fleets. As a pioneer in new energies and the European leader in electric light commercial vehicles, Renault Group is pursuing its objective of having the greenest mix on the market with the creation of HYVIA. HYVIA integrates the entire hydrogen mobility ecosystem in a unique way from the vehicle to infrastructures and turnkey services for our customers. The development of this cutting-edge technology will enable us to strengthen our industrial base and set up new value-generating activities in France in this very, very promising segment. So see you soon on the green hydrogen path that we are creating together.

I'm Dustan Skidmore. I'm the Vice President of Fuel Cell Engineering with Plug Power. Fuel cells have several advantages over batteries in electric vehicles, especially when you get to the applications where you have to carry a lot of weight or have a longer range if you have to drive further. We found that especially in delivery vehicles, once the range gets to about 100 miles, the battery becomes very large and also heavy. So they have to reduce the amount of packages and cargo they can carry. But with the fuel cell, once you have the fuel cell system itself and if you want to extend the range, you only have to add more hydrogen tanks. So it's a much smaller and lighter component to extend the range beyond 100 miles. We've partnered with Renault and we have a joint venture with them called HYVIA, and we'll be making vehicles together. And those vehicles will be branded as HYVIA, and they will use this 30-kilowatt engine. Those vehicles are now going through testing phases, and they'll be available to the public late this year. This 30-kilowatt fuel cell system was designed to fit between the frame rails of a typical delivery truck. And we also wanted to make it easy for our customers to integrate. So we found that in the fuel cell industry, other companies were making fuel cells, but they were really hard to install in trucks. So you have to provide a lot of different components, the customer had to figure out how to make it all work together. This thing is a completely self-contained system. So it's got the cooling system, the fuel cell, the DC-to-DC converter and everything else you need to turn hydrogen into high-voltage electricity. So you can take an electric vehicle and maybe it's a battery vehicle, you can convert it to fuel cell by adding this fuel cell engine when you add the hydrogen from the hydrogen tanks and then it's 350-volt DC output power to the truck, makes it very simple for customers. We're also going through iterations where we'll be taking the components inside this engine and putting them in the engines compartment for future generations. This product is for use in applications like on-road vehicles such as semis and buses, but we also have a variant of it that can be used in large-scale stationary. That version can be used in a parallel configuration to make systems up to 1 megawatt. And that would be for things like data centers, warehouse backup, things like that. And then we also have a third application, which is aerospace. And similarly to the stationary program, we use multiple modules to make megawatt scale engines for airplanes.

This is [ Charles Carlston ], I'm the Director of [indiscernible] cell stack engineering. This is a 180-kilowatt stack that's used in our 125-kilowatt system. It's made up of nearly 500 cells and 500 different MEAs, and they're all planted together and strapped using the [indiscernible] hardware. The first key improvement the stack team has made is we've built and tested stack of a new tool that produces the plates. These plates of the new tool reduce the cycle time it takes to make a plate, reduced the welding time required, the laser cutting time and also improves the material utilization to make a plate. So there's less waste in the stamping process. The second key improvement the stack team has made is we introduced a new press and a new strapping technology. These are larger stacks than we ever built before. And the 125-kilowatt system contains stacks that have about 500 cells. So that's 500 separate plates and MEAs that can be stacked up and pressed between in plates. The third key area we made progress is in the testing of our large stacks. We've never made stacks this large, so we needed a new test station to test them. And this test station tests stacks from 10 kilowatts all the way up to 180 kilowatts. This allows us to test the whole dynamic range of the stack and has key control over the stack parameters that are important, that's stack temperature, pressure of the hydrogen and air, pressure of the coolant and flow of the coolant as well as the relative humidity of those gases. This allows us to map the stack out and determine the best operating condition. Another characteristic of this test station is that it has advanced cell diagnostic techniques, and those could be used to diagnose specific problems within a stack. So if a stack comes back from a field with an issue, we could pinpoint exactly what it is and [ arrive ] at the root cause. We can also use those same techniques to evaluate new components in the stack, a new plate design, a new material to prove out, and overall, improve the stack performance in many ways. All of our stack test stations here at Plug Power export the power we produce to the grid, so there's nothing wasted. All of the work we've been doing in the past year has been to advance the technology for mass manufacturing of the stacks. With the advancements we've made in the stack tooling, we can produce the plates more effectively with lower scrap and reduce cycle time. We can press the stacks more precisely and apply the strapping bands in an automated fashion on the new press and we could do automated leak checks. All this information too is collected for later traceability. All 3 of these technologies that we're now incorporating, the new plate designs, the new stack press and clamping, the new test stations will enable us to produce these metal plate stacks at a higher quality level and a higher quantity than we ever have been able to do before.

You all know who Senator Schumer is. He's been representing New York State in Washington for over 20 years. He currently serves the nation as the Senate majority leader where he sets the legislative agenda for the Senate. What you may not know is that Senator Schumer has been a long-term partner with Plug Power. And quite honestly, we wouldn't be where we are today without his great support. He's also a passionate advocate for decarbonization. Senator Schumer support plays a key role in bringing affordable hydrogen to the market. I'm so honored to have Senator Schumer here today. Senator Schumer?

Hi, everyone. This is Senator Chuck Schumer. And I'm so thrilled to join you for this year's symposium on the green hydrogen revolution. Thank you to Plug Power, CEO, Andy Marsh, the over 1,000 Plug Power employees and the many friends and partners in attendance today for inviting me to share a brief message. Plug Power's work to develop hydrogen fuel cells is vitally important to the success of Upstate's economy and to our nation's clean energy future. This month, Plug Power's breaking ground on the world's largest green hydrogen fuel production facility in western New York. And this fall, it will open a new 380 job Innovation Center in Rochester to drive the clean hydrogen fuel cell ecosystem in our state. I've worked very hard to support Plug Power over the years and make sure it can grow. And this year, I'm doubling down on my fight to grow the green hydrogen and fuel cell industries here in New York with the bipartisan infrastructure build, which makes an unprecedented $9.5 billion federal investment in the hydrogen economy. I made sure that this provision was put in the bill because I believe in you. This investment is key to helping leaders like Plug Power reach their goal to create new technologies and the first nationwide network of green hydrogen fuel cell production. I'm also pushing for greater investments in hydrogen fuel cells and production facilities as well as major new hydrogen production tax credits. This work is so important. It's about protecting our environment while paving the way for jobs of the future, and Plug Power's work will be vital to achieving President Biden's goal of reducing greenhouse emissions and creating 10 million clean energy jobs. I've been proud to help Plug Power in many ways as it has grown, and I'm now more focused than ever on helping you furthermore in the future. So to Plug Power, I'm proud of everything you've accomplished. Keep up the good work, and congratulations on all your success.

Paul Tonko is serving his 6th term in Congress, and I'm fortunate enough to know him from way back in his 1st term representing New York's 20th District, which is up here in Upstate New York. He serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and chairs the Subcommittee on Environment & Climate Change. Congressman Tonko knows the importance of the hydrogen economy, not only for drastically reducing carbon emissions, but also for creating good, clean, green jobs. I appreciate his long-term support for Plug's work and I'm so happy to welcome him to our symposium today. So let's hear from Paul.

Hello. I'm Paul Tonko, and I'm proud to represent Plug Power's headquarters in Latham, New York in Congress. I have been working with Plug for over 2 decades going back to my days in state government. During this time, I've seen them grow from a small start-up to an essential service provider for some of the largest retail companies in the world. And as more people, businesses and elected officials come to understand the urgent need for a clean energy transition, companies like Plug are becoming truly indispensable. In Congress, there is a growing recognition of the importance of hydrogen to our energy future. And that recognition is coming from both sides of the political aisle. For instance, in August, I had the opportunity to host a Republican colleague, David McKinley of West Virginia in the capital region. A visit to Plug Power was our first stop. But for our climate goals to succeed hydrogen infrastructure, equipment and vehicles will need to be fueled by clean hydrogen. Plug is pioneering green hydrogen production at scale, which will lead to investments and jobs across our country, including in New York State. This is an incredibly exciting time for hydrogen energy. As I record this video, Congress is working on a budget reconciliation package and a bipartisan infrastructure bill. And by time the symposium happens, I hope these issues will likely be resolved. The Build Back Better Act that House Democrats advanced out of committee included significant funding for zero emission vehicle infrastructure and an expansion of DOE's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program and Title XVII Loan Guarantee Program. These investments are intended to be inclusive of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies. The bill also includes new investment and production tax credits for low emissions hydrogen, and it extends the existing fuel cell investment tax credit. These are great tools that will provide long-term certainty for an industry that will undoubtedly grow exponentially in the 2020s. The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment in Jobs Act also includes a robust hydrogen title, including establishment of at least 4 regional clean hydrogen hubs and a $1 billion investment for a demonstration, commercialization and deployment program intended to decrease the cost of clean hydrogen production from electrolyzers. It is so clear to me that Secretary Granholm and the Department of Energy are also prioritizing hydrogen. DOE recently announced a new Hydrogen Earthshot with an ambitious '1 1 1' goal. That is $1 for 1 kilogram of clean hydrogen in 1 decade. As we have seen with other DOE initiatives like SunShot, the success of the Hydrogen Earthshot will depend on successful collaborative relationships amongst the department, national labs, academic and research institutions, state and local governments, and yes, the private sector. The good news is we know this process can lead to results. We have done it before. DOE investments, beginning with the Recovery Act in 2009, helped reduce the cost of LED light bulbs by over 90%, of batteries and utility scale solar by over 80%, and of onshore wind by over 70%. But now it is time to innovate the next generation of essential energy technologies. DOE can play a critical role in the growth of the industry at every step along the way, R&D, demonstration, financial assistance to build domestic manufacturing capacity and early commercialization and widespread financing opportunities for the production storage, delivery and use of clean hydrogen. And I believe that Congress, beginning with this infrastructure legislation, will ensure DOE has the funding necessary to achieve its goals and support all aspects of the emerging hydrogen economy. So I thank the Plug team for convening this symposium and for allowing me to participate. We are indeed in the midst of an exciting time for Plug and certainly for our nation's energy transition, and I believe hydrogen is going to play a critical role in achieving a rapid and ambitious clean energy agenda. I look forward to continuing this work together. And with that, I thank you.

Hello, everyone. I'm Gerry Conway, General Counsel and Executive Vice President for Government Affairs here at Plug. Earlier in the program today, we've heard from some of our long-time partners in Congress. Senator Schumer, Congressman Tonko and Congress Morelle all touched on some of the government policy initiatives that they are supporting that could help accelerate growth -- continued growth in the green hydrogen industry. So we wanted to give you a little more color on certain of those key policy initiatives that we believe will help both Plug and others in the green hydrogen space. So I'm here today with my friend and colleague, Tim Urban. Tim leads the tax policy practice at Bracewell's Policy Resolution Group in Washington, D.C. He's an experienced tax lobbyist, who's advocated for clients on every major tax bill introduced in Congress over the past 20 years, including the restoration and the extension of the Section 48 investment tax credit in 2018. Tim represents Plug and many of our partners promoting federal tax policies related to the clean energy, hydrogen and fuel cell sectors. So welcome today, Tim.

Thanks very much, and good afternoon.

So I've been with the company for over 21 years working in the policy space. I've had the pleasure to spend some of that time with you and some of our other colleagues. And I have to say that it's certainly an active and exciting time in our industry. And we're starting to get a lot of attention in Washington, D.C. or continuing to get a lot of attention in Washington. And as you're well aware, we're certainly hopeful that Congress will act in the near term to secure the $9.5 billion for hydrogen in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, as well as tax incentives that would be created and extended in the reconciliation that's being considered. So what are your thoughts on where we are in the process, how we got here and what lies ahead?

Well, thanks very much. I guess, first of all, I'd just like to say it's a privilege to work with the Plug team. I've been doing this work for over 25 years as a government official and then as a clean energy lobbyist. And the fact of the matter is that not every year is equally auspicious. I think that this year, may be a once in a decade or once in every 2 decades kind of opportunity for clean energy generally, but also especially for hydrogen as a technology as part of the answer for global decarbonization. Gerry, I mean, you've been doing this for a while, you realize that in energy, there's no getting around the government policy affects investor behavior. And I think that while my colleagues that do other types of lobbying at Bracewell would probably argue the point, I think that an energy tax policy is kind of the queen in terms of the drivers of investor behavior. And up until now, I feel that hydrogen has been sort of crawling along a little bit at a time, getting modest extensions of various small fractionalized tax credits. It's enough to sort of keep us aspiring for more, but it hasn't been enough to drive what I would consider to be a revolution in the sector. And I think President Biden and the congressional majorities were clearly elected with somewhat of a mandate to change the tempo at which we move from these small bifurcated policy initiatives and sort of creeping along towards decarbonization at some point in the far future. I think President Biden correctly reads the tea leaves from the last election that voters want a more dramatic revolution. And because of that, this legislation, both the bipartisan bill, which you referenced and also the budget reconciliation bill, I think these are absolutely critical ingredients to moving our entire energy and industrial sector forward on a much more ambitious kind of climate change agenda. And hydrogen, for the first time, maybe ever plays what I consider to be a starring role.

Thanks, Tim. So what do you think in terms of timing? What -- not to put you on the spot, but as we look ahead in the coming weeks and months, any insight that you have into how this might actually get enacted? As we all know, Congress certainly is having its challenges of late, in particular. But any insight you have into what the weeks and months ahead look like for these policies would be helpful.

Sure. And I guess I would start with the famous phrase "don't panic" because there's an entire journalistic career field now of people who write articles that have to be published every 4 or 5 hours chronicling the ups and downs of these major pieces of legislation. And so in the race to generate clicks, I think, there's a lot of drama, there's a lot of The Perils of Pauline kind of thing. Every day, our firm, we get calls from clients who have just read the latest thing or watch TV and now they're positive that everything is falling apart. This is what we call Friday. I mean this is going to be a normal chain of events. It's going to go on, in my opinion, it could easily go on towards the end of the year. There aren't a lot of hard stops that actually require congressional action on the bipartisan bill and on the reconciliation bill before the Christmas period. If you look at the history of the most significant seminal tax bills in the last 20 years, all of them had to sort of navigate a very ugly up and down political debate with problems between Republicans and Democrats, problems between Democrats and Democrats, problems with the administration and the Congress. This is all very normal. And I think that the hydrogen -- the clean hydrogen components of these bills, in my opinion, these are sort of the crown jewels of President Biden's initiatives. I think that over time, you're going to see that the size of some of these bills, like, for instance, reconciliation bill, will shrink from $3.5 trillion to less, and there will be an entire spate of news articles claiming that the sky is falling and all these provisions are going to be removed from the bill. I personally think that the items that are closest to the President's heart and closest to lot of the voters' hearts and also that are the most, in my mind, closely linked to climate change, these are going to be the items that are the least affected by that shrinkage. These are the ones that are going to be there when the bill crosses the finish line and there's a bill signing ceremony. Hopefully, people from Plug Power will be there. And there are a lot of things in this bill that are not really, in my mind, central to the mission statement or the theme of the bill. And some of that stuff may very well fall away. There's a lot of politics involved here. As you might guess, there are a lot of people on the hill who are not involved in the tax legislative process, who want a starring role. They're going to try to push initiatives that may not be necessarily acceptable within the budget reconciliation framework. And some of that, they'll do a lot of work, eventually, maybe the Byrd rules will toss a lot of those items out when the Senate -- when the bill comes to the Senate floor. But again, the clean hydrogen stuff, we've been very fortunate, I think, with Plug's leadership in the clean energy community. There's been a lot of work done to try to polish up these proposals in such a way and to adjust them, looking ahead, being sort of far sighted to -- so that when we go to this whole Third Bat so-called process on the Senate floor, that our stuff will survive. So I'm very optimistic, but I do think that we have easily a month or 2 ahead of us of sort of ups and downs and dramatic turns and changes before we get to the enactment.

Thanks, Tim. That's a great insight. And I think the patience that you counsel is something that we need to take to heart. Is there anything else that you think that we, as a company or as an industry, should be doing that we're not doing now to -- I mean Plug and others have kind of taken a leadership role in promoting these tax policy initiatives. But is there anything else in terms of outreach or messaging that you think we might need to do? And is there anything that maybe some of our listeners today might also be able to continue to push this policy forward?

Well, I mean it's a great question. As you know, a lot of people in the business have sort of a shorthand for the ingredients for success. They talked about the 3 legs to the stool, the policy, the process and the personalities. I think frequently, people underestimate the importance of personalities and trust relationships. This is an area where I think that Plug's actually been playing a very significant and leading role. So I guess my immediate reaction to your question would be, I don't think there's something that you're not doing that you need to start doing, but the one thing I would suggest is that we definitely need to continue the work that Plug has been doing, both between high-level executive relationships between Plug and government officials and also high-level personal relationships, trust relationships between Plug and other opinion leaders in the clean energy space. There was an old joke when I first started doing renewable energy about how -- when the clean energy community comes under pressure, they circle the wagons and shoot in. And sometimes, an immature industry sector can actually get into trouble because with various conflicts they may have. But I think that the fact that Plug has been, like I said, playing sort of a leadership role in terms of generating and maintaining these trust relationships, especially with members of Congress and centers at the very highest level of the tax committees and leadership, this is essential. And I think we need to stick with it.

Great. Well, Tim, I just wanted to thank you for your time today, for your stellar advice counsel and advocacy that you provide to us every day. And for our symposium guests, as you heard, there's certainly going to be more to come in the coming weeks as Congress hopefully moves forward on these critical policies. So please stay tuned, and we certainly appreciate your time today to get some perspective on the policy aspect of what the business is doing. So thank you.

Thank you. [Presentation]

Our General Manager of New Markets is Keith Schmid Without Keith, we wouldn't even be close to racking up the accomplishments that we've had to date. Look, I have no reservations about giving Keith tough, tough challenges where ingenuity and creativity are critical. Let me just name a few. An in-house MEA started the path to our Gigafactory. The Gigafactory began, it's just a back of the napkin idea, and now is a 200,000 square foot facility in Rochester, New York. Production will start ramping in the fourth quarter, making it the premier showcase facility in the world. For the Renault Plug JV, Keith led the negotiations and now is the Chairman of that company. Now we've asked him to lead our efforts in the 3 different new markets while leveraging a single platform. That's tough. Keith is here to reveal the exciting plans we have in store for bringing green hydrogen solutions to the on-road stationary and aviation sectors. Keith?

In Plug's new markets, the major driver is environmentally conscious public sentiment. This moves greener public policy, which in turn, steers industries to decarbonize. Many of our strategic customers, like those in the logistics, on-road transportation and aviation sectors have significant sustainability goals. They're responding proactively and accelerating this transition. They know that green hydrogen is a significant part of their future, and they cannot wait for hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells to become the norm. And Plug is more than happy to oblige. We're accelerating this transition on all fronts. The applications that I'll go over are new markets. But keep in mind, we aren't starting from scratch. This is not our first rodeo. Plug Power has been at this for more than 20 years. We were the first to successfully commercialize PEM fuel cell technologies and our technology platform is the most proven in the industry. We have 600 million-plus run hours and some 50,000 fuel cells currently in the market. We've installed more fuel cells into electric vehicle applications than anyone else in the world. And it hasn't been easy. In fact, the material handling application has given us the opportunity to prove our performance in one of the most difficult and demanding applications that we have encountered. We run in freezers at minus 30 degrees C. We routinely experience physical shock at levels up to 40G, and our units, essentially, they run 24/7. This puts more hours on the fuel cell system in a year than a passenger car would see in its typical lifetime. Occasionally, I'll hear, "Well, you're talking about powering Class 8 trucks and airplanes, but you guys, you just do forklifts, right?" No. We chose a highly demanding application to prove performance and commercial viability with a stable, robust technology platform established that step to trucks, planes, data centers and more as a logical progression. Plug is taking all of that history, all of that knowledge and our proven technology platform, and we're simply scaling up the power level to meet the application needs in these new markets. The new market opportunities that Plug is pursuing fall into 3 principal sectors. The first is on-road electric vehicles, specifically commercial fleet vehicles. This includes delivery and cargo vans, heavy-duty Class 5 through Class 8 trucks and transit buses. These are the high-volume Workhorses in North America and Europe. Our first application to volume in this space is our line of HYVIA fuel cell-powered vehicles in partnership with Renault. The second opportunity is large-scale stationary power. So think fuel cell systems serving backup power applications for critical operations that require a few megawatts and then data centers that require 10s of megawatts and continuous power generation facilities that are measured in the 100s of megawatts. Our third sector is aviation. And here, we mean regional short-route commuter and cargo planes and, of course, drones. Plug's key enabler and fundamental building block for these new market opportunities is our ProGen engine line. ProGen engines, based upon our ProGen metal plate stack technology, are complete state-of-the-art modular pre-engineered fuel cell systems. They are designed to be easy to integrate, easy to operate and to accelerate market adoption. A high degree of commonality across the line provides scale and volume necessary to drive down cost. Plug's line of high-power ProGen engines range from 15 to 125 kilowatts. So now let's talk about mobility in greater detail. One of the only ways for our transportation and logistics customers to meet their sustainability targets is to decarbonize a significant amount of their fleets. Our green hydrogen production plants, ProGen engines and GenFuel hydrogen refueling stations are key parts of the solution set. In mobility, Plug is specifically focused on commercial fleet applications. The reasons that commercial fleet vehicles are so appealing to Plug are threefold. First, they're high utilization vehicles, which inherently require long range and the benefits of fast refueling, key attributes of the hydrogen fuel cell value proposition. Second, cargo volume and payload capacity are important. Fuel cell vehicles provide greater range with minimal impact on payload or cargo over battery-only electric vehicles. The third item is a substantial share of the commercial fleet vehicle market returns to home base daily or they run known hub-to-hub routes. These routine circuits don't require us to install refueling stations along every available road. We can make these operations effective by simply delivering refueling infrastructure to a few key locations in their network. Now that's something that we've done. In fact, we do it every single day in our material handling business. It's a standard part of our toolkit. We are part of an exciting joint venture with the Renault Group. The vehicle company, it's called HYVIA, HY for hydrogen and VIA for way or path. HYVIA represents the path to a zero-emission hydrogen-based future for electric vehicles. In HYVIA, we're integrating Renault's industry-leading LCV platforms with Plug's ProGen fuel cell technology, and then we're bringing them to customers through the Renault sales, distribution and service network. Based in France, HYVIA is having a big impact on the European market. HYVIA is introducing a complete line of hydrogen-powered light commercial vehicles. But like everything Plug is doing in green hydrogen, it is so much more. HYVIA provides customers with an entire hydrogen ecosystem solution to both support and accelerate zero-emission fleet adoption. This includes HYVIA hydrogen refueling stations, they're based on Plug technology and the hydrogen fuel itself. The stations can be sold or leased throughout Europe. The HYVIA lineup, branded as H2-TECH, will soon be transporting Europeans and their goods. Look for the master H2-TECH to be on the road in Europe with customers during the first quarter of 2022. The next major segment of Plug's new market business strategy is what we call large-scale stationary. Large-scale stationary is essentially diesel genset replacement. It's about eliminating the emissions associated with diesel in the landscape going forward. This market can be huge. In fact, the global diesel generator market today is in excess of USD 25 billion. Our large-scale stationary line consists of 250-kilowatt, 500-kilowatt and 1 megawatt modules to cover a large variety of applications. These products are built using a raise of our ProGen 125-kilowatt engines, and they are housed in industrial containers for ease of transportation and installation. You can take multiple containers and you can combine them to build very, very large power stations. We break large-scale stationary opportunities into 2 categories. The first is what we call backup power. This is always available power that can be depended on when the utility grid can't deliver. One of the largest backup applications that has wide open potential for a large-scale transition to hydrogen is the data center. A typical data center building would have approximately 9 to 12 megawatts of diesel backup power and a hyperscale data center has multiple data center buildings on a single site. So they're big, they're really big. The primary obstacle for customers as they go forward in the backup power space is the regulatory restrictions on diesel emissions. They can see our customers in the near future, a time in which they won't be able to get needed permits to install diesel generators. So backup generation is a massive growing market that is undergoing a complete shift, and it's driven by the elimination of emissions and noise associated with diesel generators. Plug Power, we plan to be the first to power a live data center at scale in this space with a multi-megawatt installation in early 2022. The second large-scale data center, stationary power application, is primary power generation in a microgrid or continuous power application. This is essentially replacing the traditional utility with an installation of multiple stationary fuel cell generators. In this case, we're talking about 50 to 200-megawatt installations. These installations generate emissions-free utility-grade power. A big near-term power generation opportunity for Plug is with our SK partnership. Together, we are planning for the installation of a 200-megawatt power plant in South Korea during 2023. Clean skies, green hydrogen and fuel cells powering electric flight, that's the third new market sector for Plug. Maturity in this market, it's a bit further out, but we're building for the future here. The activity level in aerospace continues to increase, and many of the major aircraft manufacturers are starting to announce hydrogen fuel cell programs and zero-emission aviation. We divide our aviation push into 3 application buckets. One is the regional commuter aircraft that flies routes that are typically in the 200- to 400-mile range. This will be the first commercial passenger aircraft to convert. Plug has partnered with Universal Hydrogen in this application, and we are developing a 2-megawatt fuel cell powertrain to power the De Havilland Dash 8 regional turboprop. The second application is the smaller logistics or supply chain aircraft, delivering high-value packages in cargo for same-day delivery, a trend that continues to increase. You might call them flying vans. Plug Power has partnered with Airflow to provide 100% carbon-neutral hydrogen solutions for their aircraft models. They are developing next-generation planes that can haul up to 2,000-pound cargo payloads, they fly fast and they take off and land on very short runways. For the third application, we have a history of powering small UAVs or drones with hydrogen. We see these drone markets as a burgeoning opportunity. Drones have applications in delivery, inspection, surveillance, search and rescue, disaster relief, agriculture, mapping, defense and really just about anything you can think of. Lightweight hydrogen fuel cells keep drones flying long enough to complete these important tasks. Plug has entered into a partnership with Heaven Drones. Our fuel cells will allow their actionable drones to remain aloft for extended periods and lift upwards of 250 pounds of real cargo. Why is hydrogen the best solution for the new markets that we have discussed? Let's use delivery vans as an example application. A typical e-commerce delivery company focusing on same-day delivery often makes deliveries from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. at night. For battery-powered vans, those evening deliveries, they're going to have to be made by a second van because of insufficient range. You can make a longer-range battery electric van to deliver goods by simply adding more and more batteries, which are heavy, they take up space, and they reduce the capacity of the vehicle. They reduced both the payload, that's the amount of weight that you can carry and cargo volume, both of which are critical to the task. For a fuel cell vehicle, hydrogen and the carbon fiber tank that it is stored in are very, very light. So once you have the fuel cell engine in the vehicle, you're not adding any significant weight to improve range. You're simply adding hydrogen gas. You must plug in each of these battery EVs into their own charger, and they're stuck there for 4, 5, 6 hours to charge those batteries. That's time in which they can't be driven. And also you need a lot of input power to do that. If you have a fleet of, let's say, 100 delivery vans and you're trying to charge them all at once, the odds are that the utility can't meet your load requirements. Your infrastructure will need to be significantly upgraded at great cost. Because of hydrogen's fast refueling capabilities, 1 hydrogen fuel cell van out on the road all day is worth multiple battery vans that keep returning to the charging station. The bottom line, for any transportation application that requires high utilization and long range without a reduction in payload or volume, hydrogen fuel cells really, really shine. When it comes to zero-emission stationary backup and continuous power, the issues are also volume, scale and cost. To back up the data center building for 12 hours with fuel cell generators, you simply add as much hydrogen as needed, either in the form of liquid tanks or a pipeline. To do the same thing with lithium-ion batteries, you'll need containers upon containers, upon containers of batteries to provide the same level of power over the same period of time. Not only that, but significant incremental utility and charging infrastructure. It really just doesn't work. So when powering applications at scale, hydrogen is more cost-effective than any other zero-emission sustainable approach. It has been my pleasure to share Plug's new market activities with you. Hydrogen fuel cells offer significant value in zero-emission mobility applications and in large-scale stationary power. In the fuel cell industry, Plug is unique, in that we're a vertically-integrated hydrogen total solutions provider. We offer an entire hydrogen ecosystem to support our customers' applications. So from commercial vehicle fleets delivering in the last mile to regional passenger and cargo aircraft, Plug Power is delivering the technologies and the solutions for a zero emission, sustainable future. I talked a moment ago about the aviation industry. Current airport ecosystems are very carbon-intensive. Airplanes alone contribute over 2% of the world's CO2 emissions every year. Add to that, the carbon produced by a variety of other airport services and the emissions of the industry as a whole are substantial. Now imagine a world in which the entire airline industry emits no carbon at all. We've imagined it at Plug, and we are working to make it happen. Plug just signed an MOU with Airbus. And under this exciting partnership, we'll be analyzing and modeling the hydrogen ecosystem at a major North American hub to support carbon-free flight and other airport applications. We're building work streams and we're forming teams right now. Glenn Llewellyn is Airbus' VP of Zero-Emission Aircraft and as such, is at the helm of what's been called a hydrogen revolution at Airbus. Glenn strongly believes that this is the technology that will allow Airbus to achieve its ambitious promise of climate-neutral flying by 2035. We are very pleased to have him with us today to talk about how we'll work together to achieve the world's first zero-emission aircraft program. Glenn?

I'm Glenn Llewellyn, Vice President of the Zero-Emission Aircraft at Airbus, and I'm working with my amazing colleagues inside and outside Airbus to bring zero-emission aircraft to commercial service by 2035. Aviation has a huge added value to society. It allows us to physically connect, share cultures and mutually understand each other. At the same time, we know that aviation contributes to approximately 2.5% of CO2 emissions. And we recognize that we need to provide the huge added value but without the climate impact. Everyone has to play their part and we're committed to playing ours. This is something that we see as a moral obligation, but also as a huge business opportunity. At Airbus, we have an and, and, and strategy. What this means is that we are working on improving an aircraft efficiency and performance, we're working on deploying increased levels of sustainable aviation fuel into the market, and on top of that, we're also looking at what we can do to deliver a zero-emission aircraft by 2035. We see hydrogen as having the most potential to allow us to get to zero emissions. We've looked at all energy carriers, butane, propane, methane, ammonia and the list goes on. And what we see in hydrogen is that it really has potential, first of all, to eliminate CO2 emissions because hydrogen, when it's consumed, emits no CO2. And on top of that, potentially disruptively reduce or even completely eliminate NOx and persistent contrails, which are also really important for us. What we revealed 1 year ago in 2020 are 3 zero-emission concepts. These are 3 aircraft, which have hybrid electric propulsion systems. It means that they have got a significant megawatt-scale fuel cell on board, which is providing electrical energy into gas turbines, and that allows us to have a highly optimized hydrogen propulsion system. On top of those concepts, we revealed later last year, a fuel cell propulsion concept. This is a concept which is 100% powered by fuel cells, and we are working on all of these concepts in order to understand their scalability and economics. The 3 aircraft we revealed all look a little bit different one compared to the other. One of the concepts is a blended wing body. It's the one that looks the most disruptive compared to the others. It is essentially a flying wing. It's a very exciting concept in terms of its performance because as many of you will be aware, we need extra volume to store hydrogen and its basic shape has naturally more volume inside it. On top of that concept, we are also looking at the classical tube and wing configuration, what we call the turboprop and turbofan concepts. These -- for those of you who look closely at aircraft, also are different from kerosene-powered aircraft in that they have slightly longer fuselages compared to classical aircraft today. And that's because we store the liquid hydrogen in the rear of the aircraft, behind the rear pressure bulkhead, behind the passenger cabin in the non-pressurized zone. And this means that we need to have a longer aircraft fuselage. For sure, we need to develop new technologies in order for us to achieve this ambition, liquid hydrogen distribution systems, hydrogen propulsion systems onboard the aircraft, these are very different than what we've had in the past. But on top of the technical development, which we need to do, including maturation of technologies and flight testing, we also need to develop the infrastructure, the availability of hydrogen in parallel. It's very obvious that even if we develop a very high-performing hydrogen-powered aircraft, unless there's hydrogen available at the airports, we are not going to succeed. So this is a crucial component in what we're doing. Airbus is really excited. I am really excited about our partnership with Plug Power. We're going to develop a plan to get large quantities of green liquid hydrogen at airports. Our intent is to power aviation with renewable energy and green hydrogen is the perfect surrogate for this. All of this means a focus on the complete value chain from renewable energy all the way through to liquefaction, all of this with a focus on the price of hydrogen in order to make our ambition of zero-emission flying economically viable. This is the first-of-a-kind partnership in North America, where the pilot airport will be U.S.-based. With U.S. partners on board, we believe that we can scale massively and ultimately have the biggest benefit for the climate.

Thank you, Glenn. As you can see, today's symposium is all about the future and not just about Plug's expanding market share. We're bringing together thought leaders who are actively shaping the future of the hydrogen ecosystem in a wide variety of industries, like our next 2 speakers. Dean Nelson is the CEO of Virtual Power Systems, a digital infrastructure company that helps its customers run more efficient and sustainable data centers to quote "lower the carbon emit for every single click." He's also the co-host of the Next Wave podcast. Dean is joined in conversation by Mark Monroe. Mark is a principal engineer in Microsoft's Data Center Advanced Development Group. He's working on future systems for energy, water conservation and automation. He's a Six Sigma Master Black Belt with a focus on change acceleration in corporate settings. Dean and Mark join us today to talk about sustainability and the role of hydrogen in replacing diesel generators for decarbonizing the backup applications for data centers, an enormous area of opportunity for green hydrogen. Please join me in welcoming Dean and Mark.

Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Keith. I'm excited about this segment. I've got Mark Monroe here with me as you were mentioning. And Mark and I go way back. I believe you've been in the industry for 40 years, Mark, is that right?

Yes. Hard to believe, right?

And just for our audience's sake here, we -- he and I worked together for at least 20 of that. So all the way back to like Sun Microsystems when we are both working in the sustainability effort back in the day. So yes, this is very interesting. Awesome. Well, I know we've got a limited amount of time. So Mark, first off, I want to thank you for jumping on here. You are currently, of course, driving the stuff in the Data Center Advanced Development Team over at Microsoft. And again, you and I have been working with infrastructure basins and other stuff for years, and all of us about driving sustainability within the industry itself. And Microsoft is a leader in this, especially with the commitments you've done around the sustainability aspects, right? I mean, you set the bar, you raised the bar up and everybody's got to try to achieve that, right? Paying back all carbon ever emitted since 1975 by 2050.

Yes.

Awesome. Awesome. So I assume that there are some things here that we're going to talk about on specifically how that's going to happen. But I want to start with some simple definitions first. So you're a hyperscaler?

That's right. That's right. The term could not be familiar to folks in the hydrogen industry, right?

Yes. So help us understand what do you mean by hyperscale?

There's about 25 companies that are considered hyperscale in the world today. And you can probably name them, right? It's Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Baidu, Tencent, ByteDance in overseas there's...

There you go.

Right? So the way we classify hyperscale is both by the size and the speed of change with which things are happening. And so to give you a little example, when I joined Microsoft about 3 years ago, the web page that we have that talks about the number of data centers that Microsoft is -- owns and operates, it's a 100-plus. Now 3 years later, it says 160-plus and 150-plus edge sites. So now we've got over 300 sites where we're managing. And just the size of that infrastructure and the speed are really what makes -- sets us aside from other kinds of computing. And what that means from the industry standpoint is that we -- data centers are our factories. And so we're trying to make them as inexpensive and as clean as possible because those bits that go across the wire, they're directly related to how much those things cost and how much carbon we generate out of those. So that's what a lot of our research work is focused on.

And the growth in there is incredible. I mean you take the pandemic and how many people have leveraged digital infrastructure technology to just function and so -- and that's not going away, correct?

It's not, not any time that I can see. As you said, we've been in the industry a long time. And what I see is that there is still at least 5, maybe even 10 years of very fast change in the industry, where people are handing over infrastructure to folks like the hyperscalers because we can -- how is that stuff more reliably, cheaper, cleaner using better green energy than a lot of the people can, just because of constraints. If you're making toothpaste or automobiles, IT is not your main focus, whereas that's all we do 24 hours a day is trying to figure out how to make that stuff cheaper, greener, faster. And some of that stuff, you'll have to keep inside, but a lot of it you can pass off to somebody else like Microsoft or one of the other hyperscalers.

Yes. And you guys are -- again, the cloud players are the big giants when it comes down to these -- the growth, and so feeding that and enabling companies to be able to just start and scale. But what's your year-over-year increase in capacity? You said you've gone from 100 to 130 or 150 data centers and edge sites, right?

I can't share exact numbers, but I will tell you, if you just go to Microsoft's quarterly results, and I usually do this in a slide deck, I'll take the result that talks about the growth in the cloud. Cloud is now the biggest division of Microsoft, bigger than any of the software divisions, bigger than the gaming. It's a little over 1/3 of the revenue that the company makes. It is consistent. And the whole 3 years that I've been here, every quarter, I change that slide, and every quarter, it's 30-plus percent growth year-over-year, 70% growth in the Infrastructure as a service stuff. I mean these are dotcom sized gains in the amount of work that we're doing. But obviously, we're back a little differently than lot of those dotcom folks were in the early 2000s.

Yes. And it's a core part of your business, like you're saying, it's now the largest revenue segment. That's -- so the investments in there and of course, margins and making sure the efficiency and the sustainability contribution because of the overall goals, there's just huge efforts. And just for the audience's sake, what we're seeing right now is that there's probably going to be 20 gigawatts worth of capacity expansion in data center and edge over the next 3 to 5 years. 20 gigawatts of new and that's going to be Africa and India and Lat Am are the leaders in that. And so Microsoft has a big chunk of what's going to be done there, but you guys are serving in almost every country in the world today, correct?

Yes. That's right. And we made announcements in Latin America and Asia Pac, in Africa, there's just expansion going on all over the place. And more and more, we are building those facilities. We may go into what's called a colocation company to get started in a marketplace. But as I mentioned earlier, these are our factories, and so we know how we want to build them. We can build them cheaper and better than anybody else can. We run them more efficiently greener. And so as soon as we can in a marketplace, we go in and start to build and that's what you're seeing in construction projects all over around the world.

Yes. And so the term hyperscale, the whole point here is you're at scale, and you can get hyper reliability, hyper efficiency, hyper everything. So let's take that now and go into the next question, reliability specifically. Your requirements in these big data centers, right, when you've got scale, so help people understand what that means.

One of the most common terms in our industry, as you know, is five 9s of availability. And that means 99.999% of the time, when you ask for a cat video, you're going to get a cat video from one of our data centers, right? And obviously, I'm being facetious, but you might also get a 911 call or an air traffic control piece of information, right? So all this stuff is super reliable. Five 9s of ability means less than 5 minutes per year or about 5 minutes per year of unplanned downtime and practical... [Audio Gap] element. And so the reliability requires that there's something to back it up. And right now, the choice is diesel generators to ensure that when the UPS, the batteries run out, that those things are going to be there and they can run continuously. So let's talk about what you're doing with hydrogen around that space. Because I think you've shared before with me that you guys have big batteries for long duration, you have biodiesel and those things, but let's zero in here on what are you doing around diesel generators with hydrogen?

Yes. So about a year ago, we published some blogs that talked about testing that I helped put together where we are trying to verify the technical and the economic viability of hydrogen fuel cells as a replacement for the diesel generators. We look at automotive type fuel cells or the stuff that Plug Power makes for material handling, lift trucks and things like that. They start quickly, they stop quickly. They can handle variations and load. They're very efficient. And the difference between the engine, the fuel cell runs and an internal combustion engine is they run absolutely pollution-free depending on which type of hydrogen that you supply to them. So we verified about a year ago that a set of fuel cells could operate like a diesel generator or like a backup generator for IT infrastructure. We ran testing that we do with our diesels in terms of transients up and down, dumping load on them. We ran for 48 hours straight, which to our knowledge, nobody had done keeping computers running for that long, which is typical of the backup period you might see 24, 48, even longer in Texas when the freeze happened last winter. And the data centers were running for like 72 hours on their backups. So we're excited about the possibility of using a fuel cell generator as a replacement and kind of a drop in replacement for diesel generators in the first generation that you might see.

So let's help people understand because I'm a hydrogen novice, right? So give us the basics around how this works, right?

So people at the conference are probably familiar. Hydrogen fuel cells take pure hydrogen in, they take oxygen from the atmosphere, combine them, you get water vapor and a little bit of electricity that comes off of every time one of those molecules combine. We do that a whole bunch of times, and we get enough electricity so that we can run our big computers. And the only exhaust is though the warm water vapor. And like we said, it's -- with the PEM fuel cells like the Plug makes, they start up very quickly. They have a lot of the characteristics of that are similar to an engine -- internal combustion engine. And so they work as a good replacement for that. There's -- we do have to have a lot of hydrogen around in terms of storage. Those of you that are familiar with hydrogen, we say that for a 30-megawatt data center we would need 100 tons of hydrogen sitting around waiting for a disaster. And that's most likely in a liquid format in order to be able to see. But that's as big as one of those fears that NASA uses to launch a rocket. So that kind of sizes that we're talking about.

That really helps get a visual on it. Let's hold that for a second. The supply chain is a whole another discussion on it. But just as we go into this. So here's this new technology, you've done basically a POC at scale for doing that, like, okay, so what are the roadblocks like why wouldn't you just go all in today?

Yes, it's a good question. The technology is still a little bit nascent. Fuel cells have been around for -- I think, literally, the first one was in the 1800s. But in the 1960s, NASA used them in the space program. But they still -- they're still a little scarce when you talk about the kind of scale. And when we talk hyperscale, we start to talk about needing thousands of these things. Companies -- car companies like Toyota and Honda and Hyundai, have fuel cell vehicles, but there are single-digit thousands, maybe tens of the low digit tens of thousands of those. There are -- Plug has done a great job in the industry. They've got, I think, around 50,000 fuel cells deployed in the field and things like lift trucks, material handling applications. So the technology is still being brought up to scale. GM has announced that they're building a new factory where they're going to build tens of thousands of fuel cells in the U.S. Toyota has announced they're going to scale 10x their production in Japan for fuel cell production. So getting the technology is one thing. And then, of course, the supply of hydrogen is another issue that we have to get to.

Yes. So let's talk about sizing here, because -- so we got the supply chain but also the unit. So you were saying you did a test. What was the size of that test?

Yes. The test we did was about 1 row of compute. We did a 250-kilowatt device. So that has 4 fuel cells and linked together as a single unit generator function. Then -- but we need to do something that's 10x bigger than that in order to get up to what our standard diesel generators are. So we use, and a lot of other hyperscalers used, 2- to 3-megawatt diesel generators as our -- kind of our chunk size. It fits well in our electrical architecture. We build the data centers around that. No one that I know of has built a 3-megawatt fuel cell generator. And so we're pushing forward the edge to try and come up with a prototype one of those and then be able to test that and demonstrate the fact that we could run at that scale with fuel cells. Now that we -- then we can go to our engineers and to other engineers in the industry and say, okay, this is now a viable at scale type of device that we can drop into the electrical architecture.

Awesome. Okay. So it's like 2.5- to 3-megawatt generator sizing that needs to be there. What kind of hydrogen capacity is needed for something like that?

We talk about a typical fuel cells use about 70 kilograms of hydrogen per megawatt hour, okay? So you start talking about 1 megawatt -- supporting 1 megawatt of IT would be about 2 tons of hydrogen. And to -- for those of you that can't picture it, it's think about one of those gasoline delivery trucks, a tank truck like that except cryogenic, so that it could have liquid hydrogen in it, and that will have about 2 tons of hydrogen. That will keep 1 megawatt of IT equipment running for 1 day for about 24 hours. So we -- as hyperscalers, we build data centers that are 10, 20, 30, 50 megawatts at a size. [Audio Gap] So now you got to multiply out, think about how you got 50 of those trucks sitting around to duty just 1 day, and that's where you get to the NASA sized hydrogen sphere.

Got it. Okay. So again, there's a supply chain question we talk to you about the units. So this is not new, like Plug Power has done, like you said, 50,000 units, but it's also in pretty hard conditions, thermal shock, hard stop, like a forklift that's constantly going up and down and charge in those things. So it's been proven out when it comes to other sectors or other industries, it just comes down to creating the product here that's sized appropriately.

That's right. The specific application. And then to be honest, we have to get the economics to the right place, right? Diesel generator is well understood. It's been around for hundreds of years. The fuel cell generators are -- we actually run some proposals and request for information and request for proposals. And we're pleased, really pleased that the things that we're seeing, but we're still at least twice the cost of diesel generators. We see a curve that kind of gets us down to even more competitive, but at this point, it'll probably be a pick and choose kind of place where hydrogen is required as the backup as opposed to some of the other things.

What's interesting with what you just said. The reason we don't run generators is they're dirty. They're there because we have to have something. But if you've got a clean energy generation source, maybe you rethink about what happens on site, it's like a microgrid almost.

That's one of the things that when the fuel cell manufacturers ask us, how long are you going to run these generators? And we say, well, the diesel is only run 100, less than 100 hours a year. They can allow few well, that we can do that 100 hours a year, but we go, but wait, we hate that. I mean that's an idle asset. We want to be able to participate. And one of the things that can really help with the sustainable environment is for people that they have hundreds of megawatts of generation capacity to be able to participate at the drop of a hat, total nonpolluting asset, they cab back up and firm things like solar, when cloud moves across the big array or when the wind stops suddenly. Renewable energy is intermittent and big generation capacity run for short periods, can really help that. So that's one of the sustainability aspects that we think is really important about hydrogen generators.

That's exciting because in the end of it, it's demand response, load shedding, but clean, not firing up your generators to say, "I can help during the Texas issue by firing generators up, but I'm admitting all of this carbon, right?" So these fumes. So I think that's really cool.

And folks will tell you that you have to be careful about what kind of hydrogen you use because you still can have a carbon footprint, right? So I think, Dean, you and I talked a little bit about all the different colors of hydrogen. That there's browns and grays and pinks and blacks and blues. And frankly, Microsoft as a company doesn't have an official position, but our position inside of our advanced development group is, that we're going to stick to straight green hydrogen, and we take the simple definition that says, green hydrogen is water that's been electrolyzed using renewable energy. And there's lots of different definitions, but we try to keep it as simple as we can. And that's what we're targeting that we expect that a lot of the industry will go to as well.

Awesome. Okay. So we're running out of time here guys. I have 2 questions I want to ask you. So -- but 1 statement first. We talked about supply chain. And I think the good thing here is that Plug has already proven out some things in this space where forklifts and fuel trucks and everything else, there's a supplying of lots of hydrogen that's going out there. So now it just comes down to how does that serve another industry? So okay, with that in place, let's say, great, this is all lining up. Would you replace everything with hydrogen generators?

No. No. The answer is that -- we're looking at a swiss army knife full of different types of solutions, large batteries. Some places, the grid is reliable enough that if we just had 2 separate connections, we wouldn't need generators at all. And I think that you'll see the data center industry diversify like that. We definitely need 1 solution that is capable of running tens of hours, 60, 70, 90 hours, in some places in California are telling us we have to be ready for 4-day long outages due to wildfires. And then they say in the same breath, they say, "Oh, by the way, you can't run your diesel generator, right." So it's like, well, what are you doing? Do better that big? So hydrogen fuel cells will be one of a whole array of solutions that you'll see data centers go to.

Yes. But very exciting developments in this one and thank you for the leadership that Microsoft and your team has been doing to do this because we need it in the industry. People need to take those chances, jump in because that's how disruption happens and that's how advancement goes. So let's wrap it up with this way. What's the one thing or the main point that people should take away from our conversation?

So what I would say is that the hyperscale industry can be a catalyst in this marketplace. We joke, you and me and other people in the industry joke, Internet years are like dog years, right? We moved 7x faster than most industries. And the hydrogen industry talks about things out in 2030 or 2050. We're thinking, that's 150 Internet years, we'll never make it that long. We've got to go faster. And so the hyperscale in this deal will drive a lot of this stuff will drive volumes and fuel cells will drive volumes in hydrogen. There's a lot of partnership opportunities, I think, to partnering up with people to use common storage facilities, to inspire new green hydrogen sources. And I think that, that's the message that I want to leave with is that we're -- as an industry, we're very interested in pursuing this and it looks very promising.

Excellent. Well, thank you, Mark. I really appreciate you being on here and sharing your insights and keeping up of that advanced developments. I know you're loving your job, which is really cool to watch. So excellent. And thank you, everyone, for watching this one and enjoy the rest of the symposium.

I'm so pleased to have Ji Young Lee from SK join us today. She is the Senior Vice President at SK, one of the leading South Korean business groups. In March of this year, SK announced they would be investing $16.5 billion to build a hydrogen ecosystem in South Korea by 2025. And on October 6, Plug Power and SK, E&S formalized our joint ventures. We're proud of the fact that SK has chosen Plug Power as their partner to accelerate hydrogen as an alternative energy source in the Asian market. Ji Young, and I should ask to say she's become a good friend. Thank you for joining us today. And...

My pleasure.

Your pleasure. That's great. We're in Korea together. So Ji Young, we have about 5,000 people watching this. I was wondering, if you could tell them a little bit about the SK Group.

Sure. So SK is 1 of the top 3 conglomerate in Korea, with probably $200 billion of market cap based on the publicly listed companies. We're the flagship company when it comes to the telecommunication and energy in Korea. And our semiconductor and EV battery business is one of the largest in the world. And lately, our focus -- additional focus will be the green business, green energy business. And the core of it is the hydrogen. And to your point, we announced $16.5 billion investment in Korea to build up the whole ecosystem. So yes, that really highlights how committed we are in the green hydrogen -- green energy as well as the clean future of South Korea.

So you and your team, Ji Young made the decision in February to invest $1.6 billion into Plug Power. And you've really led that activity. Can you tell them why you made it in your company, and you made this investment?

Right. So we're trying to preempt the market by utilizing the existing assets that we have. So we'll start with byproduct hydrogen and enter into the market in 2023. And we're also building up the blue hydrogen project, which is about 250,000 tons per annum capacity, which is one of the largest in the world. So all that sort of creates opportunities for technological products. And also thinking about expansion into other markets in Asia, we thought that having the complete solution, including the technological options, I think it's critical. So we looked at the global leaders in the technology play, in hydrogen and power sort of caught our attention. Not just because of its technological leadership, but it was very unique in its business model and the strategy. We actually think that SK and Plug Power share a lot and its integrated business strategy because Plug Power uses its electrolyzers into pure cell, but it provides the one-stop solution for the customers in building up the ecosystem on its own. And we really like the business acumen in that. And on top of it, I like the fact that Plug Power secured its technological portfolio in its own way, not just organic research but also the acquisitions. And it was very nimble. It happened very swiftly. And we thought that with that base of capability of integrating things, we thought that there will be much more addition of new technologies going forward. We like the flexibility the Plug Power had. So that's why we reached out to you and the deal came about. Yes.

Well, I got to say, Ji Young, I think SK is the best fit for Plug Power. So I think we're matched there. So could you tell me a little bit about what you think the JV's goals and ambitions are over the -- for the coming years?

Sure. So I agree with you in that we're very, very complementary. So basically, SK is a very strong player in Asia. So we bring the market, and Plug Power brings the technology and advance the business model. So together, Asia market, in my mind, is a little behind Europe and North America. Meaning, we have great chances to preempt the market. And I think the combination of our skill sets will position us in a very unique manner, where we'll have all the technology available throughout the value chain, starting with electrolyzers and fuel cells and refueling station solutions and potentially liquid hydrogen as well. And then when it comes to business models, SK is focusing on producing hydrogen. So is Plug Power but in a slightly different manner, focusing on the green hydrogen. And in terms of the business model wise, I think we do distribution and sale of the hydrogen as well as sale of fuel cells and electrolyzer all the technology possible. So all in all, I think they will position this joint venture as a total solution provider that will be badly needed by all the Asian markets. That's at the very inception stage of hydrogen industry.

I couldn't agree with you more Ji Young, of course. But we really curious, I know the folks out there watching about how does the Korean government think about hydrogen? What's the policies of the government?

Right. So because Korea is not -- unfortunately, not the best nation when it comes to renewable energy because of the natural environment, unfortunately. But Korean government is very adamant and committed to the net-zero target, achieving net-zero target. So hydrogen is very important for them because it's an alternative to them. And they set out the road map, which is a larger scale hydrogen ecosystem. And I think initially, their focus will be both mobility and the stationary power plant. But I think a power plant, when it comes to power plant, it's really big and very distinguished. If you think about the world market, there is no other market than Korea that has this scale of target. So we're talking about 4 gigawatt of hydrogen-based fuel cell power plant capacity by 2030. And that gives us a lot of opportunity. And SK having the access to the hydrogen, as I mentioned before, I think we're very well positioned to take advantage of that opportunities. And thinking about Korean government's net-zero target. I think 4 gigawatt by 2030 might be short. So the government might have to move up the target, meaning that there will be additional opportunities for us. Obviously, mobility and other applications are also the opportunities for the joint venture.

No, Ji Young, this is a huge market opportunity. We're so fortunate to be here in South Korea and in Asia with SK. I had probably 35 different companies from Asia come to see Plug Power in Latham, New York. They asked if they could form a venture with Plug. And we made the decision, 34 times I said no. And then Ji Young called me. And on the 35th time, she explained their vision, their market reach, the integrity that they've brought that I believe, and the entire Plug Power team believes they're the right partner to build out the market. It's going to start with stationary products as Ji Young explained, huge opportunities long term with electrolyzers. Really some interesting deals we're already looking at in the mobility and fueling station areas. So Ji Young, I guess we probably should stop talking and get to work. I'm here with Ole, if we're going to spend the rest of the day here in South Korea kind of dreaming even bigger than what we just explained. So thank you, Ji Young, and look forward to many, many years of working together.

Sure. It was lovely to have you and Ole on the ground in Korea, and we really look forward to building this together with you.

Yes. Paul Middleton, our CFO, has been my close partner for the last 7 years. One of Paul's many great strengths is his vast knowledge of mergers and acquisitions. He's just closed over 40 in his career. Boy, that skill has been critical in helping us make the right decisions when it comes to inorganic expansion like our acquisition of Giner. Paul also has a global perspective. Lived overseas, has been all over the world. Let me tell you, I never make any significant decisions without leaning on Paul. He's a trusted and valuable partner. Now he has all the numbers you've been waiting for. So Paul, take it away.

Good day, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to share today. The presentations you've been watching today all provide pieces of how Plug is focused on growing the hydrogen economy. I'm going to share how all these activities roll together into our latest financial outlook. Let me start with what we believe Plug will look like in 2025. The next 4 years will be a period of significant growth. We expect to grow to $3 billion in annual sales in 2025, which approximates a 50% growth rate from today. We are working to achieve a 17% operating income level, and we are targeting to achieve an over 20% adjusted EBITDA rate. We will solidify our role as a global hydrogen ecosystem market maker, well positioned for continued substantial growth past 2025. We're going to drive our vision based on 5 major building blocks. We participate today in a large global market that is accelerating the hydrogen economy. We have a broad product platform that's generated significant traction with key industry leaders. We're investing in capabilities to expand both our market and geographic footprint. We're driving the cost curve through overhead and supply chain leverage, design enhancements as we iterate through the exponential learnings and vertical integration. And lastly, the green hydrogen network we are building will not only reduce cost but will also support accelerated adoption on new applications. Our investments and activities are accelerating growth in the near term, which supports our long-term forecast. Our gross billings forecast of $500 million for 2021 represents approximately 50% growth over 2020. Given the momentum in the market and our investments, we expect to surpass $825 million to $850 million in gross billings in 2022. That's a 60% annual growth rate over this year. We are ramping up our new gigafactory, developing the green hydrogen network, establishing our commercial platform in Europe, developing key partnerships like Renault and SK and even expanding our core personnel, all to ensure the capacity and key capabilities to deliver our forecast. These factors drive the confidence in the $3 billion target for 2025 being very realistic. Now one takeaway from today, for sure, is how in the next 12 months for Plug, it will represent such a significant inflection point. We will be achieving substantial sales in markets outside material handling with over 25% of revenues in '22 coming from electrolyzers, stationery, energy and other sectors. We'll be establishing the first global green hydrogen network and prove this opportunity as today at cost parity with the carbon alternative, again, another major milestone. And we will establish a substantial international presence, with over 25% of our sales coming outside of the U.S., solidifying that Plug is now a truly global company. Our market penetration is growing in all markets. Now Jose talked about our traditional market material handling. This market continues to grow at a healthy rate in both units and sites. For 2021, we'll be approaching close to 60,000 units and 200 sites deployed. In 2025, we're going to be quickly approaching close to 200,000 units and over 500 sites deployed, just in material handling. Now I only talked about our new electrolyzer market, which has enormous potential for growth. We're achieving substantial growth in '21. But more importantly, we are nurturing a substantial pipeline, and we expect to have greater than 250 megawatts in backlog by the end of this year. By 2025, we will have installed close to 3 gigawatts globally. And Keith and Andy talked about how a variety of other markets are taken off for Plug, including on-road electric vehicles, large-scale stationary and aerial applications. We expect to see over 30,000 fuel cell systems deployed across all these spaces by 2025. For the green hydrogen market, you heard Sanjay discuss how we are building our network to more than 500 tons per day in the next 5 years. And as we move forward, we expect to continue investing in the global network. Where we're doing business represents a big shift for us as well. Our North American sales will continue to grow. We will be significantly expanding our presence in Europe. And we're getting a large foothold in the Asian Pacific region. This geographic growth represents a major opportunity for Plug. Fortunately, there are significant tailwinds that are driving the global hydrogen economy. We're operating in a favorable regulatory and social environment and the global cost curves are benefiting from the escalating global market focus on green solutions. Let me drill more deeply into the growth in our gross billings and how we're going to drive it. We expect our material handling business will more than double by 2025, and we have clear strategies to drive it. We've got a large account strategy with multisite customer wins, which are proving now with our 5 pedestal customers. We're developing exciting new hydrogen solutions, which expands our market. We have flexible business models to make it easy for our customers to access our solutions. And we're continuing to invest in cost downs and improve reliability. For new markets, we anticipate a 50-fold increase in revenues over this planning period. To drive this, we're developing market channels, including industry-leading customers and strategic partners. We'll be leveraging metal plate stacks that will bring improved power density at lower cost. And we will be expanding markets like on on-road EV, stationary, power and aerial applications. And as you know, our green hydrogen market is really poised to take off. We expect to see a 650% increase in gross billings as we develop our market channels and grow our customers and partners, leverage the global market for electrolyzers with our superior technology and scale the gigafactory in Rochester, New York and also scale our global green hydrogen network. In terms of our targeted business model, and what we see as we scale the $3 billion in 2025. We expect gross margin to exceed 30%, and we expect to achieve low teens leverage on our operating cost base. We have seen how scale matters over the years, and we expect this to continue as we drive improvement in conjunction with other key drivers, including continual innovation, improving product performance and reducing cost; vertical integration, reducing lead times and driving cost synergies and improving product performance; supply chain leverage driving cost down and improving performance; and lastly, leveraging our OpEx as we scale. Now near term, we expect to increase OpEx investments given the breadth of growth opportunities unfolding, which spans many markets and geographies. However, we see tremendous leverage opportunity as we scale in this longer-term planning horizon. Now drilling a bit deeper into our gross margin target. It boils down to 3 things. Effectively across our markets, we sell equipment, service and fuel. And we see big opportunities for improvement in each area. Our higher volume in equipment sales will mean better leverage of fixed costs and supply chain pricing. Vertical integration will increase reliability and reduce costs. Technology innovations are simplifying equipment designs. Service improvements will include increasing reliability and reducing costs with stack enhancements, utilizing analytics for predictive maintenance and performance improvement, and leveraging labor as we cluster customers with a dispatch model as we scale. And our fuel business margins will improve with infrastructure design improvements that increased site efficiency and lower cost. And the implementation of our hydrogen generation vertical strategy, which yields synergies on costs we're paying others and also affords tighter control of the network, which will significantly enhance our system efficiencies. And we've achieved 35%-plus quarterly gross margin rates on equipment in recent years. And while this will vary going forward as we scale new products and new markets, we've demonstrated our ability to cost down and achieve our target rate, and we plan to routinely achieve this in the near to midterm. The real key, as we've shared, is driving service and fuel cost down. Both will significantly improve over this planning horizon. Target reductions in monthly unit service costs over 60% will come with improved stack life from new designs, newer models in the fleet as we grow sales and customers refresh their fleets, standardizing and streamlining customer offerings and enhanced digital diagnostics, enabling improved predictive maintenance. We anticipate fuel cost will more than be cut in half because we'll own our own capacity as we drive towards 500 tons per day in 2025. And we'll invest in logistics capabilities to streamline processes and improve field dynamics. And we'll leverage vertical initiatives for CapEx reductions. And that all adds up to improved operating income and operating cash flows. In this planning horizon, we are targeting 17% in operating income and more than 20% in adjusted EBITDAS. Now how do we achieve these targets? We'll do it through sales and operating margin growth like we've been talking about, developing and leveraging our supply chain for more effective working capital strategies and using our financial growth and asset platform to drive more efficient cost of capital solutions. In 2014, our breakout year, we were at $64 million in annual sales. During 2015, we predicted we would grow Plug to $500 million annually within a 5-year planning horizon. In 2021, we're achieving that milestone. Plug is proving we know how to grow this hydrogen economy. There are plenty of positive tailwinds as we move forward. And like the last 5 years, there will be some unexpected headwinds in our future. But we know the market opportunities are real. And the Plug team has clear plans to accomplish our growth targets. And we have plenty of near-term factors underpinning our confidence. We're scaling with over 50% growth in sales next year. We're growing internationally and entering new territories. We're continuing to grow our established material handling market while expanding significantly into new ones like electrolyzers, on-road, stationary. And we are in the construction phase to launch the first global green hydrogen network, which will deliver at cost parity or better to the existing market next summer. To wrap it up, let me say I look forward to sharing more as we move forward. And I especially look forward to our investor symposium in 2025. We will be celebrating with you all, all that we've accomplished in these next 5 years. And given success begets success, we will all be discussing how we are poised to achieve similar, if not even better growth rates in '26 and beyond. Thank you for your time and stay tuned.

Boy, what a day. I've so much enjoyed hearing from so many of the outside distinguished speakers talking about the future of hydrogen. But quite honestly, I really enjoyed more to speak -- talks by the Plug Power team, who talked about how that future is actually here today. From Sanjay Shrestha, you heard about our green hydrogen network, where we'll have 500 tons of green hydrogen across the United States by 2025, the first of its kind. And by 2028, 1,000 tons around the world. Ole Hoefelmann talked about the huge ambitions and opportunities in the electrolyzer business. In that business, Plug Power has a leading-edge technology, which gives us a differential advantage against all the competition. Keith Schmidtalked about a wide range of applications using one platform that allows us to address on-road vehicles, stationary power products and even flying in the air. And boy, you can't forget Jose Crespo, Jose is a guy who's built Amazon for Plug Power and he's looking to really build our material handling business even more rapidly. This was quite a day, and I know you're out there that you're looking to give us some questions, and we look forward to answering those questions. So please fire away.

Hello, and good afternoon, everybody. We're finally live, and we're really looking forward to having an interactive dialogue with you. Today, I just want to highlight a few items. We really showed you how Plug Power is really building the green hydrogen highway. And what does that mean? From everything to the plants that Sanjay is leading the construction of around the country and ultimately, around the world, as shown by the folks at ACCIONA. You heard from Ole about the electrolyzer business and how we have the world's leading PEM technology for electrolyzers, which we're selling, but also using ourselves. And then we talked about applications from what Jose has done with material handling to all the cool things Keith is doing with on-road vehicles, with HYVIA, the fly in the air and large-scale stationary with folks like SK. So we're really ready to go and looking forward to your questions and Preeti, I guess, we got. I guess I get the first one.

You get the first one. Thank you, Andy, and thank you all for attending. We're going to kick off for Q&A, and we'll have some questions for Andy and for the general managers. And let's start with you Andy. All these announcements. Please share your thinking around that.

Well, my thinking around it is consistent with everything we've been saying for the last 3 years. Plug is the company that's building out the hydrogen ecosystem and is the leader. Let's go through a few of them. Yesterday, and you heard some great explanation from Airbus about the hydrogen hub we're looking to build at airports in the United States. And as Keith explained, it was not only just for airplanes, but it's for ground support equipment at airports. Now we're doing work like that with Amazon today. It's for vans that run around the airports, which I know you've all been in. And Plug is really driving that and partnering with people like Airbus is really important on that journey. We also had a real need announcement with Phillips 66 yesterday. Where with them, they have 13 refineries around the world. The biggest one is actually in the U.K. that we're looking today in that process, there's lots and lots of gray and brown hydrogen being used and they want to convert to green hydrogen, and they want to do it with all these electrolyzers. Then the 2 big ones today. You have the real big announcement for Australia. And many of you saw Dr. Andrew Forrest from Australia. I think you can see why we decided to partner with them. I think there's 2 companies that have a huge vision for what can happen with green hydrogen. It's Plug Power and Fortescue. And combining together, they really build out in Australia and New Zealand, we believe is a huge opportunity. Remember, Australia is a leading exporter today of minerals. Solar and wind, as Andrew explained, will allow them to become a great exporter of green hydrogen and green ammonia, and we want to do that with them. And finally, we had an acquisition today. It's another step in building out the hydrogen ecosystem with Applied Cryo Tech. So now today, that's stuff that hydrogen at green hydrogen that Sanjay is developing will be trucked to our sites with liquid hydrogen tanks manufactured and used not only by Plug Power, but other people around the world. And finally, they also -- today, we bought in the past year about 60 liquid hydrogen tanks, now we can do it ourselves. So that's where it's what the announcements were about today Preeti, and I expect more to come.

Sounds great. So as a reminder to everyone who's watching, there's a Q&A on box below. We're seeing your questions coming live. So please keep them coming, and let's dig into the next question. So Andy, a very topical question. Does management have any concerns about supply chain problems right now?

We've been able to -- look, let's be -- we've worked, I think Keith is sitting here and Keith knows better than anyone else sitting here, it's been a tough year making sure that we have the parts to build our products. We had a record third quarter as we predicted. And we were able to find the parts. We're the rolling-up your sleeves type folks. We know we have to make our customers successful. So we had to find a way to deliver. I think we're a lot like Tesla. I looked at Tesla. They made their numbers, they figured out how to work through chip shortages. They figured out how to put cars in people's hands. We figured out how to provide our products, our fueling stations, our on-road vehicles to customers. So it's been tough. And we've been rolling up our sleeves and doing it, and we're going to do it again in the fourth quarter.

That's right. So Keith, do you want to add anything to that?

I think that's exactly right. We put the energy in. We attack it head on. And if there's a challenge out there, Plug is going to surmount it and close it out. So I totally agree.

Paul and I, every morning at 8:30 are on the phone with manufacturing, making sure we have the parts.

Sounds great, Paul, a question for you. How do you think about 2030, given what you're projecting for the next few years?

Well, I think we've given the guidance that we're going to be growing by over 50% through 2025 to get to the $3 billion number. And I think that's a real -- that's a good proxy to continue on into 2030. But I would leave you with this that if you look at the inference that, that basically suggests we're going to do close to $2 billion in 2024, which would be an increase from the $1.7 billion we were at previously. I think as we continue going forward, you heard all the people talking today, all the great things happening. And again, I use the phrase success begets success. And so I think that 50% is a good proxy, but I'm really optimistic about how big it can go.

And a follow-on question for you. When do you think Plug will be cash flow positive?

It's a good question. I think about cash every day. I think it's interesting. We've kind of gone through this phase of really proven to ourselves and to the world that this first market can be successful. And over the last couple of years, we've started doubling down on these new markets. And for the next -- for the near term, we're really investing in OpEx, CapEx, new products, new -- these new markets. And so I'd say in the short term, you're going to see investment. But one thing you will see is this continued incremental improvement in gross margin. And you're going to start to really see that in a step function way, really on into the back half of next year and on into '23, as we start turning on our green hydrogen network. We start scaling. I think of the 23 people that talk today, the one common theme that you heard was scale. And if it's any proxy from what we've done, every time we've doubled our installed base, we've seen a cost step function change of over 25%. And so I think 2023, scale matters. You get into 2023, I think you're going to see that inflection point.

Thanks, Paul. Sanjay, a question just came in for you. How can we reduce the cost of hydrogen production?

Great. Thank you, Preeti. Again, thank you for the question. This is a great question. So as we've talked about it a couple of times, right? I mean we've spent a lot of time even as we sit here right now and building some of this green hydrogen plant, where have we spent a lot of time? Where can you source and locate your hydrogen plant closest to the possible lowest cost of renewable electricity? That is the biggest factor in terms of how you go by really reducing the cost of green hydrogen, right? We're working with partners in some situation and that we publicly announced, like, for example, the plant in Georgia, it's a very low-cost electricity. The plant we're building in Buffalo, New York. It's a very low cost of electricity. Coming from NYPA, the plant we're looking to build in Texas is also coming from wind power, very low-cost electricity. So but as you look forward, there are going to be a couple of step change function that you're going to see. Number one, you will see cost of electrolyzer go down, which Ole can talk a lot more about, obviously, and that's going to help reduce the CapEx. Second piece, as we build some of these plants, you will see us be able to do a lot more optimization, if you would. How do you really get electrolyzer and liquefier what are the things we can do? How can we improve the lead time for the liquefier? How can we reduce the cost of the liquefier? Third thing, as Andy just touched on, we made an acquisition of Applied Cryo Tech. That is now going to reduce the cost of our tankers and therefore, the cost of our delivery network, right? So when you really think about it, the first and the most important thing is continued decline in the cost of renewable electricity. Second piece, continued reduction in the overall CapEx, right? And the third piece is really also the reduction and more and more capital coming into this industry similar to what we saw, what happened to the solar and wind. When solar and wind industry kind of got started, call it, 15 years ago, everybody was looking for 15% project level IRR. Now folks are happy to own solar assets for 6% equity return. So when you see that level of a CapEx, cost of capital reduction, you will also see the cost of hydrogen continue to go down.

That makes sense. So I'm going to take a follow-on question earlier that just came in. Many, many competing technologies in the market. Why do you think Plug will emerge as a leader in electrolyzers as well as, therefore, green hydrogen?

Yes. No, that's a good question. And Andy alluded earlier to the fact that we do have a best-in-class PEM technology. And as you saw earlier on the symposium, we've done a lot of testing. We have very robust technology. It's been used in some very stringent environments. And so that technology, as you saw earlier on from [indiscernible] key has now been scaled up to a 1-megawatt stack that, we internally call the allagash. What's nice about that is we've scaled up the stack. And now, as Sanjay was saying, we're scaling up the production of green hydrogen. So we're taking the stack, working on balance of plant on the ancillary equipment and really building out our experience on operating and then servicing and maintaining large-scale facilities. What that allows us to do is then also go to our customers and say, hey, listen, we've done this ourselves. We know how this works, and we can keep driving the cost down, working also on larger volumes with the supply chain. The other thing that we've done, and you heard this already earlier today as well is we have our gigafactory in Rochester. We've also announced a factory with SK in Korea. We have another announcement that we did earlier today that Andy alluded to with FFI. And again, that's about -- as Sanjay was asking me to do is drive down cost on the electrolyzer system, not only on the stack itself but the overall components. When you then look kind of down the road and then how do I think we're going to maintain our leadership is continue to innovate. We've done a great job over the last 20, 25 years. As Quik he was mentioning earlier, there's a few things we're already working on. We talked about the higher current density. But in the end, our commitment, because we need that internally for ourselves, for our customers, but also then third parties that we're selling our equipment to, we need to keep driving down the cost. And I think we have everything we need to deliver on that.

Thank you. Thank you, Ole. Keith, and lots of questions on HYVIA. Around the theme of Canvas product HYVIA or a similar product, we integrated in the U.S. by companies such as Amazon and Walmart for the last mile.

Great question, Preeti. And the answer is absolutely. The Master Van is the premier platform. It's in the right class. And obviously, it has applications globally. So it is a direct fit into many of our logistics customers. Now we're truly excited about the success of HYVIA. Initially, we're focused on Europe, but we see, as we go forward, expansion in not only the product line at HYVIA, but the geography as well. So thank you, Preeti.

Jose, a question for you. Listening to your presentation, initial cost parity would lead acid battery technology is a cornerstone for material handling strategy to go into hyper growth. How comfortable are you that you can actually achieve this goal?

Okay. Thank you, Preeti. So as you probably all know, at Plug, we have an incredible track record of cost efficiencies over the last 15 years or so. We have been able to reduce the cost of our technology by around 25% every time that we double the installed base. So based on that, I have a very strong confidence that we're going to be able to get to that point of cost parity, but added to that to our record, as I mentioned during my presentation, we have the new stack technologies that we are implementing as well as modular systems for our gen drives as well as our new solutions for hydrogen infrastructure, more tailored towards medium and small installations, which is going to all contribute to the initial cost of ownership to basically go to the levels that we want to go. Added to that, then the new technologies that we're putting on the table are going to make our solutions much more reliable, which is also going to impact the overall cost of the technology as well as the satisfaction of our customers with the technology. And finally, adding to all of that, then we have Sanjay with the green hydrogen plants that are going to provide us with the hydrogen that we need to run all these applications at the right cost and being green. So all in all, I think we have an incredible rate of success to be able to meet the targets that we need to meet.

Sanjay, why don't you remind everybody of all the green hydrogen plants we've announced, and how many we're going to have by 2025, just to give people a feel that we'll be able to support Jose.

Absolutely, Andy, right? And I think I will also like to remind everybody as we've always said, even the cost of our green hydrogen from our plant number 1 is going to be substantially lower than what we're paying for the gray hydrogen in the market today. Second thing, we have not taken into consideration any of the potential benefit from production tax credit. If something like that were to be implemented, if you had a $3 production tax credit, that basically means our cost of electricity is now almost negative, which is the biggest variable cost when you think about the cost of green hydrogen. Now in terms of the number of the plants we're looking to build, as you all know, today, we have a plant in Tennessee. It's plant number one. This year, we're looking to break ground on 3 plants, right, plant in Georgia, plant in Buffalo, and there's 1 more plan that you will hear more about as the year progresses. So we'll be breaking ground on 3 plants. So by the end of 2022, we will have at least 4 plants, and we will exit the year with more than 70 tons per day of installed capacity. Now when you think 2023, we are looking at about 200 tons per day of installed capacity and more than 6 plants. Well on our way to 2025, where we will have at least 13 plants operating. But one more important point to highlight here is, and we've given this a lot of thought as to where and why we're building these plants. Number one, where is close to one low-cost renewable; second, closer to the customer and the demand. But more importantly, also, how can we cover the entire nation, right? Because thinking through the delivery timeline, number of hours the drivers can be on the road, how do we need to think about the team drivers. So we have given all those things a lot of thought, so that we can really have a lot of efficiency from the cost of delivery perspective as well. So again, that's how we see the cadence of how we grow, 1 plant, by the end of next year 4, at least 6 by the end of 2023 on our way to 13-plus plant by 2025 and 500 tons per day. And we have an absolute clear strategy how low and get that done.

So Jose should have absolutely no concerns about hydrogen supply.

As I said, I'm very confident in that.

Thank you. Thank you, Sanjay, for that. Keith, Again, lots of questions on data centers. Can you talk about your data center strategy and backup generation strategy in general?

Sure. The data center market, it's -- and backup power market is really undergoing a dramatic shift, and that's really driven by the need to reduce diesel emissions. We heard from Mark earlier, Mark Monroe, from Microsoft earlier that PEM technologies have been proven to be a plug and play replacement for diesel technologies in these applications. And more than that, they provide additional values for applications like firming, et cetera. So we have a solution set that's proven, it's plug and play, it can be a drop in replacement for diesel, and it adds additional value. So we know the market's there. It's growing, the demand is strong, and Plug is well positioned. We, with our ProGen engine set that we're leveraging across multiple applications, we have products that are ready to go, and we'll be installing those products in the first half of 2022 with multiple leading customers. So from our perspective, the backup power market is a great market. It's really prime for large growth. And the market is ready, the technology is ready, and Plug is ready.

And Keith what's the difference between what you would do for Microsoft and what you would do for SK?

So that is a great question, Andy. And the answer to that is even better. Not much. So those 2 platforms are almost directly similar. So we can make 1 standard platform and fit both application needs. In the backup power market, we're focused on optimizing for capital cost because you don't run that much. But in the continuous power market, we focus on optimizing the solution set for efficiency because fuel cost over continuous power applications is a big, big driver. So essentially, we put more engines into the continuous power applications and less engines into the backup power applications, but we can fit the entire market with one solution set.

So Sanjay, questions around, so much hydrogen, you talked about on-road. Any thoughts about using existing pipelines for moving hydrogen around?

That's...

They may have gotten that because we've had a lot of pipeline people talk to.

Exactly.

But this is certainly a very good question, right? Certainly, a very good question. Again, I think we touched on it a little bit during our presentation today, where how are we thinking about sort of the long-term growth of the hydrogen industry, if you would, right? So for the first phase of our growth is 500-ton, even the 1,000 tons. And even beyond that, when you even start to think about numbers like 5,000 tons, liquid model, size of the liquid plant just makes perfect sense, right? You really need to get into kilotons, right? You really need to start thinking about how do you move 10,000 tons per day of hydrogen. That's when then all of a sudden, the large pipeline, right by thinking through absolutely ideal wind resource location, right, working with a company that already knows they have how to get the right away from a pipeline perspective, even leverage their know-how in the natural gas pipeline industry, to, in fact, be able to use that for the hydrogen pipeline. So is that part of the future? Absolutely, yes. Something we spend a lot of time thinking about. But in the near term, we're heads down focused on making sure that these plants are up and running. So Jose never has any problem with hydrogen availability for his customers and all the new applications that we're building.

But it's fair to say, we talk about pipelines every day.

Absolutely.

It was ultimately that helps drive the cost now because it eliminates the transportation cost. What's really interesting is we don't really think it changes our need for liquid hydrogen. And that's why some of the acquisitions we're making, like with Applied Cryo Tech is really associated with liquid because we know we need to store and deliver even with pipelines in the liquid form.

And Andy, as you say all the time, right, the liquid delivery is the perfect way to do it from an on-road standpoint, because if you do the high-pressure gas, just delivery, once you get above 100 miles, you run into a lot of limitation, right? Pipeline will get you to a certain point, but there will be a very strong liquefaction technology, liquefaction architecture really to get it to the end customer uses with a lot of flexibility in terms of how far and where we can take it. Absolutely, Andy.

So all this growth we're talking about, Paul, what's our capital strategy in the context of all these plants that all the general managers are speaking to?

That's a good question. I think -- let me start and say, in the 7 years I've been here, we're in the best position we've ever been in. We have close to $5 billion in cash. We have very little debt. We've got this growing pipeline. Next year, we've predicted 65%-plus growth. The amount of inbound interest we have, not just on the commercial opportunities, but on the different partners that want to work with us from a capital standpoint. So as we continue to grow in scale, our ability to attract lower cost of capital solutions to continue to fund these incremental investments continues to get stronger. And the best part is for the near term, we're very well positioned with the cash that we have on hand to invest all of the different strategies that we have for the next couple of years. So we're in a good spot.

Sounds good, Paul. On to you, Ole, what role do you see for the joint ventures that we've been putting together, say, SK, Fortescue?

Good question. Andy mentioned, obviously, those also during his introduction to the Q&A. A simple way to look at it is that it's helping us accelerate. And it's also by finding the right partners, which I really believe we've done with both SK and Fortescue. We're helping them achieve their ambitions as well, which SK has a very strong ambition that is in support of the Korean government. And you also see in Andrew's, where it's his passion for how he's trying to position Australia for the future, particularly as it relates, obviously, to green hydrogen and his case, also green ammonia. For us, what way it's going to help us too, it's going to help us increase our footprint. We'll be able to bring our technology a lot quicker to some of the other geographies around the world. It will also, as Keith was alluding to, help us accelerate our product development when we talk about like the 200-megawatt stationary that we want to do with SK in Korea. So to me, it's really about accelerating our presence, but then also accelerating how we do things. We have a commitment with both of our partners to learn together, particularly when it comes around advanced manufacturing, when it also comes to evaluating different business strategies and the geographies, we're in. So to me, again, in the end, it's going to help deliver what Paul is asking us to deliver from a financial perspective. But certainly, I see a lot of synergies in those joint ventures for us.

Preeti, we should not forget Renault.

That's right.

And not forget ACCIONA. But the Renault venture is really, really critical to making us European. I mean, one of the items that I was struck by is how international we become because of these partnerships. So I mean we heard from -- I don't know how many people from Europe today, from Asia, from Australia, is a lot different than the Plug Power Symposium in 2019 that I don't even think we had any international presence. And now we're really an international company with Tier 1 international partners.

Well, well put Andy. Well put. Jose, speaking of international, what's the outlook for new customers, whether it's the U.S. and/or internationally?

I like that question. That's what I ask them.

That's a question I ask them every day.

It's the main stay. That's right.

In 2019, when we did first symposium, we said that we were going to have 5 pedestal customers by 2024, right? We are right now with 5 pedestal customers right now. And I think this is one of the reasons because we have more predictable revenues, and we are at the level of revenues that we are in material handling this year. We're going to be doing in material handling and alone over $450 million. We are working with many of our existing customers and some new customers to talk about multisite deals. In particular, I have 2 customers in the U.S. and 2 customers in Europe that we are in very active talks to do multisite deals. And I'm hoping that in the next 6 to 12 months, definitely before the end of '22, we will sign hopefully all of them, at least or at least half of them. But yes, this is what we do every day, and this is what Andy asked me about every day and is on the top of our minds.

Andy, I've got a question for you. I love this question. I want to work for Plug. What types of positions are you in need of? Actually, I would like to ask everybody.

I will let them go -- Let me just turn off. First, you may have caught on, you have that passion. If you don't have passion, this isn't the right company to work for. We want people who are smart at what they do, and we need people who are smart at lots of different items. And we need people who will roll up their sleeves every day. It's -- we were not afraid to work after we get done offstage here. All of us are back to work for the -- how many more hours, Sanjay? Long hours. But it's a great place to work. We do like our people. And we have great respect for our people. And I'll let everybody go around and talk about what skills they need. But come apply, if you got those characteristics, and we'll find a way to put you to use. But what do you need, Keith?

I need engineers, and I need business development personnel. And I really -- as you said, Andy, I need passionate people that want to make a difference. And regardless of your skill set, we'll find a spot for you.

Yes. I agree with, obviously, the passion that that's certainly why I joined a few months ago. I also -- as Keith already said, and I think you're getting a sense of it, right? We're -- we need engineers, be it mechanical, be it electrical engineers. We're also looking on the electrolyzer side to build out a service organization. So we are looking for people that are willing to work with their hands kind of get into the things. And in the end, we are open. We're open to, as you were saying, Keith, different profiles as well. So certainly, if you're interested, if you like what we're doing and you like what you see then I certainly would just go ahead and apply, and we'll find a fit for what makes sense.

And I'll keep my answer short. We're building a marketing team from scratch. So we're looking for rockstar marketing people.

Well, we already [indiscernible] here.

That's right.

She works around the clock...

We only have excellent people.

To make sure this Plug Power Symposium came off. So we already have some stars and Tracy is here, but we do need more stars.

We need more -- it's a team with stars, exactly.

Do you want to go, Paul?

I need whatever these guys need. I want to grow this company. So come apply.

Again, I'll keep it brief as well. So we're building a lot of plants. So we need electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, civil engineers, and we also need a lot of folks who can distribute this green hydrogen products. We're also looking for a lot of folks in the logistic industry, drivers, plant manager across the board. So passion. We have a lot of rules and we'll find you a job. All right.

All of the above, also salespeople, we need -- nobody has mentioned that, and we do these salespeople.

That's true.

Engineers, product managers, above all people that we're going to have a lot of fun every day when they come up work and they want to make a difference, and they have energy. So come and work with us.

Well put.

Great. I think it's time...

It's time.

Closer out. I just want to take a minute and remind folks of what they heard today. This company is building the green hydrogen highway. And as I stated this off a few 30 minutes ago, we're generating the green hydrogen. We're doing it with clean hydropower, solar power, wind power, doing across United States, we'll have 13 plants by the end of 2025. A lot of people talk about doing things. I mentioned about the kind of employees we need. We roll up our sleeves and do things every day. We acquired Applied Cryo Tech today, so we can deliver hydrogen and store hydrogen in large quantities. We know how to build fueling stations. We've built 165 of them. And the apps no one's made as many fuel cells that have to really work. And the one thing about Plug Power is I often tell people, we're real. We've been doing real things. I've been here since 2008, and we do real things. And that's what I think differentiates us from many companies who just talk about it. And I think it's one of the reasons today, you saw stakeholders across the world participating in the Plug Power Symposium. We have wonderful people from government like Senator Schumer, and from the European Commission. You saw customers, you saw partners like Fortescue and SK. You saw employees when we talked about the gigafactory. You saw Dustin and Corky talk about the great work they're doing. This is a real special company, and it's really just starting. We're going to be the company that's going to be known for not only building the first commercial market for hydrogen fuel cells but building the first global hydrogen ecosystem. Creating a green hydrogen highway, not only here in the United States but around the world. So thank you, everybody, for joining us today. And next year, we're going to do it from Rochester, New York live when this pandemic is over, so you can see our wonderful gigafactory. See you soon.