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

[Presentation] Please join me in welcoming to the stage, Plug CEO, Andy Marsh.

Well, good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to be at the 6th Plug's Symposium. And we got a full room here today. Some folks are still out on tour, but we also have 5,000 people online. So Great. Good morning, good evening and good afternoon to those online. Each of the Symposiums, this is the sixth one. We actually try to do more than just give a Plug view of the world. You're going to hear from policy is really important at the moment. We have 2 of our friends, 1 who's more of a Democratic lobbyists and 1 who's a Republican lobbyist talking about -- with many of us about the climbing in Washington today, I think you'll find it fascinating. I've known Scott and Greg for a long time, and they always are really, really interesting. We have a customer who came all the way from Australia to talk about his green ammonia project. And I think, Alfred, you'll really enjoy him talking about how to really export the sun from Australia to South Korea and to Japan. And finally, you hear from us. The management team as well as some of our directors about the activities which are going on in their business. As always, this talk is covered by our safe harbor statement. But I always like to start every presentation talking about customers. In Plug, we're around and we feel it would not have been possible if customers have not supported our efforts. And in the electrolyzer business, today, you see folks like Galp in Spain or in Portugal, wrong country, in Portugal, using our electrolyzers which will be one of the biggest projects, if not the biggest PEM project in the world as it starts getting deployed next year, 100 megawatts for electrolyzers. Last week, I met with folks at Iberdola. I met with folks in Lhyfe. These products and this activity with these customers, every one of them I sat down with and said to them, and Jose was with me. And my first question is, what could Plug do better? And the feedback I get is the activity of our team is the best in the world in supporting their deployment because we're used to doing real things, because we've been doing real things with people like Amazon, and Walmart and Home Depot in our material handling business for a long time. That experience of how to serve customers has really been helpful as we develop new markets like with Energy Vault. This project, 8-megawatt stationary deployment in California, the power of microgrid during outages during fires. Again, I think it's unique how Plug really thinks about putting customers first. And you'll hear that theme throughout the event. But then it's great to put customer first, but you have to have the tools to do it. Many of you walked through this great facility today in Slingerlands, New York where we're building electrolyzers, we're building stationary products. We're building mobility products. We're building fueling stations. That's happening here in this building. Great facilities, the biggest gigafactory in the world for PEM devices in Rochester, New York. Plug has not only the ability to serve customers, but we have the tools to make sure they're satisfied. And that makes this scheme a possible. And if you think about this scheme and when I take a look back, where do we get our electrolyzers. Well, we manufacture stacks in New York. We -- stacks in Rochester, New York. We integrate products here, which many of you saw today, as well as in places like Vietnam and Dubai and the Netherlands. We know how to liquefy hydrogen. Our plan in Georgia and Texas, which will come online, we'll use a 30-ton and 15-ton Plug electrolyzers. We moved gases today, hydrogen and other gases for people like Linde, Air Liquide, Matheson as well as ourselves. And no one's built 305 fueling stations like Plug has in the world, which are dispensing 50,000 times a day as we speak. And into a wide variety of applications, which you'll hear a lot more from Jose, Luis and others today. But none of this would be possible without the people. And the experience that they've gained over time. You go and talk to our Stack team in Concord, Massachusetts for electrolyzers. That stack team has been developing and designing stacks for over 20 years. We've taken and worked with them to take projects which were for nuclear submarines and spacecrafts and help commercialize it for everyday applications that -- and those stacks are more efficient, which is key in the electrolyzer business than any other stacks in the world. That's why customers like working with them. We have a great team in the Netherlands and in India who are actually critical in integrating these products -- electrolyzer products. That team, they really earned their -- they've really earned throughout the years, how to do big projects in the oil and gas industry. Now funny real advantage Plug has is 30% of our people have worked in oil and gas, and know how to do big projects. That's why we're working on 8 gigawatts of basic design and engineering practices. Here in New York, we have people who've done over 70,000 fuel cells. We've had people who've dealt with customers for the last 15 years building an industry from scratch, and that's a real advantage. I'm not telling you that it's been easy. It's been tough. The challenges over the last couple of years, we have overestimated the speed of the market and how fast certain activities can get done. When I reflect now when I think about, boy, we have customers who are about to spend $6 billion, $7 billion on projects. They're going to take their time, and that's why they're working with us on FIDs today for their big programs and integrating us into their packages. The regulatory environment has not accelerated as rapidly as we hoped in the United States. We're going to hear from some experts today about how they see that landscape. But look, I appreciate how hard it is to get regulations right after working on it for 2 years. And I really believe that there will be progress, especially with the overturn of Chevron. Learning how to manufacture at scale, learning how to even work with customers on these long -- tough long programs, they've been learning. But no one else has this experience. No one else has this capability in this industry, and it really does uniquely position Plug. So the folks here at [ 6 Eyes ], I guess, they've done all our Symposium and Matt, who's producing this event for us here today said to me, "Boy, Andy, you used to just show dirt when you look at these projects. The schema was a vision, not something that's been executed." Well, many of you have walked our plant in Georgia, the largest PEM electrolyzer deployment in the world. It's real. It's not dirt. You go to many of our customer sites, our friends at Lhyfe in France. They commissioned their products with them in September and they're shipping hydrogen to customers today. In the transport business, Bob, you've been doing this for 15 years. We know how to move hydrogen logistically. Chris and his team are moving 20 tons of our own product today. We know how to do that, but we also know how to make the trailers and make it happen. Three, I mentioned 305 fueling stations. Nobody matches it. And then the applications, 70,000 fuel cells. You look at the stationary products that are beginning to power remote areas where the electric power doesn't exist today. Plug has done a great deal, and we are making progress every day. And we're making progress financially. Gross margins improved by over 37% from the second quarter to third quarter. We're using less cash. We told you about our execution plans, how we are going to put more financial discipline into the business. And this is happening today, and you can see from that graph, less cash usage, less -- improved gross margins. And since we've made the investments, we're in a position to really capitalize this for the long term. And that's a theme that you're going to hear throughout today. So, now I mentioned the fact this real -- and real things are happening now. Some key milestones this year. We have a great -- we're building a hydrogen network. We have a great plant in Tennessee, you're going to hear about. We have a great plant in Georgia. St. Gabes in Louisiana is going to come online. The DOE loan will happen and Texas will be starting final construction for the next 18 months once that loan is finalized. Look, we have more than triple, quadrupled our revenue for electrolyzers from the second quarter to third quarter. We actually are deploying real PEM electrolyzers. I saw an article that someone handed me from Bloomberg. You go outside China, who is the third biggest provider of green energy hydrogen? It's Plug. If you think about our customers. We have -- I mentioned before, we have great customers like Walmart and Amazon. We have great customers like [indiscernible] and Galp. We have great customers, some of them who are suppliers to us like Linde. Plug has a customer list that's unmatched in the industry. And today, you're going to hear a lot about innovation from a panel we have with Tim Cortes and Dr. Luke Wenlent about everything that we're doing in hydrogen. And we're not doing it alone. We've got partners and partnership is critical to Plug's future. And this next 1 really excited me when they gave me this slide yesterday that the biggest customer we have at a single site is the Spartanburg's manufacturing facility for BMW, where there's over 500 GenDrive units. Europe in the last 18 months, we've actually doubled the number of sites we have in Europe. And with BMW, we're heading into BMW in Germany with 2 new infrastructures and 2 new sites using our GenDrive products. We're looking to jointly expand. And look, the reason BMW is doing it is because how well we've served them in the facility in Spartansburg. And so a pretty good road map as far as successes go even though it's been hard. And just look at our hydrogen plant in Georgia. This plant looks so much like what has to be done elsewhere. I see my buddy Alan here, who's our project manager over all these activities. He worked to make sure the substation was built by the local power authority. We figured out how to work with SMA, a great provider of many of our rectifiers. It's our electrolyzers. It's our control system. This site has over -- Alan, if I remember, 8,000 pipes. If I got it right, and over 2,700 loops and connections. We actually know how to build real complicated things and try to work through how electrolyzers work best with the liquefiers. It's another skilled talent that no one else really done before that Plug is done at this site. And then you think about the electrolyzer business. I had a wonderful trip last week to Europe. I was in -- with Jose. I was in Paris. I was in Madrid. I was in Lisbon. I was in Copenhagen seeing customers and across the board and talking to them about their deployments. And this list just shows we're on 5 continents. And I'm hoping to figure out -- I know I'm going to get on a 6th one. I'm trying to figure out how we get there [indiscernible]. That is really -- but it really is special. Lhyfe, by the end of this year, we'll have 8 deployments either done or under construction with Lhyfe for sites in Germany and France around, in the U.K., [indiscernible]. There's actually some vehicles on the road if you go into New Zealand, and there's 4 electrolyzers, 3 of them that have already been deployed by Plug to support mobility networks with our electrolyzers in New Zealand, monitored and managed through our team in the Netherlands. It just kind of gives you a feel for the depth and experience of Plug. And in Texas, we've been working really closely with Infinium. We deployed our first project. They're really working on electric fuels. Infinium is backed by companies like Amazon, who are really thinking about how to use carbon capture, hydrogen to power their fleets for the near term as hydrogen and batteries become more readily available for on-road vehicles. And finally, this is a real picture. So Matt was saying, you go out to California. You'll see 8 megawatts of Plug Power stationary products installed. I think during the tour, you saw one outside here. This is a first of its kind microgrid. I know I've talked to all the data center operators. And I know this portion of the market is going to evolve over time. If I look at hydrogen is one of the key critical items now you think about it. But look, now in this time period, Plug is really thinking about how to support areas with remote power, where you can't get power easily. And it's a charge of electric vehicles. I think everybody knows it can take 3.5 years to get the grid today, but also come '28, we'll be doing tests next year, really to start thinking through how to power hyper data centers. And I know Jose has been working with a customer where there's a hydrogen pipeline nearby, and they're talking about hundreds of megawatts of stationary products. But long term, this product will be the dominant product for Plug. When you start thinking about a renewable grid and a renewable grid is coming, just asked the CEO of Exxon because he said it yesterday. A renewable grid is coming. As electricity on that grid at night, you're going to be creating hydrogen with electrolyzers and during peak hours, Plug stationary products will be doing everything to support those customers to power the grid. We have a road map for cost. We have a road map for efficiency, and we're really starting to engage with those customers on how this product should evolve in time. And we're doing it in a way that Plug won't -- will be able to generate cash along the journey. I have an employee meeting every week. And I share 1 slide with them every week. And if any of my employees are watching -- I'm just -- I skip one government policy. And on government policy, you're going to hear panel today that, as I mentioned, my buddy, Scott Siegel, who I've done meetings at the White House with. My buddy Greg, who during the 2018 when we had the ITC extended, no firm was a better lobbyist firm to be working with Greg. I think we got, what, 120 have cosponsors about the ITC bill, 60 Republicans to make it happen. And Greg was critical in that activity. So we're going to tell you where -- they're going to tell you their views of what the future of government policy is. DOE loan program I said yesterday, the government doesn't really like me saying exactly what's going to happen, but I know that we have a time line. We know what has to be executed, so it happens before January 20. Tariffs look, there'll be challenges, but we're American made, American manufacturer. Really, we have a path, and we'll talk about European policy. So now the slide I was going to show was what I show the employees every week. We have a lot of arrows in our back. We're the pioneers. You don't build the first market for fuel cells without getting shot at a couple of times. You don't do what we're doing electrolyzers and building hydrogen plants without critics and without learnings. That being said, I think the pioneers made America and Plug is the pioneer in this industry. And we're not doing this to come in second place or third place or fourth place. We're doing this to win and achieve dominance. And it's been a long journey, but it also -- when you look at the real stuff, we do every day, it really separates us. And we're building for the future. And about 3 months ago, I asked Dean Fullerton to join us from Amazon. I knew Dean for about 10 years now, and Dean built out all the Amazon distribution centers over the last 14 years, he's built airports. You're going to see when he gives his resume. His extensive experience in the supply chain. Dean's job that make the trains run on time in a frugal fashion, and that's what Dean is driving. And externally, I am just thrilled and some of you may have seen in the press release today to announce my partner in crime, Sanjay Shrestha as our President. So much of what we've done in building out this hydrogen ecosystem, Sanjay was a key contributor and a leader to the activity. He's going to focus on making sure we do more deals with customers, which are profitable. He's going to make sure that we reach out to all stakeholders, those stake externally, those stakeholders being local communities, those stakeholders being obviously the shareholders in the room, many of them who know Sanjay quite well as well as government officials. I think all of you will enjoy Sanjay is going to roll out what we're going to do the next 5 years to make sure customers remain excited about what's going on at Plug. So on that note, I would like to introduce my colleague, Sanjay Shrestha to tell you all about our plans for 2025 as well as our plans for the next 5 years going forward. Sanjay?

Good morning, everybody, and for those of you who are here in person, once again, welcome to our Sixth Annual Plug's Symposium. And many of you who've been with us for a long time, listening to it online. Again, welcome, and thank you for being here with us and thank you for continuously supporting Plug and believing in what we're trying to do. We really, really appreciate you all joining us online as well. And before I get started with my presentation, first off, I'm very honored, as Andy mentioned, to take on this new role. I feel very humble. And I do want to actually thank all of our stakeholders. Every single employee at Plug, all of our shareholders, our partners, our customers without all of whom, we will not be able to do what we have done and are not going to be able to do what we're about to do and set out to really achieve the domination in the hydrogen economy, as Andy has talked about. That's our goal. We don't want to come second. This is the race. We're the trailblazer. We are doing something very special, and we are going to win, and we are going to come first in this hydrogen economy as we move ahead. But before we talk about the future a lot, let's take a step back, right, because I think we got to get 2025, right? As Andy said, the last few years has not been as easy, and we are trying to do things that have never been done before. And when you're actually doing something like this, sometimes, it ends up taking a bit longer, it ends up actually being somewhat challenging. There's curve balls, but we navigate, and we are actually maneuvering and going through all that pretty successfully. We are laser-focused on 2025, which we believe is going to set the stage for the next 5 years, and we're going to lay out for you all today, what does the company look like by the end of this decade. So just a quick executive summary, if you would. Again, in 2025, we believe, with all the effort we have going on, everything that we're trying to do, as you can see, we believe it's going to be a transformational year for the company. What do I mean by that? We are going to make sure that we are laser focused by the time we exit 2025, we are looking at a company that is going to exit the year being gross margin positive. That is an absolute must. That's a major focus. We are going to do everything we can, execution-wise, sales-wise, focus-wise, team effort to make sure that we accomplish that. Second thing, as we then set the stage with '25 and deliver on '25, we are targeting to exit 2026, by the second half of that year, we are going to be EBITDA positive. And by the way, we're not going to stop there, obviously, right? And as you start to think about 2027, we are actually planning to exit that year being operating income positive. And that is going to be a major milestone for Plug. That is going to be a major milestone for the hydrogen economy, and we are going to make sure we accomplish that. And by the way, as you start to think about 2028, we are absolutely planning to exit that year by essentially being profitable as an enterprise, which will be the first time in the hydrogen economy size of the opportunity, what Plug is doing. By the way, we have the platform, right? We have done a lot. So it's not like we're creating something new. We're just going to build on that platform with the team that we have in place to make sure that we execute and we really deliver on some of the goals that we have set out here. Again, coming back to 2025, top priority. How do you drive revenue? And as Andy talked about it, obviously, Jose and Andy just came back from meeting a lot of customer. We have a lot of opportunity going on, both on our energy business, also on our application business side, but we're not just going to stop there. And we're going to focus on revenue growth. We're going to obviously focus on bookings that is going to support that here that is going to support many more years to come, but we're also going to focus on how do you drive cost down? How do you improve the reliability of product? How do you improve the life of our stack? How do you drive the cost down for our ELX stack? How do you think about balance of plan? How do you think about system optimization to provide better value proposition for our end customer. And also on our hydrogen business side, we're going to focus on how do you improve the fuel margin? How do you improve our logistics network? How do you improve the operation of the plants collectively that is going to give us the benefit from a top line as well as that cost reduction road map also will give us the margin leverage. And that's why we say -- when we say that we are absolutely laser-focused on 2025 is going to be the year that Plug is going to exit the year by being positive gross margin. That's our target. That's our mission, and we will make sure that we're laser-focused on that. Again, this is a quick snapshot of what we think is going to happen from a revenue and a margin standpoint for the full year. We're looking at about $850 million to $950 million of sales. That's our target for the year. And when you look at that negative 20% to negative 5% in gross margin, that's really margin starts to improve throughout the year. And if you're at the low end of the range, you're probably looking at Q4 being a positive gross margin. If you're at the high end of the range, there's a scenario where Q3 is a positive gross margin for the year. Again, it's very simple, right? The mantra is drive sales and profitable sales. Continue to improve margin by basically focusing on cost down, execution, right, product reliability. And again, that's going to set the stage for us as you look beyond 2025 for the next 5 years for the company until the end of the decade. Now again, I think this is really one of the favorite chart for me. I did touch on this a little bit, but how are we going to get to that EBITDA positive? How are we going to get to that operating income positive and the overall profitability for the company. We're really looking at about 30% CAGR in our energy business. I'll go into some more detail on that. We're looking at also 30% compounded annual growth rate for our application business. And again, top line growth is there. That's going to give us the leverage from the manufacturing standpoint, labor and overhead, but we're also going to complement and supplement that margin expansion with continued focus on cost reduction, continued focus on product reliability, and that's what allows us to give us -- get us that double whammy of an effect, you got the top line benefit, you get the leverage, you get the cost down, better value proposition for the customer and better margin profile and overall profitable for the Plug as an enterprise. I can probably spend all day on this slide in terms of what we have been able to do. There is nobody that can actually put up a slide like this. We can produce hydrogen. We have the world's largest gigafactory for PEM electrolyzer, we're operating the world's largest PEM electrolyzer in Georgia at our plant, producing 15 tonnes of liquid hydrogen. We transport that ourselves. We can store that ourselves. And as Andy said, we got 305 dispensing and fueling station. Nobody even comes close. This really, really puts us in a unique position to be able to do what we're set out to do. And then -- that makes this slide a lot more plausible if you would, right? Given what we're bringing to the table, our capabilities, we're really looking at 30% growth. And as you can see, margin profile starts to go up driven by the revenue growth. And I'll get into some more detail as well as to why we're talking about the numbers the way we're talking about. There's backlog. There is bookings. There is opportunity that's really providing the backup, if you would, in terms of why we're saying what we're saying from a number standpoint. Again, majority of the growth here in the near term, we believe is going to come from the electrolyzer side of the house. It's also going to come from our cryogenic business. We're going to continue to focus on cost down. We're going to continue to focus on releasing the cost of our fuel business, logistics, generation efficiency, and collectively, that's what's going to give us both the top line as well as the leverage and the margin expansion for this company. Again, electrolyzer business. Alfred's here. We're working together on 3 gigawatt electrolyzer opportunity in Australia, and he's going to talk about it somewhere after I'm done speaking about some of our plan and the 5-year projections here. But as you can see, and it's 8 gigawatt of basic engineering design packet. We have systems operating, as Andy said, in 5 different continents. 40 megawatt was the largest PEM electrolyzer. Pretty soon, our customer is actually going to have 2.5x bigger than that in Portugal, our system, 100-megawatt electrolyzer. And again, in 2025, we believe that order intake is going to be very, very meaningful. We're looking at a number more than 1 gigawatt. And by the way, folks we're only to us getting started. 1 gigawatt sounds very big, but that's not where we're going to stop. This opportunity set is much larger, much bigger than that. And the growth is going to continue to remain there until the end of the decade and it's going to continue. And not just on the electrolyzer side, by the way. We have a very good front log opportunity set despite the fact that our liquefier business has been somewhat slower to grow here in 2023 and 2024, we really haven't lost any opportunity. It's just that things have moved to the right from the overall timing of FID and final investment decision when the customers are really looking to do the actual construction, but the opportunity set is pretty big. And by leveraging our know-how in that business, we're also looking at some of the energy transition opportunity. As you can see here, we feel pretty good about the fact that we're actually going to land 1 of this energy transition opportunity here in the coming months, and that's really going to supplement the growth of that business. And on the cryogenic side, as Andy talked about it, Bob has done it for a very, very long time. We actually do both hydrogen as well as non-hydrogen related cryogenic tanks. We've actually even launched a new product called Mobile refueler, that's really hydrogen on wheels, which allows our customers that are looking to do a lot of pilot deployment of either transit buses, Class 8 trucks, even before the entire fueling infrastructure ends up getting built. And that product, we believe, is going to have a phenomenal growth opportunity. And by the way, it really carries a pretty attractive margin for us because we've really thought through what else can be done with that product. Now from the plan perspective, obviously, Louisiana is we're doing mechanical completion right now. And as Andy talked about, Alan and his team is making sure that this plant is going to produce liquid hydrogen in Q1 of '25, and that really now starts to resemble a bit more of a network for us. We have a plant in Georgia, plant in Tennessee, plant in Louisiana. And as we really bring our plant in Texas online once we get the final commitment from DOE, there's a lot of work that's been done, all the long lead time items have already been ordered. We're doing detailed engineering with our EPC contractor. And by the way, that plant will likely be the lowest cost green hydrogen plant from a liquid plant perspective in the world because we have been very fortunate about having secured a super attractive wind power purchase agreement for 15 years. And by the way, not only just that. This is a 120-megawatt Plug electrolyzer, and this is a 45-ton Plug liquefier. And by the way, that hydrogen will be moved with Plug tankers being built in Houston as well. Again, this is what allows us to do the enterprise sales, right? When we think about if you want to buy a one-stop shop, if you want to come to somebody, and we always have been a very, very customer-obsessed company, right? We're always all about what can we do to make our customers buying decision easy, make their life easy, how do we collaborate and how do we work together. So again, if you have green hydrogen needs, you don't have to call anybody, just called Plug. You need to produce gaseous hydrogen, we'll give you electrolyzer. You need to liquify that. We'll give you a liquefier. You need to move that. We have the trailers and the tankers. And, oh, by the way, if you don't want to do the capital equipment purchase decision, we can also support you by selling hydrogen from multiple plants that we already have or we're in the process of building. Now in terms of our opportunity on the application side of the house, I think it is worth mentioning that Plug really created the first viable market for hydrogen fuel cells, right, which led to made us the world's largest user of liquid hydrogen. We've run this system for over 1 billion hours. That's obviously come from our material handling business, but when you start to think about some of the slide Andy showed, on the large-scale stationary side, Jose and the team is going to talk a lot about that in the next panel here, but that's a tremendous, tremendous opportunity. We think is going to start to unfold as you think about end of this decade. The way we think about it, electrolyzer is going to drive a lot of growth for us still like '28, '29, '30 time frame. And at that point, we think large-scale stationary product as the hydrogen availability infrastructure keeps getting better and better ends up making another step change from a growth perspective when you then start to think beyond 2029 and 2030. Now also, again, in this business, while 2024 was a year of reset, we've obviously done price adjustments. We've raised prices. We've worked with customer, collaborated with customer, what we believe that our material handling business will actually get into the growth mode again in 2025. We have lots of initiatives going on that's going to drive our service margin, that's going to improve the reliability of our product. And again, as you start to see the growth accelerate in that business, you are also going to get the benefit from the labor and the overhead perspective, thereby giving you a double whammy of a benefit from a margin standpoint. And again, stationary in 2025, mostly is going to be about executing on the backlog. But looking beyond that, we are super excited about what that market holds and how big of an opportunity that can be. Now this is also an amazing part about what we put together as a company, right? It creates an unbelievable flywheel effect for what we do. Our energy business produce hydrogen. Our application business creates incremental demand for that hydrogen, and as both of these business grow, the cost goes down, demand for hydrogen goes up, levelized cost of hydrogen keeps going down and economics for the end customer keeps getting better, right, which is why we really see this flywheel having an unbelievable effect for Plug and really helping drive the growth of our entire enterprise, not just in '25, but for many decades to come as well. And again, just to kind of wrap it up from a number standpoint. So as I talked about on our energy business side, as I talked about on our application business side, it's all about driving profitable growth. We're laser-focused on 2025. And just one more time, I just want to highlight, as you look at that line going up there, as you can see here from a margin standpoint, line trending higher, some of that is pricing, some of that is volume. Some of that is cost going down. But as you can see, sometime in 2027 and 2028, Plug is a profitable enterprise. In 2025, we will make sure we are going to execute. So with that, I really appreciate everybody being here. Thank you so much for the opportunity that I have been given by the Plug and the Board of Directors at Plug. I really, really appreciate that, and let me ask Andy to come back on the stage. Thank you, everyone.

So what's it? I don't need this. actually. I love hearing from customers, and we're going to hear from Alfred Benedict from Allied Green Ammonia. I've looked at Alfred resume. I mean he's been in the energy market his whole life. He is still a young man, probably for the last 35 years, Alfred. He's an engineer. He's built plants. He's helped finance plants. He's been an energy trader. But I -- if you really think about Alfred's really thought through how Australia, which is a country which really lives on exporting raw materials, how to export the sun to Korea and Japan and other places creating green ammonia. And I personally met Alfred, and I really like this because you meet people along the way who have passion about what they're doing. And Alfred was meeting his mother. It was about 12:00, 1:00 in the morning in Australia. And I had the opportunity to meet him, and he's standing in his mother's garage, getting me excited about what him and his team are doing in Australia. So it's really my pleasure to introduce Alfred and let him tell you about the great company he's building as well as the great project he's building. Alfred?

Good morning, everyone. There have been a long flight from Perth, continues for last 40 hours. And the result was I lost the bag and end up on the shoes here. I kind of admitting I can for -- guys, thank you very much, again. It's been a pleasure to be here and see all of you. Thanks to Sanjay and Andy and organizing all this step in a very short notice. Relationship with Plug started about a year ago when we were looking at electrolyzer from different companies. There was Chinese, there was European, and finally, after 2 years of research, last year, we finalized Plug going to be elected as the supplier. So that -- there's a lot of reason for behind it. I'll explain that, and it's very interesting ones. Maybe you're listening for a Plug side. We are the end user. And when we look at, we look at 5 different manufacturers and out of 5, we pick Plug, not only the price, the key was purity of hydrogen. The only company who provide 99.9% pure hydrogen, rest was 99.1%. So I will not mention the name, but there was a reason for us to come in to Plug. So the project we are building in Australia is one of the biggest hydrogen green ammonia project, 4.75 gig of solar panel, 3,000 megawatts of electrolyzer. Thanks to Plug, we are able to take that because there is no other manufacturer got that facility available at this time to build that scale and deliver within 3 years of period of construction. So that's another key reason to coming to Plug. Of course, price is one of the key. So that's helping us as well. Having said that, there was -- the price came to important factor. Our power was $0.026 per kilowatt, and hydrogen was trying to keep below $2.5 per kg, and we end up on $2.3 -- $2.30 kg of green hydrogen. And when we convert that numbers on to natural gas, end of the day, we're going to sell ammonia. So ammonia is gray, green or blue. That doesn't make difference. We say it's green, but when it comes to market, it's only ammonia, people only pay for ammonia. They don't have a green, gray or blue. So we have to be competitive with the gray ammonia to sell the green ammonia. The only way possible if we have a competitive price production of hydrogen. We are replacing natural gas with the green hydrogen. So for us, it's a gas. It's green hydrogen gas or it's a natural gas. So we have to have both pricing comparative to sell the ammonia, otherwise, the project will not be possible -- not be feasible. So it's a $6.5 billion investment of our project. So very important factor was to get the right electrolyzer, right size, right price, to keep the ammonia price right. So we are pretty much done today, hopefully, we might be able to sign the deal with Plug. So that's a journey in last 1.5 years or so, and it's going to be continued for other 4 years of supply and construction. And yes, so we are looking forward to it. And definitely, I can see your plans, and I can see the light green ammonia will be there working together, completing this project and definitely all the best with all your targets. With the help of Allied Green Ammonia and our upcoming next projects, who knows, when the price is right and everything is good, we can do it more. Guys, thank you very much.

Other partners you have in this program because you've built an impressive list of partnerships.

Yes, in our project. Yes, yes, definitely. Thank you, Andy. So yes, we've got -- our ammonia plant is coming from Haldor Topsoe. Our Técnicas is our EPC contractor. Tata is our electrical design engineers. AFRY is our Owner Engineer for electrical side. We got -- Trammo, is offtake buyer, 100% offtake buyer of the green ammonia. Then we got Steiner -- SPG Steiner building our ammonia tanks. Then we got Nacap building our pipeline. So you've got a list of companies, famous companies from the world joining us this project to make this project successful. This is Australia's one of the biggest projects right now. There are many projects in the pipeline, like different type of projects where they're supplying power to Singapore and other projects. This is ammonia project, and we come from ammonia background. We are purely ammonia producer, run the plant in Australia, build the plant, operate for 10 years. So we know about ammonia. So for us, we just want to build ammonia plant, but we can't afford the gas, it was too expensive. And Australia will get the gas and we sell it to Japan. We don't do anything with it. We convert to LNG and sell to Japan. So when we start building and plan this one, we had a plan to go green, just to replace the gas, find our own gas. If we can't find natural gas, you get the green hydrogen. That's all the plan was. So we had to find the cheapest way to get the production. Now, in 3-gigawatt of electrolyzer is a huge job. That's not been done before. And when we decided we're going to build that. So the shipment arrival and the operation for the next 45 years, their maintenance project program, the replacement program. There is a huge list of things which we work with Plug to work next coming 45 years. They're going to keep supplying all the stacks changing, replacement, repair work, maintenance work, 5 years -- initial 5 years, operation maintenance contract. It's quite a lot. It's a relationship, which goes a long way. And that make this project much more successful to having the right partners. So yes, thank you, Andy, that was really important. So yes, the price of hydrogen, whatever the world is hoping for and thinking, it can be much better and cheaper if we have a right team, expert who understand the industry and do things by their own, not depending on others who put 20%, 30%, 40% contingency on each and every item and make the project so expensive that will not be feasible. So that was of the biggest difference. We've done everything with our own team. And then we went to the engineering company to verify and step to make this project on the right price. So by the way, our ammonia price -- green ammonia price is the same price as a gray. Thank you very much, guys.

Thank you, Alfred. You can see why I'm excited about the project. Now we're going to bring our policy experts. And my buddy, Greg Nickerson, who I talked about earlier, Greg worked when house ways and means as a senior legal support, correct, Greg?

Yes, tax stuff.

Tax stuff. Yes. And Greg runs a consulting firm that we've dealt with for about a decade now, no better. Scott Siegel. Scott, you're the 1 who told me Chevron was going to be overturned 16 months ago and that people didn't think it was going to happen. We're living in la la land. So Scott, he knows what's happening in D.C. and Erin Lane and Gerry Conway, my leads in government affairs are going to join us up in the panel. So come on up, guys.

All right. Greg, since you're side 1, you get to go first. So tell me why you think about how hydrogen is going to do under the new administration and how we should really be thinking about it?

Sure. Well, thank you for the opportunity. And first, I just want to say, Andy, Erin and Gerry are like the best team, and they really support this company. And I don't normally give compliments, so that's kind of a big deal. I mean I think they care about having the technology here, having the manufacturing here, having the employees here. And I think it's going to be important over the next several years with this administration with the emphasis on having manufacturing in the United States. So I think that's the first thing first. Obviously, with the election was a big deal. I think there's been a lot of calls to basically repeal the IRA, all of it, all $660 billion of it. Honestly, that's just not a realistic claim that can't happen. And for a bunch of reasons, members care about the different technologies in different ways. In particular, hydrogen is a bipartisan priority. You have members from both the House, Senate, Republican and Democrat that care about hydrogen, and it's a clean technology. And part of the -- part of what's going on, you've got this repeal the IRA on 1 side and you've got all of the above energy policy. Well, you can't have both of those things exist. So at the end of the day, there's a need for all kinds of energy, and I think that's where that eventually comes out. There's a big tax bill. It's -- Congress needs to do a tax bill. There's a $4.6 trillion of expiring tax provisions. That's a lot of money. And that doesn't even count all the President's proposals that he came out during the campaign. That's several other trillion dollars. So something needs to be done by the end of the year. $3.7 trillion of that is on the individual side, depending on how you count it, and about $900 billion is on the corporate side. I just think -- I think it's -- it could go 1 or 2 ways. The president kind of gets his first bill. He kind of always gets his first bill. Is that going to be immigration? Is it going to be tax? Is it going to be something else? It's probably going to be 1 of those 2 things or a combination of those 2 things. So you can either have a long debate over what the tax provisions are or the President can kind of come in and like just kind of push it through, which I don't think that will happen. I think you're going to have a debate. I think there's too much at stake. The margins are so close. You're looking at probably like 3 seats on the house and 3 seats on the Senate. So you're going to need pretty much unanimity to get a tax bill done. And I don't think you're going to get many much Democratic support on any of it. So I think it's going to be a process. And I think hydrogen should do well in that process. I think it's an important -- because it's a priority. And investments are made in districts, investments are made in states and people care about those things. So kind of -- that's my brief overview.

Great. Wonderful. Well, thanks, Greg. Scott, we've been going out for a long time together too. Maybe you can give your perspective from all your time in D.C., and you've seen administrations come and go and what do you think is going to happen over the coming years?

Sure, sure. So about 6 months ago, we came to the conclusion that it was possible that the Republicans would retake based on what we've been calling the trifecta that they would win the White House and they would win the Senate, and they might hang on to the House, it was possible. I would regard it as what, 6 months ago, we thought was the second most likely scenario, divided government being more likely. But whether you're dealing with divided government or you're dealing with a Republican trifecta, you still have to be able to speak the language of both political parties when it comes to issues like hydrogen. And so 6 months ago, we undertook some focus group work to see what types of messages we're appealing, particularly to Trump supporters that might be of direct reference to clean energy transition generally and also -- and as a subsidiary matter, of course, hydrogen. And I don't think these results will surprise you. But the reason I'm bringing it up is because there is a way to talk about hydrogen policy and the transition to a hydrogen economy in a way that is appealing to Republican members, and does not alienate Democratic members. Climate change has not become a dirty word. It's just become 1 among many approaches in selling clean energy transition issues. So for example, phrases like energy independence, and you can certainly see how that would apply with a domestic manufacturing base like Plug has and with potential export markets that are created by Plug's investments. Onshoring of manufacturing, you can think about job creation. You can think about manufacturing assets of the sort that we're very impressively. I love Andy's statement. It's not just pictures of dirt, it's actually pictures of where investment...

It's actually [indiscernible] face, not even pictures. More than that, Scott.

No mere renderings, right, exactly. National security issues will play very strongly. And remember, you probably heard this phrase as Trumpian phrase of energy dominance, which typically is used to defend the export of LNG to make sure that U.S. foreign policy takes advantage of our ability to exert influence in the energy space. Hydrogen plays an interesting role in that, too, not just because it's a commodity that's traded internationally, but also because it's based on technological innovation, and we sell that innovation too. That's another vector for energy dominance. So all of these messages you're going to hear coming up, and you're going to hear as a way to defend it. It is no surprise that as Greg said, there is bipartisan support for hydrogen. There are basically 3 technologies that are IRA technologies for which there's a strong bipartisan portfolio, small modular reactors, hydrogen and carbon capture and sequestration. Now each of them has their own issues. You have to reinvent the nuclear regulatory commissions approach to rapidly sending out -- rapidly improving new reactor designs, which -- that's not what we're here to talk about today, but that's an issue. And with CCS, you've got to get the local approval to build our pipelines. By those standards, hydrogen looks pretty good because hydrogen has a manufacturing base, Plug has led the way on establishing that platform. And I do think there's strong bipartisan support for each of those. You may say, come on, Scott, bipartisan support for clean energy issues, how can that be? Well, one story Erin Lane and I were discussing this morning over breakfast, for another technology, which is more of an appliance technology, geothermal heat pumps, some years ago, we set up their trade association and got them actively involved in government policy. One of the -- I won't get into the details, but I'll just say one of the key elements that advance the ball on that was the description of the technology as being one that created benefit in red jurisdictions and blue jurisdictions alike. And of course, you can say that, 3 of our biggest states for hydro manufacturing or at least predicted hydro manufacturing, Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia were key elements in President Trump's victory. So we can make that same type of argument. The reason I bring up geothermal heat pumps is that the first legislative victory for that industry, and I don't know how many political junkies we have in the audience was the Jim Inhofe, Hillary Clinton amendment to the energy bill of that year. Now think about that. Jim Inhofe at one point doubter about climate change and 1 of the most conservative members of the Senate, and Hillary Clinton, I need not explain. You know the role she's played. Common ground could be established on clean energy investment because the manufacturing supply chain was in that case, was in Oklahoma and the demand was in New York. So think about that. And think about that as a description or a mechanism for us coming up. Just 1 more quick point and I'll yield [indiscernible] microphone back. On the question of what the broader approach to hydrogen policy will be, I'm not going to cover taxes because Greg's forgotten more about taxes and I know. But I will say just generally speaking about hydrogen policy, there are a broader -- definitely in a Trump administration, there will be a broader portfolio of inputs, energy inputs in support of hydrogen production than there were in this administration. So this administration, if you look at their tax guidance, not yet final, I might say. But if you look at their tax guidance, you'll see that they had a very limited definition of supportable hydrogen. Here, we're going to add -- we're going to see a broader definition of that because we're going to see natural gas inputs and the like, also encouraged by this administration. And that goes all the way up to the President's frequent description -- or the incoming President's frequent description of oil and gases, liquid gold and the rest of it. You know all of that. There are bipartisan drivers, the geography we discussed, the emphasis on job creation. In the last Trump administration, he was famous for showing up at new manufacturing facilities to do ribbon cuttings just like Governors and Senators do. And so this is a visual industry in that respect. Our facilities look like other manufacturing facilities, and that's a good thing. But we will be looking at -- and I think policy will encourage hydrogen investment from the broadest portfolio of inputs as opposed to a very limited range of inputs. I'm not going to get into the key takeaways of the election for energy policies. I think you know them. The President-elect was very clear about types of energy that he supports. But he didn't -- but with respect to clean energy or IRA-related issues that he does not support, he only called really 2 out. I think people know what they are, offshore wind and there's a historical reason for that with Donald Trump and certain investments he made in Scotland and electric vehicles, which we at least must believe is somewhat tempered with the advent of $250 million spent by Elon Musk for the get-out-the-vote effort for the campaign. Maybe not, but just my spotty sense tells me that. We're going to see big reforms. They say personnel is policy. We're going to see big reforms, obviously, much different team of players. We've only had 1 energy and environment person appointment advanced thus far, and that's the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, who has an interesting record on climate change, one that is not 100% negative, certainly was an active member of the Climate Solutions caucus, which advocated bipartisan support. In fact, that letter of 18 members of Republican members of Congress that supported only taking a scalpel essentially to IRA, not trying to do wholesale revisions. The caucus within Congress that those folks are members of, Zeldin was a member of when he was in Congress. So I think that's a good sign. That said, bottom line, the new Trump administration has learned something important from guess who, the Biden administration, which is they will centralize a lot more decision-making regarding energy and environmental issues in the White House itself. So we are anticipating the appointment of an energy Czar position. In the last administration, in the current -- or I should say, the current administration, that was a climate change Czar, John Podesta, notably filling that role for the longest period. We're going to find somebody like that. It might be North Dakota Governor, Doug Burgum, who is -- who actually knows quite a bit about hydrogen and about clean ammonia, I might add. So not -- again, wouldn't be a bad pick to be that energy Czar. And as far as the DOE Secretary is concerned, Well, it could be Burgum, if he's not the energy Czar or it could be some folks installed from the last administration or it could be somebody completely random who perhaps is another Fox News host, I don't know. But we'll have to see. Anyway, it will be an exciting 4 years. I don't -- I am not gloom and doom when it comes to clean energy transition. There's too much capital, chasing too many projects for a business-oriented Republican administration to turn its back. I think that's what Greg was saying. All right. I talked way too long.

Thank you, Scott. So yesterday on the earnings call, they really -- the analyst brought 2 questions. And I'll give you a question one Gerry, and I'll give you a question two Erin. Question one, Gerry, is when is the DOE loan going to get done?

So it's a question that comes up frequently. It came up yesterday on the call. We've been working with the DOE on this particular loan for probably 3 years, heavily diligence. We've been.

Longer, because it started in the previous...

Actually, you and I have been talking to the loan program office even before that. So we are very close to getting to the finish line. And we've negotiated documents. We've done the NEPA process, which is coming to a conclusion. So we anticipate in the coming weeks that we will get to the final finish line, likely before the inauguration on January 20. So that is what we are driving towards. We have a team within Plug. We have outside advisers who have been working diligently every day for weeks on end to get to closure. So we're almost there. We're almost there.

And Gerry, would you say DOE is trying to get there, too?

Yes, I think they are very serious about this project. There's a number of projects that they've had in the pipeline. And I think that they do want to get this particular one. This will be their first hydrogen project, and I think that they want to get this over the goal line during the Biden administration.

Great. Erin, PTC?

The PTC, Oh, my favorite topic, also something that we've been working on for quite a while. So just I'm sure everyone in this room is very familiar with the hydrogen production tax credit, which came from IRA, but also started previously as a stand-alone bill that had bipartisan support. It was a great piece of legislation. We were thrilled that it was put into IRA. And if it was implemented the way it was meant with -- through the legislation, we would be off and running, and we would be in good shape. Now it's taken a little while to get the guidance out. We think the guidance was a little stricter than it should have been putting on barriers. We feel the "3 pillars", but we -- this administration, we are expecting that they will still put out the final guidance by the end of the year. And we're very hopeful from conversations that we've had and also the mandate that was set by the election that the credit when it comes out will be more user-friendly. Now both Greg and Scott addressed this in their remarks, I think that the next administration is going to be very business-focused. They're going to want to make sure that they're getting projects in the red states and the red districts and moving forward. And they're going to want to make sure that hydrogen -- the credit is usable, and we were able to work with them in a way that will allow hydrogen to continue its lead here in the United States.

And maybe just to add to what Erin said, and it was touched on by you guys about Chevron. You have Chevron that's out there. And so as they're putting out this final guidance, they've got to have that in the back of their mind. So there -- for example, there were no 3 pillars in the 45V statute itself. And we've been very public about, along with others in the industry, that the 3 pillars were created in this regulatory process, not in the statute. So hopefully, we'll see, to Erin's point, a much more user-friendly 45V when it's finalized.

Yes. I guess on that point, I think the Chevron overturning is a big deal. I think it's going to -- people like me are going to be more valuable. You guys said I could say that, right?

I told Greg yesterday, he could do a commercial.

I think you're going to have to like draft legislation much more carefully and you're going to have to flesh out all of the details. And I think you have this administration is basically -- it said in the electric vehicle credit that a free trade agreement is not a free trade agreement. So I mean that was right from the statute and then you have these 3 pillars. So I think there's a lot of potential litigation that could go on. And I'm not talking about this particular credit, but I'm talking about widely because I think everyone is looking at the regs that are passed and were they beyond the mandate? And did the regulators go too far. And I think that's across all of the agencies and all their guidance. So it's going to be a whole different world. And I think Congress is going to be much more important. They're going to need staff who's going to be much more careful. A lot of times, they just punt all of these things to the regulators to do. And I don't think they can do that anymore. So it's going to be a different world.

The only thing I'd add on Chevron is we know the 3 pillars weren't authorized under the original inflation reduction. How do we know it? Not only because they're silence there. But because the Inflation Reduction Act was adopted as part of a process called budget reconciliation. And if they -- if the 3 pillars had been in there, they would have stuck out like a sore thumb because budget reconciliation bills are intended to be very tight on the drafting of whatever is actually authorized under those bills. So we know the 3 pillars we're not authorized by Congress.

We also helped write it.

Yes. Indeed. There's also that -- so that's why this overturning of the Chevron doctrine by the Supreme Court is so important. And by the way, it's only 1 tool in our arsenal in forcing back to what Congress actually authorized. Even before they overturned Chevron, there were other decisions, which said that basically, no surprises in legislation. If there -- if you think a regulator or interpretor at the treasury department, if you think that the legislation said something we better see evidence from Congress. And that dates back even before the overturn of Chevron. So they were on notice.

Can I add 1 thing to because with the conversation going forward. We're talking a lot about the industry and moving forward in this PTC that was really a collaborative effort from lots of different companies, organizations, our CTO office was very involved in it and other technical offices within the other companies. And so when we put this together, it was the notion that we were going to put the industry forward, and this is what the industry needed. And I think right now, you can confidently say that the industry is aligned with what 45V should be, what it needs to be and what it is going to be that is going to drive us forward in continuing the momentum for us to be successful. So nobody wants to sue, what we want is a usable credit that we can start right away and move forward on.

So going to switch topics, but still on the legislative front. Tech neutral, if the regulations for 45V probably weren't as clean as we would like. I think the tech neutral initial regulations, I'm going to say we're kind of unreadable. And I would really like Jerry, you maybe to talk about even in this environment, how we could leverage tech neutral, but also, and maybe Gerry and others would like to add about the potential for another ITC?

Sure. So I think as -- certainly as we know, our traditional Section 48 credit is ending at the end of this year. So the 48 credit that we've used for the last 10-plus years will go away in its current form if it's not extended. It is being replaced extensively by what's called 48E, which is supposed to be a tech-neutral piece of legislation. It's anything but -- so it's clearly very targeted towards specific technologies that don't necessarily include fuel cells. Fuel cells can access 48E in a very narrow way, which is if green hydrogen is used to fuel those fuel cells. There is a problem even in the definition of fuel cells and how it characterizes fuel cells, which is just technically wrong, which somehow should -- would need to be corrected. But I go back to how we've historically interpreted Section 48. So if you read 48, the current 48, which has been amended and expanded in IRA. But there's nothing in there, for example, that says that you can take all of the infrastructure and the warranty and service piece of the project that we sell to our customers. That has been done through years of working with our advisers, working with our customers. And over time, they've taken that credit, that spend the interpretation of how 48 works. So we'll do -- we'll engage in a similar effort...

Much like wind credits, right? For codes and other items?

Yes, that's, I think, common with many types of incentives and tax policy. There's the statute itself. There's the regulations sometimes that interpret the...

And Gerry, that was something I didn't know. A lot of times there aren't regulations.

Yes, they don't -- every statute doesn't have regulations for its implementation. So -- and so it is subject to interpretation. You can go to treasury and ask for an opinion. We're sort of in the camp of do not ask the question to which you do not know the answer. So you got to be very careful when you go and ask that question of treasury. But some of it is just through implementation and working with your advisers, working with your auditors, working with your legal counsel. Does this make sense? Would this pass the SNF test with treasury? So we will find a way to use 48E. It's certainly not optimal. And then I just should also mention the 48 credit appointed bipartisanship, there is a bill that was introduced by Claudia Tenney. She is a conservative Republican from New York, has a bipartisan sponsorship. And that would extend 48 in its current form for 10 years. So obviously, we're very strong supporters of that bill, and we'll be doing what we did a number of years ago with this team, and Erin and I hitting the hill and lobbying for it to be included in whatever vehicle we can get it included. And that means going to congressional offices on both sides of the aisle. As Scott mentioned, it's how do you talk about hydrogen, right? What is the language that you use. And I say this, and we were very authentic in this. But when we went the last time when we got 48 extended after it was dropped for a couple of years, we had a pitch on the blue side of the aisle, and we had a pitch on the red side of the aisle, both of which were true, right? So we weren't inauthentic, but you highlight for your constituency, the issues that are important to them. And the beauty of hydrogen is that it appeals to -- has bipartisan appeal.

Great. You were there with us on ITC and love to hear your views on going forward. And then you, Scott?

I'm very fond of the ITC since that's why you brought me on board, so it's on my heart. And I do appreciate that, and it was a lot of fun to work on with you all. I would just say this, sometimes simpler is better. And like making the code more complicated is not always the right answer. The current 48C credit works just fine, extending it would be simple. People understand it. People know how to use it. As Gerry said, there's a bipartisan effort. There's a Claudia Tenney bill has 11 ways of means on it, 8 of them are Republicans. And you have a bill with Senator Carper and Lindsey Graham and Thom Tillis on that bill as well. So you've got a bipartisan bill over there in the Senate. And I just think it's one of those things. Obviously, renewable energy is going to be a discussion when they do this tax reform bill, this massive tax reform bill. And with every bill, there's risk, but there's also opportunities. And I think this is an opportunity to try to get this reinstated or extended. It's not expired quite yet to get it extended because it works and people know how to use it.

Well, the only thing I'll add to this is -- and I think this has been well plowed so you don't need me to add a whole lot more, but I'll just say this. We've talked about this vocabulary for speaking to hydrogen issues in a Republican-dominated Washington. I want to make one thing clear. That doesn't mean climate change is a dirty word. It doesn't mean that clean energy is a dirty word. On both sides of the political aisle, there is interest in advancing those technologies. So it's a question of emphasis. And we -- by being a lot more of a traditional manufacturing industry, at least by appearance, we're certainly a traditional manufacturing sector. We are in a good position to make that case strong with Republicans for job creation and the like. And we can draw more than a dotted line between the good work that you guys did on ITC and ultimate investment flows. So real dirt being turned.

Okay. Erin, you'll actually have to do the real work for us. So what do you think?

Well, Scott mentioned earlier about this trifecta was always a possibility. And working bipartisan was always going to be what we do. So we've been working on promoting the Tenney legislation and Panetta with bipartison from California for a long time now. We were helpful in creating the legislation with members of the community. And we've been doing tons of meetings with Republican and Democratic offices. And so we're ready, we're spreading the message. We're doing the hard work. We're making sure that we're working with our customers, our partners, our suppliers and others. So they understand, too, that it's in their best interest to work with us and help us to promote this legislation and get it passed and included in any vehicle that moves forward next year. So we're ready for the work. It's going to be my team's top priority next year because the hydrogen PTC is going to be taken care of, and it's going to be great, and we're -- it's going to be usable. And so this is what we do. This is what I'm made for and why I'm part of the team. So I'm pretty excited about the effort because nothing comes easy, but the reward is pretty sweet.

Before I turn it over to the audience for some questions. Do you guys have any comments on the tariff world?

Sure. Yes. But we've been dealing with these tariff issues. And the thing is, obviously, former President Trump on the campaign trail was pretty clear, 10% -- [indiscernible] just said 20%, but 10% across the board tariffs and then for extra special winter countries like China, maybe 60% tariffs. And there are huge. If you could snap a finger and have that come into effect. And of course, there are emergency authorities, which are close to that. But if we could do that, that would have profound macroeconomic effects and profound effects on supply chains. This transition has been announcing in record time, the -- it's a point ease. Just to give you an example, the EPA administrator, it took them to almost the end of December to decide in the first Trump administration. And this time, they announced it on November 11. So they're ahead. There's still a pitched battle, unless it's happened while I've been sitting up here, there's still somewhat of a pitched battle about the theory of which way to go for the Treasury Secretary, who will occupy the seat at the U.S. Trade Representative's office and commerce, that suite of 3. And part of that is an internal, fight is the stronger term, but an internal discussion going on about what kind of emphasis and on what time frame really want to do tariffs. There will be a lot of lobbying, not to use a dirty term, but there will be a lot of lobbying about issues like categorical exemptions, if there are areas where -- because remember, this Trump also campaigned on expanding manufacturing assets in the United States. It's a very big deal for him. So there are some instances where that's going to be inconsistent with tariff policy. And the way you make that all work together is by using little techniques like categorical exclusions where you say, okay, for this category, for these purposes, you don't -- we don't have to apply the tariff in quite that same way. Now of course, he didn't say that on the campaign trail, but that's 202 or 302 level of trade policy. You wouldn't -- that doesn't make for a really good campaigning. So you would expect that there will be some play in the joints, particularly as they try and encourage things like onshoring of manufacturing in the U.S.

So I'm a tax guy, I'll bring this back to tax, because it's easier for me to talk about. I did talk about the $4.6 trillion of tax cuts that need to be extended. One way to do that and pay for some of it at least is to codify tariffs, and take the revenue from that and use it to help pay for all that bill. So I think it's going to be a much -- it's obviously a huge issue and it's going to continue to be a big issue going forward. I don't know how it's going to end up at the end of the day, there's many theories as it like -- we're going full speed on all these tariffs or it's a negotiating tactic or both. I think it'll get some combination of that, and it may hopefully be -- if they're going to do it, it may at least be a revenue source to pay for something useful.

So, I take from what you guys say, the fact that we're in the business of energy independence here at Plug and the fact we're in the business of U.S. manufacturing does put us in a strong position.

I mean I think manufacturing is -- I mean, the President talked about a 15% corporate rate for manufacturing done in the U.S. It's clearly a priority. Getting your supply chains back to either the U.S. or to friendly nations has it been a big priority. So that's going to continue to be a big priority. And I think being a manufacturer in the U.S. is definitely a plus with this administration.

Not -- yes, this is a very visual. This upcoming President. He's a very visual guy, right? I mean I made a little quip about Fox News and the fact that our new Defense Secretary is -- was the weekend host on Fox & Friends. He's visual. And I will tell you this, Donald Trump is not going to show up for ribbon cuttings at wind facilities. Not going to do it. Maybe solar, maybe a little bit more as Elon Musk said over the weekend, so the future was solar. It's interesting cat. He says lots of different things. So maybe that, but certainly not for wind. But you know what? When one of our facilities opens, that looks a lot like the classic widget factory doesn't. I mean it looks a lot like an auto manufacturing plan or something else because we're producing high sophisticated exemplars of U.S. ingenuity that can be exported, right? So that is the kind of thing that from a visual is much more consistent with the Trump lexicon. So that's why I do think I can agree with you, that's why folks in the SMR business and CCUS, a little bit less so, but why hydrogen plays that kind of outsized role.

Great. So we have any questions for the panelists? And to the left.

This is Dushyant from Jefferies. Just had a quick question on the DOE loan. Let's say, Jan 20th comes along, it's approved. Is there any potential for a clawback after that?

Do you want to take that, Gerry?

Sure. So the money is there, and it will be obligated once we do the final loan facility. So -- is there no possibility that somehow the Trump administration could figure out a way to claw that back, I'm sure there's some possibility. I think the further along we are in the process, we've closed the loan, we've recommenced the construction in Texas. I think the likelihood diminishes. It's something we'll certainly be talking both to the DOE about -- and then also as the new administration gets staffed up, people within that administration just to explain what this project is. As Scott mentioned, the thing that we're building in Texas -- it has a lot of appeal. It's a real plant. You've seen these pictures. The one in Georgia will be bigger than the one in Georgia. It's in Texas. It's a very red state. So all of our plants actually are in red states. A lot of our suppliers are in red states. A lot of our customer sites are in red states. So that is part of the messaging that we'll be delivering to the incoming administration. It is something we think about. But if we can get it closed, then I think the risk goes down.

Other questions?

Sameer Joshi from H. C. Wainwright. Just a different variant of the previous question. If January 28 comes and goes and the loan has not been disbursed and no new laws have been passed, does the incoming administration -- Is the incoming administration obligated to disperse whatever has been promised?

You want to take that, Ger? Essentially, if we don't sign the final loan documents before January 20, can the incoming administration just cancel it?

Yes. So I'll give a quick answer, and then maybe, Scott, you can weigh in. We have a conditional commitment. So there is a written commitment from the Department of Energy. We have gone through the vetting process, as I said earlier. We've just completed all of the work done for [ NIBO ]. We're in the final phase where there's a publication period that will hopefully commence in the coming days. So we do have contract. So we'd seek to enforce that contract. But Scott, I don't know if you have anything to add to that.

A couple of things to think about there. First of all, the loan program office at DOE was not established by the Inflation Reduction Act. So -- and you know this. So it's not a question of, oh, look, there's that Biden program. Let's do violence to that program. The truth of the matter is the LPO dates back quite some time. It was an active office in the Trump -- the first Trump administration. In fact, the discussions over this project began all the way back then before the Biden administration. So I think that's a good -- we'll able these good facts. Second, the closer you are to papering the deal, the more off the table a clawback is. So if we have paper, I think you would agree that it's much less likely that any form of a clawback would be even attempted at that level. There are -- the third thing I'll say is there are plenty of Republicans in Congress that have talked about in defense of the IRA that it basically said we're the party of business, capital is moving in the direction of where tax incentives or loan guarantees were headed. And we can't pull the bath mat out. That's not a good look for us. It undermines the sort of allocation -- efficient allocation of capital. And I think that's true that argument will be made. Last, I mean, I was born and raise in Dallas, Texas, you'd probably tell by my great accent. That's a very strong delegation, very, as you might guess, very energy-focused delegation. And my suspicion is, we would have a lot of Texas Republican members and senators, they will be quite upset about the old switcheroo at the last minute for a project this big and this sophisticated in Texas.

Any other questions We have from the audience here.

George from Canaccord. So to the extent there is support for hydrogen when the dust settles in the upcoming administration, what do you think that looks like most likely?

Yes. I mean the first is the Hippocratic oath, physicians do no harm. So the first thing we want to make sure is that programs that create a support network and government policy aren't undermined, okay? So that can have effects on the positioning of the administration on tax policy going forward, and can have impacts on how they use the loan program office, et cetera, going forward. So that's, I think, quite important. The President -- President Trump has a pension for job owning against technologies that he doesn't like. And so we want to avoid that. And so I mean, I mean there's a lot of sophisticated folks, as you know, internationally, involved in offshore wind, and every time the person speaks to the issue, it probably is a gut bunch, and we want to avoid that, of course. It's just a matter of continued coordination with the government and making sure that we don't take step backwards.

Do you have any thoughts, Craig?

No. I mean honestly, they get -- these aren't unilateral. So I think everything is going to be done in conjunction with Congress. So I think there will be a strong debate on all of these issues. And like I said, I think there's support there for the industry, and it will continue. Again, nothing is guaranteed in this world. It's Congress. I mean, if I told you 8 years ago that JD Vance would be the Vice President; and Marco Rubio Secretary of State. And after the kind of interactions with the President, you'd say that's crazy, but it's crazy things happen.

And the dude from Fox News to be the...

Probably hung up on that. I mean who wouldn't be.

Go ahead, Craig. This is our last one here. So make it a good one.

So you mentioned the loan is in the publication period. Can you maybe describe for us what a publication period is? How many parties are involved? What happens -- what do we need to know about a publication period?

So as part of NEPA and we're not in -- just to be clear, we're not in the publication period yet. So after you go through NEPA and you go through all of the studies and reach out to all of the interested constituencies to get their input, provide them with a time frame in which they can provide comments to DOE on the project on Plug. You then go out for a final 30-day notice to the public basically. So that's where we're kind of at that stage of the process right now.

So then the golden question is, have you initiated the 30-day period yet? Or is that yet to be initiated?

That is yet to be initiated. Yet to be initiated.

Jerry, I think you said earlier, soon.

Yes. We anticipate that, that period will start soon that the notice will go out soon. That's what we're parking with the DOE on right now. And just to be clear, we're working in conjunction with the DOE on the entire suite of -- as Scott said, the paper, right? There is a lot of paper associated with this loan. All being negotiated, hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents, and we -- Paul Middleton and I spend with others on the team spend a fair amount of time down in D.C. just literally sitting in lawyers' offices, negotiating these documents. So we're well, well, well into this process, and we can see that finish line.

Okay. And then just another question of clarification. -- after the 30-day period, what are the final items before we can get to?

So I think there's a couple of weeks where they go back out to the interested agencies with the final documents and say we're about -- we're going to close on, let's say, January 10, and this is your last opportunity, Department of Commerce or Department of Treasury to weigh in on this loan. So it's a very exhausting process, but we are very near the end.

Okay. And then, I guess, another question, if I may. Jigar Shah has been a long-term supporter of hydrogen, right? Do we expect him to remain at the Department of Energy at LPO in the early days of a Trump administration, is there any expectation of key individuals like that remaining in their seat?

I'll let Scott answer. I won't get Gerry on the record on that.

I mean, candidly, you almost never even know who the Director of the LPO is until Jigar Shah took that job with all of this business acumen -- and his -- I mean, if you guys are on his LinkedIn feed or whatever you know, he makes pronouncements out of that, that tells me that the chances are very unlikely that he would stay beyond January 20. Not impossible, not impossible, but very unlikely.

I'm just surprised, Scott watches Fox News.

I got a see his interview for cabinet...

Hey, Scott, Greg, thank you so much for coming up. I really appreciate Gerry and Erin, always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Really enjoyed it. Okay. The energy panels. You guys actually know. I always kind of like to change surprise, surprise. I won't change. Why don't you all introduce yourself real quick. Where's Bob? There he is.

So we're starting here, Bruno Forget, so looking after electrolyzer at Plug, it's been 3 years. Prior to that, I did a short stint at Cummins Hydrogenics, and about 20 years with Air Liquide, mainly on hydrogen. So been involved with Plug in the earlier part of the 2000 era and the first deployment of large-scale material handling fleets.

Ben Victor, I head up the liquefaction business for Plug. And previously, I was Co-Founder of Joule Processing prior to the acquisition in January of '22 by Plug. Spent the last -- I guess, it's been about 3 years now that I've been with Plug. And I've spent the last 15 years building cryogenic gas process plants in the midstream oil and gas sector of the business.

Sure. So hey, everyone. Chris Soriano, leader of the hydrogen generation and services organization. So I have responsibility for our plants. And Andy, this is my Sixth Symposium here. So really excited. I think our first Symposium was my first week on the [indiscernible] on the job. So really excited to be here. I previously led the service organization, and we've got tons of exciting things going on in hydrogen generation. So glad to be here today. .

Great. And Bob?

Thank you, Andy, and good morning. I'm Bob Arnold. I was a founding partner and President and CEO at Applied Cryo Technologies, or ACT. I've been in the cryogenic equipment design and manufacturing space for about 25 years. Plug acquired ACT in late 2021. So I've been with the organization for about 3 years. Today, I am Vice President of Plug Cryo, which includes manufacturing facilities in Houston Magnolia, Texas and Lafayette, Indiana. And also, this is the first time I've actively participated at a Plug Symposium. So really excited to be here.

So Sanjay, I want to give you 1 minute to tell why is all this linked together. And I'll give you 1 minute at the end, tell us why it all linked together also.

Yes. So Andy, as I talked about it a little bit earlier, right, it's all about the enterprise sales opportunity, right? So Bruno focuses on electrolyzer that produces gases hydrogen, then obviously, Ben has the offering that allows us to liquefy that and then to move that liquid hydrogen, Bob and from our cryo facility, we have the tankers, the stores and everything else. And then in terms of what Chris is doing, I think Chris is probably the best marketing tool that Bruno has when folks go and see, we're running Georgia, the largest PEM electrolyzer in the world at this point in time outside of China probably. I think the customer come and see, hey, you guys know how to run it. You guys know how to do it. You're doing it for yourself. So I think it really all ties together very well, Andy. And one more thing is if a customer is looking to actually build a brand-new green hydrogen plant, we can also help them even from a design and engineering perspective, not just for the electrolyzer like the basic engineering design package, but for the entire plant architecture as well, right? So it really makes us a one-stop shop, given how we are so focused on customer to really give them a turnkey solution for their green hydrogen needs.

Fantastic. So Alfred told us he's going to close 3 gigawatts. What else are you going to close here [indiscernible] what else are you going to close first. So tell us about the [indiscernible] tell us about the -- you got it. Tell us about the activities you have engaged and how you view the different markets around the world for electrolyzers, Bruno?

Yes. So in the short term, Andy, because it's always important to look before looking far ahead, we need to pursue what we've already started. So again, I'd like to go back a bit and just to put things back in perspective for people, electrolyzers at Plug is less than 4 years. And I've been working with a pretty established company in this industry for quite some time. And through the years, did a short stint at what is Accelera at Cummins, and working with Hydrogenics that had been pretty much leading the PEM technology on electrolyzers for, I mean, close to 20 years, deploying small systems, one after the other and then going on to 1 megawatt, and then 5 or 6 years later, 10, 20 megawatts, along with Air Liquide. But in less than 4 years, you probably -- most of you saw the Rochester gigafactory, you've witnessed this site here. But in less than 4 years, Plug managed to arguably be the PEM leader in terms of actual real concrete backlog and delivered units with a bit underneath 500 megawatts equivalent. This is an amazing accomplishment in such a short time frame. So for us, in the short term, it's really to pursue on what we've already started because really what it's all about, it's a race to scale. We're there in for the big projects like the ones from Alfred obviously. But in order to get there, you need to convince the people. We are convinced we are there from a bankability perspective, but the broader audience needs to get to see this. So it's all about consolidating that bankability, Andy, and that's pursuing on successful deployments of our smaller scale modules, those 5-megawatt projects that are now really starting up and putting a lot of green hydrogen all over the different continents, as you showed prior today. So yes, so pursuing on that fashion and obviously, trying to -- on the larger scale and the higher end of the deployment really consolidate also and transform those BDPs and to concrete orders. We discussed yesterday that 8 gigawatt what's out of there. Obviously, not all of the projects will go FID, Andy, as we know, we know because we develop our own projects. So we see the hurdles that we face sometimes that puts us in a situation where we need to revisit a bit the original plan, take a bit more time to get there. Our customers see the same things. But because we do understand that, to your point on the enterprise and the depth that Plug, we can not only be emphatic to our customers, but also help them enable things to go and reach that FID sooner and better in a much more certain way.

Great. So talk about reaching FID. We've actually built real plants as Bruno said, Chris, and how do you give that -- when you think about how are these plants operating. We got Georgia going -- we got Tennessee going about that saying Gabriel is going, how is it working?

So in the -- with the addition of Georgia in 2024 and Charleston -- or I'm sorry, Louisiana right around the corner, I mean we've had a really exciting year in how our network has developed here for generation and logistics. But as you know, I was able to catch up with some of our plant managers here. And I think if we turn to our plant managers to roll a video tape here, we could hear from them on how the operations are going a bit here. So Teal, if you would roll that video tape here. [Presentation]

So if you're around hydrogen, you know how important safety is. And we care about the safety of our employees and the communities we're involved in. And Alan, I think we did more than hours and hours in Georgia. I thought we were 1 million man hours.

We were closer to completion...

600,000 man hours without an incident . So quite a record. So Ben, changing topics. So the liquefier business didn't take off as we hoped, lot had to do really with how fast projects we're going to FID and why that had to do with regulation stability. How do you see the future 2025 and beyond for our liquefier business?

You're right, Andy. It really didn't develop as we expected due to the regulatory landscape. The liquefier business is really how we see as a U.S. focused market. We will see some one-off projects in Europe. But over the next 3 to 5 years, most of the projects will be born here in the states is the way we see it. Some one-off projects in Europe, as I said. But that being said, there really hasn't been many deals that have actually closed in the market for liquefiers. There's 1 or 2 out there, but we're not losing these projects or these opportunities. Demand has been light, although there's plenty of opportunities we're working on at the moment. So we're still pretty excited about the business. It's just delayed a bit, as you mentioned, due to delays in FID.

So I actually love the projects you're working on the energy transition. Can you kind of talk maybe a little bit about that, Ben. Because I love it when you say to me, I don't care to liquefy gray, green or blue, we'll liquefy.

So in the near term, we're really pivoting our focus for energy transition opportunities. So e-fuels, SAF, ammonia, methanol and renewable diesel projects. This really isn't a major pivot. Andy for our team. We have a very talented team in Houston and in Pune, India. Many of these folks have experience in that market. So we're really just going to kind of redeploy those resources as we wait for the market to pick up for liquefaction. We've developed this diversification strategy what we're calling it. And essentially, it's a hedge while we wait for the business on the liquefier side to pick up. We'll be pivoting our engineering resources and work on these alternative fuel projects, working with technology providers, taking their processes, further developing them, packaging them and selling them to the market or packaging them for that client. That being said, here in the coming months, I hope that we have a project that we can announce. So we're pretty excited for that and stay tuned.

Great. And Bob, last but not least, maybe you can tell folks a little bit about what Plug Cryo does at a real high level and maybe get into some details?

Certainly. So Plug Cryo has been a lead manufacturer of distribution, storage and vaporization equipment for a wide array of cryogenic applications for a few decades. 2/3 of our business is actually associated with non-hydrogen specialty gases and fuels. Let me -- let me give like a brief overview of a couple of key products in this sector, which will highlight some of our capabilities. First, cryogenic transport traders that offer best-in-class payload capabilities. These assets are used to distribute liquified gases such as nitrogen, oxygen and oregon. Payload optimization is a critically important product differentiator for Plug, and it's an area of focus from a design innovation perspective to say the least. Industrial gas companies, they're focused on assets that increase their bottom line, improve efficiency. And also help them achieve their sustainability goals, such as lowering fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Some of our customers in this sector would be industrial gas majors, like Air Liquide Messer, Mass and Tri-Gas and Linde. And also independent third-party haulers, which are critically important to our business model as well, like GenOx Transportation in U.S. Cryo Carriers. A second key product for us is off-grid LNG regasification systems for power generation applications. As LNG continues to gain momentum as a bridge fuel, the need for advanced cryogenic systems will increase as well. This is critically important products for us today and will continue to be moving forward. The remaining 1/3 of our business is specifically related to the hydrogen sector. Over the road transports, optimize for North America and even South Korea, storage vessels with capacities ranging from 6,000 gallons to 20,000 gallons. And one of our new products, the mobile refueler, which is basically a mobile or portable fueling platform for medium-duty and high-powered commercial vehicles. This is a product we're really excited about and lowers infrastructure cost and deployment time for a lot of our customers, it really creates a much more feasible path for some of our clients to enter the hydrogen space, which is exciting.

Great. So Bruno, back to you. You actually came up with this BEDP idea. And it's been pretty powerful, and being a veteran of the industry, you've been -- you've really been able to work the details with so many customers, Bob, not well -- with so many customers. So when do all these become orders?

Yes. So I just want to -- I don't like to do that publicly, but I just want to correct you. I didn't come up with the idea. It's a talented team behind that together, we came about...

You called me about doing it.

Fair enough. That was my role there. But it's just to show the depth of the team behind that we felt that this was the right approach, and there has been. I mean, developing projects is a challenging thing. We've been through it. We understand it. There's many different facets that needs to be looked after because we are providing the key core technology to most of these green hydrogen plants. We are obviously a centric part and a very important aspect to look after early on. And that's why you see a lot of the BEDP's. You get a very privileged moment with your customer where you're defining exactly how that plant is going to look like, how to optimize it and function of their needs what's downstream and what's feeding the plant, the power regime and the power profile. So it's normal that after BEDP, there's a bit of a dust settling around the interaction that we have with our customers because the they fix 1 part and then they need to go out and fix the other parts. So we certainly look forward at converting as many as we can. We do feel good about many of these projects going forward. They're taking a bit more time than anticipated, just like the industry in general. But for us, it's a good sign because once it's on, it's on for long, and it is where our technology in there.

As our Chairman often says to me, he likes it because you actually get customers to pay for this.

So it shows the value we're providing through that exercise, right? Again, for a lot of people that are looking into this industry, the first thing that they need to handle and play with is obviously that core technology. There's a lot of things that go around it, and there's a lot of things that you need to tackle afterwards, but it's the key point that you need to get to. And I think through, again, the vast experience that we have at Plug, not only in that specific technology aspect, but around how to go and integrate it into an actual real ecosystem. I think that goes a long way. And the BEDP approach is all about that. It's making -- it's an opportunity to share in a very, very privileged fashion with our customers. It's like a more extended qualification of the lead, right?

Interesting. So Chris, when Texas come online. Now that's really a network with 4 sites, probably more liquid hydrogen that is available than any other company in the U.S. How you thinking about the network resiliency, the supply of hydrogen, which we've run into issues in the past, cost -- how has all these pieces fit together, Chris?

Sure. So I'll just take a quick step back to the last 5 years, Andy, which you're pretty well aware of. So the last 5 years, we've really learned to operate the world's largest hydrogen refueling network with over 300 sites today in operation. With that, and through some of the most challenging hydrogen shortages, I think the industry has ever seen. We've all kind of gone through. And there's a lot of learnings. But I would say that this year with the addition of Georgia, with the addition of Louisiana as our team spoke to, it really starts to give us the opportunity to run the plants and our sites as a holistic network. And that operation with the trailers that Bob manufactures for us. And Bob talks about the efficiency of those trailers, the payload, those are benefits, real benefits that we see in the operations, and we use every day. So it really substantially, I think, number one, helps with our resilience for customers. And a lot of discussion this morning and there'll be discussion throughout the morning about the importance of customers and how important it is to have hydrogen for their operations. So that resilience and what our plans today provide is really important. But I think the second most important thing that we've talked quite a bit about is certainly our ability to get to gross margin positive. And a big factor in that is the ability to reduce our costs. And the network of plants allows us to operate those plants in an optimal way, working with our engineering teams to really understand how do we best utilize the electricity of our plants. And really, start to think about our footprint for logistics and how we use that footprint to best get to customers. So you start to think now about what limestone does for us. Limestone really immediately doubles our capacity. And not only that, but it improves our footprint. It's our first real template plant. So we're using our electrolyzer technology today in Georgia. That's been a core learning for us. I think Bruno as we've been through, right, even deploying our own systems out to sites. So we've had a real benefit from that. But also as you start to think about our own liquefaction process and running the world's largest hydrogen liquefaction process. And what that does for us to be able to deliver cost-efficient hydrogen, it really gives us our ability to cover almost our entire demand. We really our entire demand that we're expecting into 2026. And allow us to continue to work with the partners that we've worked with in the past and low-cost opportunities to get hydrogen closer to customers. And that's really what's going to be important in lowering our overall cost. Obviously, we've been public about limestone being with our PPA in place, that's our lowest cost of hydrogen. It will be the lowest cost of hydrogen in North America. So those are really important factors for how we think about really optimizing the network that we have. Among the things that we could share, we talked a bit about shared best practices. We'll start to see a lot more network activity in our maintenance practices. How we share parts, components. We have a lot of commonality between facilities where having one, you have a lot more expense, we could really share that.

Great, Chris. Ben, I caught you on water there. So how do you see the market evolving? And maybe tell us what you want to do with Texas?

Sure. Andy, to start, we're going to be,, as Chris mentioned, deploying and installing both 15 and 30 tonne a day liquefier at our Limestone project in North Texas. So we're pretty excited about that. We'll have 45 tons a day of capacity for liquefaction there. As you know, there's a lot of noise in the industry, Andy. One of the advantages for Plug is that hydrogen is a bipartisan issue reflected recently in the article in the [ political ]. I think that was last week, good read if you haven't read it. That being said, we do expect that the blue hydrogen projects, we'll see more of those going forward. And many of these projects too, will need liquefaction. They're using SMRs to produce hydrogen, but carbon capture and they're still going to need liquefactions. So it's -- there's still good opportunities for us. So we're really agnostic to color. I know you touched on it earlier. We don't care if it's blue, green or gray. I know every year is a little biased. And in general, Plug, we like green. But on the liquefaction side, we liquefy it all. So they're all great projects for Plug. Currently, we have a large funnel, as you know, Andy, pursuing quite a bit, and we should see a significant spike in liquid hydrogen demand, we anticipate, call it, mid-2026, driven a big piece of that by the mobility sector. And what that means to us is that the projects that are being developed today, they're going to have to reach FID, I'd say, mid '25. So we'll start to see some of these projects reach FID, we'll start to see these projects unlock a lot of opportunities for the liquefaction business. So we should start seeing more revenue. As mentioned earlier, we have a diversification strategy, so we're going to kind of pivot resources and continuing doing what we're doing. And I know on the earnings call yesterday, it was discussed that the signs of our business should pick up in '26. So we'll see that momentum build as projects start to reach FID in the next year or so.

Thank you, Ben. And Bob, where do you see the hydrogen economy going from your business point of view in the next couple of years?

Andy, I believe that a critical factor in driving hydro demand growth are products that support early deployment capabilities, primal example -- prime example of this is the refueler. The refueler offers a customer a great deal of flexibility. They can start out with just a few vehicles and scale at a gradual pace at a fraction of the cost when compared to a permanent fueling station. As they scale, they can install a permanent station and redeploy their refueler assets to new locations. This is obviously instrumental and supporting continuous growth and again, a great deal of operational flexibility. I did want to point out that the refueler concept is common in other fueling applications such as LNG and even diesel at port locations. We've been able to leverage our design experience to develop a refueler that was specifically tailored to the hydrogen space. As Sanjay previously mentioned, this really presents an exciting significant growth opportunity for Plug that I believe we're all excited about.

Great. I'm going to -- we got a couple of minutes here before we take a break any questions from the audience. There you go.

Sameer again from Wainwright. A question for Ben. You mentioned the liquefaction business pivoting towards some of the other SAF ammonia kind of technologies. What is the adaptation you need to do in technical terms? And also, have you analyzed the potential opportunity that it becomes our plug not just while hydrogen is developing, but as an independent business?

So when we talk about these applications, really our focus is we have a very talented team, as I mentioned, here in Houston or in Houston and in India that all oil and gas individuals, a very good amount of experience there. And a lot of them have experience in these alternative fuels and their background. A particular project we're working on right now is taking technology providers P&IDs or packages, further developing those and packaging those for that client for their customers. So over -- we have a 3-step plan. So in the coming call it, year 3 to 4, we may start developing some of our own technologies and deploying those in the market. But to start, it's a good opportunity for us to deploy our resources, keep them highly utilized. And in that space, which is really a great opportunity for us because some of these projects also, we look at enterprise sales. And I know 1 that -- I'm working with Bruno on is for doing a, call it, a e-methanol project or SAP project, there may be a need for electrolyzer in that project. So throw over the fence and Bruno and his team do a great job to deploy our electrolyzer system while we work with them to just kind of package a technology. But we're not going into the market trying to be a big player in ammonia, if that answers your question.

So I think one thing folks should realize probably more than 30% of the professional staff have Plug actually come from the oil and gas industry. And I think that's a distinct advantage because in the electrolyzer markets in many of these markets, people in the fuel cell industry, as you know, Bruno aren't really experts at large-scale projects. The oil and gas people like Alan here is in the audience, who did projects in Africa know how to get big projects done. And that's really a distinct advantage we have that we bring to the table. Other question for this team. Having seen none, we're going to go off onto a 10-minute break, and we'll be right back. So thank you, everybody. [Break]

Please welcome back to the stage, CEO, Andy Marsh.

Well, we're ready for Part 2 of the show today, and we're going to start out with the application team, talking about the work we're still doing in material handling with stationary products and much more, followed up with -- I think you'll really enjoy it, a discussion about our technology and product road maps for the future. And then finally, we're going to close out with our COO and our CFO. Dean is going to tell you about how he's going to make sure the trains run on time at Plug, and Paul is going to tell you how all the math works. So Jose, do you want to bring up Glenn and Tim with you? So we had real comfortable seats before, but I wanted to put you guys on the hot seat with the...

I'm even doing applications [indiscernible].

So let me just tell, this is a real veteran fuel cell team. I'm going to start with Tim, who's kind of sitting to Jose's right here. Tim and I started a week apart almost 17 years ago, Tim. And Tim built our entire service organization and then it's moved into sales and service. And we've really been -- when you go to material handling customers, the person they trust the most in the organization is Tim. And Tim has really been the guy who Walmart will call up, Home Depot will call up, Amazon will call up, because they know how good he is. And Glenn has been at this for 25 years, Glenn?

Yes.

You started a great company then you left for another fuel cell company for a while. Name will go unspoken. And then like us, you came back to the right side of the equation. And Glenn's really been driving all this effort for our application team. And finally, Jose here. I think many of you know him. This his sixth appearance at a symposium. That Jose has really been driving our application business. And he is really is driving now our sales around the world.

So I'm going to start out since we've been doing this a long time, Tim, in material handling. How has this evolved and changed throughout the years?

Well, Andy, it's a lot of changes, right, in that period of time. Some key ones, though. I can remember back then when we started with our first customers and really targeting those customer sites. We were looking for sites that -- where they had 200, 250 pieces of equipment in one facility or more, right? We -- in order to make the business case work and for us to have a viable hydrogen solution. But today, wow, how things have changed. In those over 300 sites we have out there running, whether of our customers, we have sites as small as 20 trucks today. And so we have all sizes. We have a hydrogen solution for everyone regardless of the size of your fleet. And then the other big item I'd like to highlight is, back then, we were primarily a fuel cell company. And I can remember working with those initial customers at Cisco, Walmart, Central Grocers back then. And we had a fuel cell for a couple of the model of trucks. Now we have an entire suite for every truck that is produced. And -- but then, we were relying upon gas companies for hydrogen solutions in the pad and dispensing and so forth. But today, when we go in to talk to a customer about our technology, we offer them an end-to-end solution for their power of their fleets. And so from -- as you've seen today, we're doing real things, and we have, from the hydrogen production, the delivery of that hydrogen, the on-site storage and compression, to dispensing, and then the fuel cells on site powering their equipment. We have an end-to-end solution, and our service folks take care of all of that for them. So whether you like it or not, they say one throat to choke. But it's a complete solution, end-to-end power for their network, and our customers really like that. But that has really changed over the years.

How's the business case changed, Tim? Things like sustainability?

Yes, we had to really make it on our own in the beginning, right? I mean, the business case really had to make sense. We really relied a lot upon productivity gains that you had through the battery changes, through the efficiency of the truck operating, both on the lifting and the driving. So a lot of that. But today, I would say that's still important, right? It's really an important part of our business case. Sustainability, I would say it was a thought at the time with a lot of our potential customers when we were talking through it. But today, just about every company has a sustainability group that is involved from the very beginning. In a lot of cases, they put a value on that for us in the business case. So that has really changed also.

So was it hard to raise prices?

A lot of my customers -- our Plug customers are here today, so I'd hate to call them out and say, "How are those conversations?" But it's challenging. No one likes that. But everyone, every customer I've worked with, has been real receptive. They want to ensure that Plug is solid and there to supply their power needs. And in the end, we work to come up with a solution. And in a lot of cases, it's even renegotiate legacy contracts. So we've been working through that with every customer. And I would say it's driven our customers who have relied on us for many years to question, is hydrogen the right solution for them? And they went out onto the market and looked at different technologies, even different hydrogen providers, and came back to Plug, and say, "You're right in what you're telling us. The relationship is solid. We want to continue to do business with you."

I think we've learned, Tim, we actually create more value than we thought.

Definitely. Absolutely. And that's why I'm still here. I love -- I am -- I say often that I'm the luckiest person at Plug because I get to work with essentially all of our customers. And I get to hear firsthand what we do for them. And we do add a lot of value to their operations. And if you think about their customer base, we're so heavy in the automotive industry. Essentially every vehicle that's made here in the United States, you think about every manufacturer, we're moving every part to the assembly line to assemble those vehicles. You look at groceries here in the United States...

30%.

Yes. I mean, hurricanes are a big thing for us. I remember going through our first one, it was -- we were talking to one of our customers earlier today. It was Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area. And how we prepared for that with our hydrogen system, how we prepared to get their network back up and going, because of the humanitarian portion of that and getting supplies and water and groceries to the local people. But I hear all those stories and how important we are. And it has -- it's really been great over the years to be able to be a part of that.

Great. So Jose, we do create value. When are we going to start making money in material handling?

That's a great question, right. In line to what Sanjay has presented earlier today, we are really working, focusing really hard on 2025. And in 2025, along with all the price increases that we have done in 2024 and the efforts that we put into make our services for material handling profitable and volumes that we're going to see increase in 2025, which is going to allow us for a better absorption of labor and overhead, we will -- we are planning to be gross margin positive in 2025. Then in 2026, along again to the plans that we have, we will be EBITDA positive. 2027, OI positive. And then overall profitability in 2028. So we will follow and contribute to the plans of the overall company.

Two items, I'd like to point out. One, the hydrogen profitability, which will come sooner actually comes from your business.

From this business.

From this business. And the second item is services, you can start seeing in the financial, service really is improving.

Absolutely. Service is improving. You see it in this quarter, and it's going to keep on improving. And I -- and we have a group of people that are, as I said, extremely focused on making services profitable. And I'm really hoping that all what I just said, we can even accelerate it a little bit.

So you and I were in Europe last week. We're in Madrid. You take me to [indiscernible] one of the largest -- is it the largest freezer company?

It is the largest freezer companies in Europe.

In Europe. And I go there. I've never seen the hydrogen facility on a roof. The company used our fueling station. It uses our electrolyzer stacks. It uses our fuel cells. How is the European market developing?

Yes. That installation is something else. Those Spaniards are crazy. Anyway, Europe, Europe is a little bit more of a challenging market for material handling than in the U.S., and it's really driven for a couple of things. One is hydrogen availability. There's not as much hydrogen as there is here in the U.S., and it's not liquid. So things change a little bit, the dynamics change. And also they don't use the forklift the same way. The intensity in which the forklifts get used in Europe is also different. So all that makes the value proposition a little bit more difficult. But if things were not difficult, probably there will not be as fun and we keep pushing. And our team in Europe has been able to -- and I think you mentioned that a little bit today. Has been able to double the number of installations that we had over the last 10 years in the last 18 months. We have 2 new installations in the U.K., 1 installation in Madrid, the new installation that Andy was just talking about. With the same company, we have an installation in Paris. We have another installation in Barcelona with Carreras Group, which is a pretty large logistics company in Spain. We have also just won a couple of sites with -- for infrastructure with BMW.

And fuel cells.

And fuel cells. And then we have just deployed -- and I think we have a video for this. We just deployed a brand-new site with one of our pedestal customers that is going to open up more opportunities. So you want to play that video? [Presentation]

So a lot of that space. All right. So where are we at stationary, Jose?

In the stationary, we are -- we have introduced the product this year into the market. We done our first installations. You have seen the pictures of Energy Vault with 6 1.5-megawatt systems already installed, and they will be ready to be commissioned by the end of the year for a microgrid type of application. We've talked about that in the past. We have also installed our first energy -- sorry, electric vehicle charging solution with 2 megawatts. This solution, just to keep everybody or remind everybody, what is the importance of this type of installations. This solution with 2 megawatts and 10 hours a day being operated consumes around 1.5 tons a day of hydrogen. So this is a hydrogen play really. So in summary, we are right now installing our first installations for several of the applications. And we are working with the large hyperscale data centers on solutions for backup power. These solutions for backup power are going to take us probably to the 2027, 2028 type of applications. We're discussing with some of the companies, as you mentioned before, Andy, during your presentation, on installations and data centers in Europe that are in the hundreds of megawatts with pipes coming close to those data centers. Again, if you think about the amount of hydrogen that we're going to need to run these backup power solutions, these amounts of hydrogen are going to have to be basically at the end of the day, for data centers, done through piping or other solutions. It cannot be done just trucking hydrogen to the sites. You are talking about tens of tons that are needed for backup power in a 48-hour period. So during that time period, we're going to be improving the technology. We're going to be making it more cost effective. And it's going to take us basically to the point where the grid, as you mentioned also earlier today, is going to be 90-plus percent renewables. And when that happens, we're going to have periods of the day. We're going to have extra electrons being produced just because of the nature of the source of energy. And then periods where you're going to have the deficiency of electrons being produced. And there is where this solution is going to play a great role, a big role levelizing the grid. When that happens, we are talking about gigawatts of power that are going to be needed, and we are talking about hundreds and hundreds of tons of hydrogen that are going to be consumed. So that's going to be in the 2030, 2035 period, where this solution is going to take Plug to the next big frontier.

So Glenn, that's -- I'll just say you got me excited. You're dealing with this every day. So how are you thinking about where we are today with the EV charging, to where we need to go with hyper data centers, to where we need to go with the grid, and how you're thinking about product evolution and -- overall? So what are your thoughts?

Sure. So first on stationary is very exciting. I mean Jose Luis hit on it, right? You're talking about applications that are using a lot of hydrogen. Well, here you go. This is our biggest one. And we're doing a lot of learning with these exciting customers today that Jose Luis talked about. We have a really exciting opportunity out in Calistoga, where we have over 8 megawatts that we're providing power to the community that are dealing with wildfires. So this is really a -- if you think about it, it's more of a long-term opportunity for us, and puts us in a position for that renewable energy grid that we talked about, hydrogen, nuclear, solar, wind in the future. So we're really evolving our product, kind of cutting our teeth, if you will, with key customers driving down costs, increasing efficiency, reliability and setting ourselves up for really large deployments in the future. One of the dominant hyperscale data center providers we're working with -- and recently, they talked to us. We were working on -- they're more like 3 years out when they develop a campus. And our initial thinking is 100 megawatts. And now because of AI, they're talking about a gigawatt size campus. So we're really going to find ourselves in a great position to be there for them in the future as we work with them today.

One of the -- I think people saw it on the tour, Glenn. From a scale point of view, the product that's going into stationary product for -- is also very similar to the product that's using for buses in Korea with our JV, Hyverse. And evolving that product and driving down the costs, improving reliability, to me, is really one of the big keys. But the whole industry, maybe you can give some thoughts about where you think efficiency needs to go? Because I actually believe in both electrolyzers and fuel cell, efficiency is the key.

Yes. As we drive down hydrogen cost and improve efficiency of our systems, sure, we're going to unlock a lot of volume. But you were talking about the engine there. We're using that engine for mobility, for stationary power. It's that key component that's going to help us in the future here. But yes, as we compete right now with some other technologies like internal combustion engine that might use hydrogen, they're going to be significantly less than what a fuel cell is able to produce in the future. So we're going to reach towards 60-plus percent efficiency and really be able to break open the market in that way as well.

So when the EarthShot was announced a $1 a kilogram, I know that's not maybe in vogue at the moment. But the more I think about, it's in the -- one of my Board members here kind of got me synced up on Germany's grid and how that's had negative pricing at certain times. I actually think the idea of hydrogen being under $1 a kilogram, it's not impossible. It's really going to be a question of when you produce it, how we drive down construction costs because construction cost is really the big driver ultimately for electrolyzers because we'll be on a 25% learning curve. How big could the stationary market be?

Yes. Well, we were just talking about gigawatt-type campuses for each individual hyperscale data center, and there's thousands of them. So following on to what you said, we believe in the $1, like you said. We believe in the renewable energy grid. And we'll become the energy backbone for all of this power generation.

What's it do for you at $1?

There's a few sales folks in here today and their life just got a lot easier.

So they become order takers.

Going to say, we may not need salespeople anymore.

Andy, you asked me about something that has changed over the years. This brings to mind one item with talking about the power is that just about everyone I meet with now, as they move more and more items, different technologies to electrify, the grid constraints has become a big part of the conversation. And that's one advantage we have, especially in material handling, is we actually free up power, right? And so...

I know in freezer applications with one of our big customers, that was one of the keys.

Yes. It used to not be a part of the conversation, it's very real now.

Jose, before I turn it over to the audience, a question. I mean, I really do think lower, lower cost hydrogen is available. And I actually -- when we were at [indiscernible] last week, I started visualizing more electrolyzers on site when we get the cost right and the grid evolves. What do you think $1 means?

Well, it unleashes everything from -- especially when you're talking about automotive, for example, long distance -- long-haul trucking, Class 8 trucks, you will open up that market. We have one of our customers that have been doing analysis and even at 250, they can basically start moving into everything.

And just to give people a feel. So if you think about the variable cost, the cost -- variable cost of a plant with $0.03 a kilowatt hour, it's about $2.25. If you -- and probably construction is probably another $2. You really think about how if you're really not paying for the electricity much and it gets down below $0.01. If you start really thinking about where learning curves are, learning curves will be 25%. I know Luke and Tim will talk a little bit about that. Every time we double the number of units, that's not an outrageous long-term goal.

It's absolutely a possibility. And as I said, that opens up everything. And when you open up applications like long-haul tracking, then the amount of hydrogen goes through the roof. And then it all becomes a lot of fun.

A lot of fun. So on that note, I'm going to actually ask the audience for some questions. So any questions for Tim, Jose or Glenn up here? Yes.

Sure. I'll stand up. This is for Jose Luis. I guess as you talk about the potential around stationary power with hyperscalers. And clearly, the delivery of the hydrogen remains a major issue. Do you kind of have any sense in realizing that this is something that is still in its early days? But just because it can benefit Plug in different ways, do you kind of get the sense for the appetite is around maybe producing the hydrogen on-site for the stationary power versus building the necessary pipeline infrastructure to kind of deliver that way?

So you're absolutely right. In this particular application, the availability of hydrogen on site is the main issue, right? It's -- the power generator, we can get there, and it's clear that we can have a solution for that. Having the hydrogen on site and producing the hydrogen on site is something that we have discussed with some of the hyperscalers, but now you need to think also that, to have the hydrogen on site, to produce the hydrogen on site, you have to have the electricity available also on site, right? So you really need to think about, a, how do you get that electricity on site that will justify actually to put hydrogen production on site as well to produce the hydrogen at the scale that you need to produce? And if it's going to be just for backup, now you're talking about something that is not going to be working all the time. So this is something that we have discussed with the hyperscalers. We don't have an answer for that yet. Piping will be kind of one of the probably the most straightforward solution for this type of applications. It's not farfetched that piping will happen. I was in Europe with one of the hyperscalers visiting one of the sites where they're going to be putting one of their hyperscale data centers, 360 megawatts in particular. And they had plans, the country had plans, to run piping basically 100 meters away from that site, right? So I think when you're talking 2027, 2030, piping becomes more of a reality, and I think that's probably the solution that makes more sense for these type of applications.

So Glenn, you do have people who've looked thinking through what else you could do with the hydrogen, right?

Yes. I was thinking about your question. And so today, we're working with the hyperscalers at a smaller scale to refine our products, so liquid on site, things like that. But you could also see out in the news than talking about using small nuclear to power the facilities as prime power. So again, easy to -- we've been thinking about these solutions, right? Put in the electrolyzer, be able to produce our own hydrogen. You can use that hydrogen to cool down the nuclear and then use it again to fuel our products. So there's a lot of different ways to kind of think about this in the future, but I think Plug is set up to be able to do that in many different ways, whether it's the electrolyzer, a direct pipe, on-site generation.

Great. Any other questions?

Sure. It's Colin Rusch from Oppenheimer. I have 2 questions. First, on the technology side, Andy, I appreciate your comments around hydrogen being a buffer technology for the grid. I'm just curious about the pipeline of the projects that you guys are seeing that are looking at that sort of application. And then I have a follow-up around the construction and labor costs around these projects.

You want to take that, Jose?

I do not hear the question.

The question is about pipeline of projects, looking at hydrogen as a buffer fuel, basically taking the volatility out of the grid, taking advantage of the duck curve, and actually providing some stability to the broader network.

So basically balancing the grid and leveling the grid, that type of project. We've been talking to companies about those type of projects. It's a little bit early in the cycle to have any concrete projects that I can tell you. We're working on specific projects. But this is kind of where we think things are moving along, and some of our potential customers are discussing about those types of solutions. We did a few studies with companies a couple of years ago that were basically about taking power generation, using power when you don't need it in the grid, and the story it has in form of hydrogen to then use in peak hours. They've been looking at battery solutions as well for those type of things. But when you get at the scale that we're talking about after 2030, batteries are not going to be working for that type of solution. Concrete projects, we don't have any concrete project right now on that. I don't think...

I would just say, Jose, to me, the work we're doing in Energy Vault is teaching us to do something at a larger scale.

This is more a scale of exactly that, right? Energy Vault is basically a micro grid that has hydrogen basically stored when there is a shutdown because of a fire in the California area. And then it powers up with 10 megawatts, the majority of the power needs for the Calistoga City. That's kind of -- there's no generation there, but it's kind of the same concept at the end of the day. But now we're talking about gigawatts of solution.

I think our belief would be, and you can tell me if it's not our belief, it's probably going to happen in Europe before it happens in the United States. I've met with people from the EU and the EC. Pipelines in Denmark, pipelines in Finland. You already have hydrogen pipeline network in the Netherlands, yes. So I think that's where you're going to see it happen first, Colin. And when Jose is talking about the hyper data centers, that's where he's in discussions on.

Excellent. And then the second question is the comments around the cost reduction. So as we see labor prices continue to move higher, some of the inflationary impacts on materials and the fact that you guys have done kind of the first of kind modular projects now. I'm just curious how you guys think about the cadence of that cost reduction from a project perspective and where the cost savings are coming, whether it's time line, materials, just new design? Just how do you think about those buckets as you drive those costs lower?

I think it depends upon the product line. I think when stationery, and Glenn can correct me if he disagrees, I think it's really so much tied to design. I think you make the first system where it works, Colin, and then you think about how you can start pulling and simplifying the design. I think in GenDrive, actually, the real cost savings comes from service and these road maps and the drive to extend the life and improve the reliability and even using more advanced tools. We've actually -- and we're in early stages with AI. We've actually been successful in doing some predictive maintenance working with universities on our GenDrives with all the data we have. Seeing failures before they happen, failures we didn't even know were going to happen. This is a -- and we haven't really talked about this today. We're just a data-rich company. And I really believe, for the material handling business, the biggest opportunity is actually in service more than anything else. And I think when you really look at the cost structure, equipment will come -- if I fill this factory equipment, we cover lots and lots of load. It's why Paul talks about consolidating. It's because we know our fixed load is holding back our equipment business. It's selling more there. And look, if tariffs go high, we're going to have to raise prices because that will -- we'll have to be quick in doing that. If tariffs become 10%, 40%. Obviously, we can't absorb 40%. Obviously, we can't absorb that. Okay. On that note, thank you, Glenn, Tim and Jose. And my buddies Luke and Tim are going to come up, we'll talk about technology. Good job guys. Glenn knocked it out.

So this is probably my favorite session, being an engineer. And the work that Dr. Luke maybe can give your background. And Tim, maybe you can tell them a little bit about yourself. They've seen you at 6 symposiums. How about you, Luke?

Sure. So my name is Luke Wentlent and I'm -- Dr. Luke Wentlent. I'm a senior principal R&D engineer that works for Tim in our CTO office. And so our mandate there is really to be forward-looking, not just where are we today, what are we iterating on today, but also where do we need to be in the next year, the next 2 years, the next 5 years, 10 years, right? And Andy has really encouraged us, don't drink the Kool Aid. We need to question everything and push the envelope and push the limit. And so what we do in our group is we do that assessment of our products and the market and where the technology is going, and we do the research and the development, whether it's internal, with internal engineers and teams, with our vendors or with university partners, to solve the problems that we're facing: Reliability, durability, efficiency, things like that. And get us to where we need to be when we need to be there. So a big piece of our thing is helping set and maintain technology road maps for where all of our products are going. Particularly I focus a lot on the infrastructure side, but that's kind of the big focus of our effort in the CTO group.

Yes. Thanks. Tim Cortes. As Andy said, this is also my sixth symposium. I've been with Plug for 10 years. I'll age myself a little bit and tell you that Andy and I were both at Bell Labs, gosh Andy, I don't know, 30-some years ago. And my background is really in the critical power area. And so worked at AT&T on backup power solutions for telecommunications. I had some experience in the battery industry with XI Technologies as well as some critical AC power equipment with a company called Power Distribution Incorporated.

Where I was on the Board.

And Andy was on our Board, Absolutely, yes. So Andy and I have known each other for a while. And as you said, technology and innovation is really, really important to Plug, and how do we continue to innovate and how do we look at where things are going. I think Luke did a really good job of describing the work that our team does. And I think we're going to get into some of those questions associated.

Okay, Tim. So you and your team look at the hydrogen economy. What's the biggest technical challenges for this economy to work?

Yes, it's really interesting because when you do look at the entire end-to-end economy and even within our ecosystem, you see a couple of things. You see, one, that there's a different level of maturity and different elements within that system. So fuel cells have been around for decades. We've given ourselves lots of experience with deploying fuel cells in applications. We've got billions of run hours. But the challenge is how do we continue to drive the cost down and how do we improve the reliability and the efficiency? On the electrolyzer side, from a PEM technology perspective, less mature. So we have a lot of opportunity there to think about our experience, where do we go on the cost curves, where do we improve our efficiency? But they're really different. So when we talk about some of the activities that Sanjay was alluding to earlier today, when we think about fuel cells, it's really about -- and Jose even mentioned it, driving down the cost and the service and what it means to service those units. And that really comes down to performance and the reliability. On the electrolyzer side, when we think about the electrolyzer stacks, it's how do we drive down the first cost? How do we improve our operations from a manufacturing perspective to manufacture those products to improve the quality, to improve the yield, to reduce the waste in that process? And it's a newer technology. So there's more opportunity, I think in some cases, to take advantage of where we're at to drive those costs down. And then we think about a little bit about the advanced manufacturing and automation that we really need to think about both for fuel cells and for electrolyzers. And I think we've heard in the past, and we've talked about it, some of the DOE programs and the grants that we received this year that are now actually in place. Several of them are really associated with how we do advanced and automated manufacturing at our Rochester Gigafactory. And that's really around stacks in our next-generation stack for both our fuel cells and electrolyzers. So how do we think about and look at the divergence in the maturity? That's a challenge. But then also how do we scale up how do we drive down costs in our operations and manufacturing? And those are some of the things that we think about in addition to all the other technology areas that we're going to talk about today.

Okay. So great, Tim. Tell me about short term, how you're going to help?

Yes. Short term, we've got these very specific SWAT teams that we've developed for 2025. And again, specific to fuel cells, it's -- we've identified some very clear projects and programs that are going to help us improve our service, drive up and improve the reliability and drive down the cost. And some of these are associated with how do we operate the system and how do we operate our stack from a software perspective and controls. How do we think about the items that are intrinsic to the stack? So how do we improve the design of the stack, but how also those things are extrinsic, so the balance of plant. How do we think about simplifying the balance of plant? Driving down the amount of energy they balance the plant utilizes to operate the system. Those things improve the overall system efficiency, which is important. This year for -- on the ELX side, we're very much focused on driving down the first cost, which means how do we reduce the material cost? Andy mentioned before that, in the past, we've seen about a 25% reduction every time we double the volume of units that we build. And we expect to see that again on the ELX side. But we've also identified programs in terms of the materials we're getting, working with suppliers. On the electrolyzer side, how do we reduce the precious metals? How do we reduce the iridium? We've got programs in place to drive that down to half of what it was before. And there's a potential to get down to potentially even an order of magnitude. That brings its own challenges with how do you do that plus ensure the durability of the product and the performance and you keep that going? But those are the key things when we think about this year and in the short term, how are we going to have an impact from technology on Plug in our financials.

If I can add one thing on that...

Okay. I got one for you after that, Luke. Go ahead.

So I think I want to get back on something that I think, Andy, you mentioned in the previous session. We're very data-rich, and I think we're at an inflection point to start to realize the benefit of all of that data. Because I think -- we talked about this ecosystem, but we're really starting to understand how the different pieces in that chain impact things up and downstream. And because we can do our own production and our logistics and our dispensing and our fuel cells, we are in a unique position to start to understand how to pull those different levers. Which we couldn't do. I mean, if we didn't make a move on hydrogen, I'm just going to get whatever I'm getting, right, in the truck. But because we control those pieces, it actually affords you a really unique opportunity. And now that we can start to really dig in and understand that, that's just some other near-term things that we can really start to go after.

So actually, Luke, that's where I was going to go. I know changing the route -- this direction. But that's -- why don't you tell a little bit about how you're thinking about moving hydrogen and making sure we don't lose hydrogen, long haul value chain? And you're doing it with Chris' team, you're leveraging our people in India. You have real cool stuff you guys have done on supplier demand side, what it looks like, and how you're beginning to be able to think through what we need to do differently to improve our margins today.

Yes. So lots to unpack there. Like I said, we're in a really unique position in that we kind of have a hand on each piece of this chain. And now that we're starting to understand it, we're really going to be able to start to drive some cost reductions and efficiency improvements. And it really starts with understanding each piece along the way. And so over the past year, we've really been building up analytical and quantification modeling efforts, really digging into understanding what is the molecule doing? The physics behind what's happening. How can I improve the thermodynamics, the performance of my cryogenic systems? How can I transfer the liquid more efficiently? Run my refueling stations more efficiently? And now we can start to actually enact and implement things that are going to fix that. So we have really comprehensive efforts working with each group across the company, to Andy's point, Chris and the plants and understanding, within the walls of the facility, how can I improve that mass efficiency? How can I make sure that every molecule I'm making is getting into a truck and getting out onto the road and getting to a site, right? And it's hard. I mean, ask any cryogenics engineering person, liquid hydrogen, cryogenics is hard. It's not an easy thing to do. But we're really digging in and understanding that and modeling that and studying that. We have a great engineering teams to really go and go after that. From the transfers and the refueling station side. You're moving hydrogen and transforming it and pressurizing it and changing that. And so we've really drawn on our deep experience of all these 305, I think right now, refueling stations, right? And so we have some of the best teams probably in the world that understands how this equipment operates. And so we've really gone after how can we improve the mass efficiency of our network? How can we make sure that we're not wasting any molecule as it gets to that customer and it's at their site? We're not where we need to be, no doubt, right? But we're trying to improve that. We know where we can get to, I think we have really strong goals there. But it's understanding that end-to-end piece and looking at it in totality that I think is just so important and powerful. And I don't want to brag, I don't know if anyone else could do that.

Well, I'd just like to highlight the work you've done with Chris. We've actually changed -- we used to run all fueling stations the same.

Yes. Yes. So what we've done is we've seen that each of our customers has -- every site is a little bit different. They all do something a little bit unique with their demand. When are they dispensing, when are the operators moving? And so we started to understand and dialing a more adaptive methodology for how we operate these refueling stations, right? Based on how much they're going to dispense each day, the specific equipment we have in those sites, we can run them all differently. The size of the tank, the liquid tank there, right, how much they're going to use. We're starting to dial in all these different levers to drive the efficiency on these systems up. And we've seen the improvements, it's tangible. I mean, we're seeing that efficiency on these sites start to ramp up, and it's only because we're really understanding that and digging into that. There's more, again, but we're really making a lot of ground there.

I would also add, in addition to that, Luke, the analytics and the data piece that you're talking about. Now we're also starting to look at the entire network. And Chris has mentioned it earlier. How do we run the plant effectively and efficiently because we really want to drive the levelized cost of hydrogen coming out of the plant to the lowest that we can. And so Luke and Jessica Fleck, who's also part of the team, have really started to understand what happens when the price of electricity changes? How often does it change? What does that mean in terms of how we operate the plant? What capacity do we run the plant at? What does that mean in terms of how much storage we need at these facilities? And then how does that relate to how do we operate our network. Having a network really now gives you lots of freedom and flexibility to optimize that entire system. And it's again, something that -- we're starting to learn more about now that we're getting more plants up and running and we've got a logistics network. Things that you don't get until you have that experience. I talked about this with [ Matil ] the other day. Plug, we've got lots of experience. We're doing things. We do want to be thought leaders, but we want to be experience leaders as well. And how do we leverage that experience to make sure that, on a going-forward basis, we're doing everything we can to optimize the performance for the company?

You won't be able to drive costs down to where they need to be unless you can optimize at that kind of a level of sophistication. If you're just doing a small piece of it, you're going to really struggle to kind of maximize the value proposition and what you can get your molecule and your performance down to. But it's only if you really have the whole chain and you understand that chain, can you start to, to Tim's point, operate the plants the right way, balance that with the demand, balance that with the logistics and put that whole puzzle together.

Yes. The variables and the interdependencies are -- were fascinating for us when we started to look at it. It was just unbelievable.

So change subjects. Tell me about 1 or 2 of the projects you're doing with universities and why it matters for the future.

Wow. Okay. So as Luke mentioned, we have plenty of partners. So when we develop our technology road maps and we identify the technology gaps that we have to work on. We do evaluate and say, is this something that we can work with an existing supplier because they're far down the technology? Do we work with one of the labs -- one national labs? Do we work with the university? And we've actually been very fortunate to partner with many, many universities. And a couple of examples that I'll bring up is -- there's a -- my old school, actually, in Mexico State. They've got a very strong power and water purification program. And which is really important because when you think about an electrolyzer, right, what's important is power and processing water. And we've worked with them over the last year to understand, first in North America, where is water available, right? And what kind of water is available? Because we don't necessarily want to just take it from municipalities, that becomes very difficult. We want to look at processed water. So if you think about the oil and gas industry and extraction of natural gas, there's a process where you create what's called produced water. And it's kind of an environmental hazard. But if we can take it and we can process it and we can clean it cost effectively, then we can buy that water and use it within our electrolyzers. So they've done a great analysis identifying across the country where we can find water. And we actually found a very interesting location in the Permian Basin that we're going to be looking at a little bit more. And now we're actually evaluating different technologies for processing water based on the different types of water that we think we can get access to across the country and do it effectively. So people are always concerned about water when you talk about electrolysis. Another program that we've worked at with UC Irvine is a how do we look at within the stack, the flow field? So how do we look at 2-phase flow, liquid and gas flow within the stack? How do we optimize that? What does that look like? What do the materials look like? What are the physics and the physical properties of the material inside the stack and how do they impact the flow? And how does that then impact the production of hydrogen and the efficiency of those stacks? Fascinating modeling that they've done with us and for us, and now we own that model, and we can take it forward and look at that. The third one is we were looking at some -- how do we reduce the corrosion that we can see on some of our anode packs, right? And we did a program with the University of California San Diego to look at atomic layer deposition that we can actually apply to our anode packs to reduce the potential for corrosion. And these are just some examples. We've got more on the liquefier side, how do we optimize the catalyst inside the liquefier? But the list is -- I don't know, Jen is here, she could probably tell me how many projects we have. We have over probably close to 50 different projects, research projects with many universities. And some of the main ones on the cryogenic side are like Washington State University. I mentioned New Mexico State, UC Irvine. We've got some programs with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then the University of Maryland, and that's really interesting because they're experts in hydrogen as it relates to reliability and safety. So we're relying on them, and Luke can probably speak to that. He's been involved in that project pretty closely. So if you want to mention something on that program. It's so fascinating.

Yes. So with the University of Maryland, they -- as Tim said, they're hydrogen risk and reliability experts. And so we have more data than we know what to do with about our equipment at our refueling stations, right, how our pumps and compressors run in particular. And what we've been doing is feeding this -- all this data to them, and they're doing some really big machine learning to try to do predictive maintenance, prognostics on that equipment. Can we put some controls around it to say, "Hey, we're picking up vibrations here or something is changing with the frequency here or the temperatures aren't where they might be. We're seeing a failure coming. Go in and do some preventative maintenance now before that pump goes down," and that could cause a problem for a customer, right? So we're trying to leverage kind of their deep expertise on the prognostics reliability side to implement it into our infrastructure today.

So tell me about your -- what I enjoy the most is about the hydrogen leakage and where hydrogen goes.

Okay. Yes. So I mean, in the hydrogen space, you probably heard there's discussions and debates around hydrogen emissions and venting and what does hydrogen do once it gets out in the atmosphere. And certainly, it's valid and important stuff to be understanding. And what we started to see though is that there needs to be a lot more science and understanding around what's actually happening because you're getting a lot of opinions and kind of gut feelings about things. And so what we've done is work with the University of Arizona, who happened to be some world-class experts in the hydrogen cycle. Hydrogen exists in the atmosphere, just like other compounds and gases and things like that, right? It's created by natural processes, and it's consumed by things. And actually, what's really interesting is about 70% to 80% of the hydrogen that's naturally generated is consumed by microbes in the soil. It doesn't go up into the air and react with other things. Some does, but most of it's just -- it's a food fuel source for microbial activity. And so we're working with them to understand is, hey, if we have a leak on a fitting or a tank or something like that, how much of that hydrogen actually goes up and does anything in the atmosphere, how much goes into the ground? And how can we then improve our system to minimize that, right? So it's some really fascinating kind of complicated chemistry and biology, but it's a really interesting project to go after.

It's actually really important to be able to explain to the environmental community.

It is. There's a lot of, like I said, knee-jerk reactions about what things are doing. And we want to put ourselves and put our policy and GA team like Erin, who was talking earlier, in the best position to go and educate people, whether it's policy or environmental groups or just someone else in the industry about what's the science, what's the reality? What's the actual data telling you?

So Tim, I'm going to change again the subject. So a year from now at the symposium, what are you going to be bragging about as far as where technology made a difference?

Well, I think getting back to those main areas that we talked about before is what our focus is on 2025. We're going to be in a position to talk about all the fantastic things we've done to drive down the cost of the electrolyzers, both from a material, but also the actual cost to build. On the fuel cell side, we're going to be able to talk about the reliability and how many hours we're now from an MTBF perspective and a life perspective we're getting out of not only our stacks but the balance of plant and how that's been able to impact the financials for the business. And then on the system side, Luke talked about the efficiency improvements that we're going to see across the entire network, but also how are we going to be driving down the levelized cost of hydrogen that we're going to be producing. We do lots of modeling and studies today when we -- and we look at different technologies. We look at PEM, we look at AEM, we look at alkaline and we've looked at solid oxide to understand the levelized cost of hydrogen. And once we have that understanding, we'll be able to continue to drive that down. And I know you mentioned the grid and how that's changing over time. But the things that we're doing today are going to make us so much better and put us in a great place to be able to address those issues that we're going to see.

How about you, Luke, what are you going to be bragging about up here?

I'd probably be bragging about how far we've come with the network. I think it's -- I know all of our products, it's awesome stories and incredible things to talk about. But the fact that we're putting together that cohesive system, I think is, to me, everyone have their own thing, but I think to me, that's just the most incredible piece of it. And I think that we've started to build it, you're starting to see it realize and now you're going to really start to see that execute and optimize. You built it, now we're going to make it better, right? So I think that will be a really awesome thing to see.

So one of the items that I really love you guys are working on is the site you're putting in place in Washington. Why do you tell because that actually is a real-time event but really important for understanding hydrogen.

Absolutely. So a challenge facing us and everyone else in the industry is there's not a lot of ways you can go and test hydrogen equipment, do the reliability work, the development work ahead of time. The pump vendors, for example, they don't have liquid hydrogen to run their pumps just because not many people have it. They don't have that infrastructure. So we really saw this need to develop real hardware testing capabilities. A couple of years ago, we acquired a start-up company that came out of Washington State University actually, where they have some really good cryo experts in Pullman, Washington, Eastern Washington State. And we turned that group into this research wing for us, and we're building up this cryogenic R&D facility there where we're going to have liquid infrastructure, the turbomachinery, pumps, compressors, high-pressure tanks, and we'll be able to do a lot of this internal development work and help support our vendors, give them the support they need to do the development we're asking for. So that's something that we broke ground. They're doing construction now. That should be realized early next year. I think it will be a one-of-a-kind facility. They don't really exist like that around the world.

Yes. I think to Luke's point, the ability for us to test even some of the attributes and performance that the suppliers that are providing this equipment can't even test, right? So they tell us they believe that it's going to do this, but we're going to be able to verify it. We'll be able to also look at new technologies, new pump technologies and see the performance. And then we can do optimization as it relates to our networks and our customer sites in terms of our infrastructure and do performance, do controls, do everything we can to understand and gather that data so that we can improve our designs going forward. It's going to be -- like Luke said, it's one of a kind. It will be very significant for us moving forward.

Great. I'm going to take questions from the audience. By the way, this group, we did a practice session. I asked none of these questions to them. So they did pretty good. So any questions for Tim and Luke? Yes, Sameer.

So this may be an unfair question, but I'll ask it. Is there an interplay between reducing costs and efficiency of the stakes -- plates itself, stacks itself? And does it present an opportunity if you're reducing precious metals, reducing cost that opens up an efficiency play?

Yes. So actually, one of the interesting things that we found is we've been doing updates to our design. So we look very closely at how we do our mixing and our milling and all of our inks associated with our catalysts inside our electrolyzer stacks. And as we're going through looking at different formulations, one of the things that we are absolutely doing is trying to reduce the amount of the precious metals in that stack. Interestingly enough, when you do that, there's a potential of gaining access to more of the active area and the material that's there, which basically, when you have too much material, if you will, or the thickness is too much, you lose some of the ability to get to that active area lower inside the MEA. And so it's been very fascinating. Our team in Rochester that does a lot of the...

It's the active area, Tim, higher efficiency.

It means higher efficiency. You're utilizing the material as best you can to get the best efficiency, reduce the amount of energy it takes to actually generate a kilogram of hydrogen. And so our team in Rochester that's really responsible for the process engineering we work with. The design team in Concord, they work with them. They go back and forth on formulations and how we do the process, how we actually coat the material on the line, how much time we do. It's really an end-to-end solution when you think about, from the material itself to when it gets on to the substrate and we produce the MEA. We're finding out a lot of things that are really, really interesting when we're doing this thrifting. But then we have to balance that with you have to be careful with going too low because you want to make sure that the life and the reliability of the stack is maintained, right? So it is a balancing act, but we're finding some very interesting things.

Other questions for Tim and Luke? Okay. I will -- guys, great presentation. Well, thank you, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So we got 3 to go. But they're not going to -- I think you'll find all of them very interesting. So Dean is going to present how he's going to drive operational efficiencies here at Plug. Paul is going to go over finance, and then we'll open it up, bring up everyone who spoke today and let them answer any more questions. But I'm going to -- I've talked about Dean a little earlier, and I think I used and I really believe this. I've known Dean almost a decade now. He was a tough, tough customer, demanding. He made Plug better. Now I'm glad he's on my side, and he's still tough on me telling me what we have to do because he's here to make the trains run, as I said. He's going to make sure this operation, we get the most possibly out of it. I think I saw this presentation. I listened to it a bit yesterday. I think you're really going to enjoy it. So Dean, please come up.

Thanks, Andy. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Dean Fullerton. I want to welcome you all here. Welcome, everyone, virtually as well. I've only been with Plug for about 3 months now, but I've known Plug for many years, as Andy said. And I'm going to talk a little bit today about the operational side of Plug. And because I'm new to Plug, many of you don't know me. Many of you have not seen me before. I have not attended a symposium before. I did do a taped video for one of these priorly, last year. But my first slide is going to go over a little bit of my background, my career history because of that. So it's going to be a little different than the other presentations, again, because you don't know me. After that, I'm going to talk a little bit about my tenets and my values personally, what I've learned as a leader and who I am as a leader. And then I'll talk about what we need to focus on in 2025 from an operational perspective. We're talking a lot here about 5-year plans, what we're going to do in 2030, the years in between there, but I'm here to talk about 2025. A big focus for this company, as you've seen through the theme of some of these slides and you'll hear from me, is we have got to deliver 2025 and we have to execute on 2025 for many reasons. And then my last slide, I'll just talk a little bit about the unique position that Plug is in to be able to deliver on our commitments for 2025. So I started at United Parcel Service. I was loading package cars at 3:30 in the morning going to university and went into UPS' management program. I spent nearly all of my time in the industrial engineering organization at UPS. It was a great place to start, learned my foundation and learned how to be a leader. Great company, great rigor. But I also realized after about 14 years there that I felt a little constraint by all of the standardization and rigor there and was always kind of thinking about how do other people do things. And I left Amazon and went into consulting and one of the best decisions I've made in my career. I learned a lot. I did consulting for a supply chain consulting firm, worked with lots of different companies, got to learn lots of different management styles from leaders in those companies, different company cultures, new technologies that were in the supply chain space and really got to execute and deliver our strategic plans for different companies. I found that I did not want to do consulting long term that, that probably wasn't right for me for my entire career. So I decided to go back in the industry and I went to Gap Inc., and I ran engineering and maintenance for North America for them. That was during the downturn 2008, 2010, a very challenging time in that space. And a headhunter called me for a job with Amazon. And I just, dumb luck, landed at Amazon in June of 2010. And literally 4 weeks later, all hell broke loose that I'll explain to some other people if they ever want to hear that story. And it was a skyrocket from that point on at Amazon. And I was super fortunate Amazon worked with a lot of great people, worked on a lot of great projects, did some really cool history-making things. And I was responsible to deliver and build out the physical infrastructure for operations. So all the fulfillment centers, middle-mile delivery stations, which didn't even exist when I got there, the last-mile delivery stations, airport. We built COVID labs during COVID because we were testing our own employees, did lots of cool things. I also got the opportunity to start the hydrogen economy team at Amazon, which is where I got to know Plug, Andy, Jose, many people and really got to learn who Plug was and the people and the talent that Plug had and developed a relationship. As Andy said, there was a lot of tough conversations during that time because myself and Amazon has very high expectations, but it was a good working relationship. I left Amazon earlier this year. Andy and I stayed in contact and he reached out to me several months ago, and here we are. So kind of the values that I have and the tenets or principles for me are listed up here. I'm certainly not going to go through all of these, but I think there are some that are very important and certainly very applicable for what we at Plug need to achieve in 2025. If you see at lower left-hand corner, customer obsession. Plug is definitely a customer-focused company. I believe that. I saw that. I experienced that, but we have a lot of opportunities on the customer side. And any customers in this room or watching virtually, I think, know what I'm talking about, and they would agree. Customer obsession has got to be our most important thing. It is what any customer -- or any company needs to focus on, and it is what is going to make us successful as a company is if we're hell-bent focused on delivering for our customers. And that's an area I plan to focus on. In the middle on the bottom row, you have deliver results. Deliver results is also something that I have a history of, I hold very high in my values and it's something that we at Plug also need to make sure happens. We've got to deliver for our customers on time, under budget, high level of safety, high level of quality. And if you go to the middle row on the far left, ownership. That's another big one for me. I like everyone in my organization to know what they own, have clear structure and are set up and empowered to own and deliver what they're responsible for, and that's going to be a focus of mine at Plug as well. I think that's what sets up success is people have clear roles and responsibilities and know what they are responsible to deliver and are in a position to be able to do that. And then lastly on here, in the upper left-hand corner, frugality is another one that has always been a passion of mine, but it is particularly an area at Plug that we're going to need to focus on. A lot of us -- everyone knows the cost structure we have is not sustainable, and we need to make sure that any decision financially we make, any dollar we want to spend at Plug, that we are looking at it through a very frugal lens and are really asking ourselves, do we need to spend that? What is that going to do for us? And how is that going to benefit our customer? One I do really like on here. I'm not going to talk about it in-depth, but in the lower right-hand corner, have backbone, disagree and then commit is certainly an important one, one that I've had to demonstrate a few times in my career a little reluctantly. But that's also very important, that everyone is aligned, everyone knows where they're going. And sometimes people might disagree, but they're going to have to commit and make sure that they lean in and that we're successful. So 2025, what I want to accomplish in 2025 is listed on here. Some other things too. But if we're going to look at this high level in 6 buckets, this is what we need to accomplish. And this is what I'm hell-bent on making sure we deliver in 2025. I'm going to talk on a few of these. The upper left-hand corner, customer obsession. Again, we need to deliver our electrolyzers, our fuel cells, our hydrogen, our service and reliability side of the house, we need to deliver that per our contractual commitments and above our contractual commitments. That's going to be very important. If you go over to the upper right, reduce cost 30%, you're hearing this theme today. We have got to get our cost structure in line. And I believe we need to reduce and we need to have a target to cut out 30% of our cost next year. Some of that's through sales, some of that's through more efficient, but we need to be from a design perspective, a manufacturing perspective, the delivery to our customers, a build-out of infrastructure perspective, our service and maintenance and reliability, we need to go through that entire end-to-end process, be much more efficient, and that is a flywheel. If we are better on the front end of that, we're going to be better on the tail end of that in order for us to meet that target. Lastly, I'll talk about the SWAT teams, this middle bucket on the bottom row. Just recently, a few weeks ago, we actually established 2 SWAT teams within the company. One is focused on electrolyzers, one is focused on fuel cells, cross-functional team. There's folks from Tim's design team, from my supply chain team, from the reliability team, from the finance team, and they have been sequestered for 2 weeks. We cleared their plate for them. One team met here, one team met in Rochester, and they went through and they're coming up with the initiatives that are going to be able to be implemented in weeks, some cases, a few months. My point there is not 6 months from now, not 12 months from now, not 18 months from now, but now, what are the things we can do now to fix our products, to make them more reliability and to reduce our cost. And they have come up with those initiatives. We're assigning resources to those time lines, and we are going to be making sure that we track those and follow those and that we deliver on that. If we want to meet the goals that we have for revenue and for sales and for new business, we've got to do these things now in order to be able to sustain that. And we're in a unique position. One of the things that I really enjoy about Plug is the people that are here, the talent that's within, which you've all heard today, people on stage, the experience they have and what they know. But what's also unique about Plug is the global infrastructure that Plug has. You saw the plant today in Vista. We have another plant down the road in Rochester. We have our offices in the Netherlands. We also have -- as we're vertically integrated, we have our tank and cryo business that's in Houston, where we make our own products there, and we have a software and engineering hub in India. As well, we use integrators and fabricators, which is really important. So we can flex up for capacity and customer demand with the integrator network that we have around the globe, which makes us very powerful as a company. And what you see from this infrastructure that we have at Plug, we can actually meet the demand over the next several years with minimal capital investment. We have the capacity to build more electrolyzers, fuel cells and deliver for our customers, and we can leverage those integrators and fabricators when it comes to spikes and fluctuations in that. So what I would say is I'm super energized, I'm super excited, and I'm very hell-bent on meeting our goals in 2025. And it's going to be critical for us to do that in order to accomplish what we want to. And with that, thank you very much. I'm going to turn it back over to Andy.

So I guess you know why I asked Dean to come and join us because he really knows how to make things work. So everybody has gotten packages from home from Amazon, the guy who did the middle mile, the guy who built the distribution centers, now he's going to make sure it all works here right at Plug, too. So our goal is to be just as good as Amazon when it comes to executing. So I really have enjoyed working with Dean over the last 3 months, over the last 10 years and really looking forward to what's going to happen in 2025. On that note, another veteran of symposiums, and my respect for Paul knows no bounds. He's worked the hard times with me. He's lived some of the good times. He works the hard times with me. His commitment to Plug, his commitment to this business is unmatched. So I am really pleased to have the opportunity to have Paul come up here and tell you everything that's going to happen in '25 and beyond. So Paul?

So good day, everybody. And actually, Andy mentioned all the hard work in doing things together. This coming Thanksgiving will actually be 10 years for me, my 10-year anniversary. And it is a place where you work hard. And 10 years ago, I looked as good-looking as Jose with a whole full head of hair. And I don't know what happened in the last 10 years, but -- so over the last few years, through -- we've talked a lot about today through development and acquisitions, we've built this integrated platform of products and service and fuel, and it really positions Plug to substantially grow in the coming years. And this range of efforts and the investment that we've made over the last couple of years has been tremendous from product design, designing things that never been designed before to developing the global hydrogen supply chain, scaling manufacturing, new facilities like the one you're in today and developing the market and the commercial channels. And this platform has really positioned Plug with a differentiated market position, unlike any other in the industry. We're really positioned well as we -- and I think this year, 2024 has really become a critical inflection point for us. When you think about the new products coming to scale this year for this market and equally important, all of the optimization activities we've put in place this year, we think this really positions us well as we head into 2025. So taking a look at 2025, our forecast for revenue is $850 million to $950 million, as Sanjay shared. But equally important, it's the continued growth of these new platforms and the renewed growth of our well-established material handling business. As we look at 2025, we should see similar sales patterns that we have this phenomenon, kind of 1/3 of sales in the first half and 2/3 in the second half, in part because of material handling and seasonality in that market and then also the timing of these customer projects as they continue to come to scale in the energy business. But we also see continued growth in margins and cash flows as we build on the strides that we've made in '24 with pricing increases and cost optimization and scaling up our hydrogen plants and leveraging from sales volume and improvements in working capital. So as we look at this, we think about where Plug is and the markets that we're in and the opportunity that we have, we still feel very strongly that this target business model is very doable in the future, and that's what we're striving towards. And we're doing the things that drive us towards that, scaling our capacity expansions, continuing to innovate, vertically integrating with key components that really are going to drive growth and drive margin enhancement, building up this global hydrogen supply chain and really collaborating with partners to reduce cost, improve performance, leveraging our green hydrogen network and reducing fuel costs and accelerate innovation. And lastly, we've shown a propensity to leverage our cash OpEx base and manage investment prudently as we move forward. So as Sanjay shared earlier, we're forecasting around a 30% sales growth -- compounded sales growth over the next 5 years. And we're also, equally important, looking to scale profitability up to over 30% gross margin in this time horizon. But even more importantly for me, this growth in sales and profitability really makes it increasingly easier to access the capital markets and drive capital solutions that will allow us to finance the business. Now as we discussed yesterday in our earnings call, we're focused on nondilutive capital solutions that can fund this growth over the next couple of years. And I spend a lot of time chasing and working with partners and some are actually here today, working on a range of corporate debt solutions, project finance solutions, project equity partners. The combination of that will be the sources of capital that will be able to fund this business as we move forward. And we talked a lot about the DOE loan today. I think that there's a strong likelihood that, that's coming to fruition here in the next couple of months. But most importantly, you should take away that these are real activities with extensive processes underway with real -- a number of multiple partners. Programs like the equipment financing we just did with Anthem this quarter that we announced. And even yesterday, the long fund that's done this deal with us, those are good examples of things that we're working on to really drive this company forward. And I'll have you leave -- I'll leave you with this. We recognize that being successful in these programs is what's going to drive Plug's growth and really position us to achieve all these targets that we've been talking about today. So that's short and to the point, and I'll leave you with -- I'm excited to share more as we move forward, and I appreciate your time today. And I don't know where Andy is, but I guess we're ready for the wrap up.

Here I am. We are ready to take Q&A. And we're going bring...

Yes, you got a clap for me now.

Now that's funny. So Tim, Gerry, Jose, Paul, you can stay. Dean, Mr. President, come on up. I see the first man with the microphone, Craig, what you got?

So you guys have done a really good job bringing down your cash needs this year, right? In '23, I guess it was around $1.8 billion. This year, it looks like it's going to be under $1 billion. I guess we got to see working capital and your success releasing PPA cash in the fourth quarter. I know it's a focus here. Can you maybe talk a little bit about cash needs in '25? Do we continue to see this kind of progress we've had over the last number of quarters? How much control will you have over cash and cash needs in '25? And is there anything we need to know about your options or your sort of optionality around cash needs over the next number of quarters?

Do you want to take that, Paul?

Sure. So I always like to share kind of 3 themes here. First, if you set aside Texas and the future of green hydrogen platform...

Paul, I probably should be getting...

I don't know. My mic's not working?

Your mic's working okay.

I don't know. Could you guys hear me? Okay. I raised 5 kids. It's unusual that people can't hear me. So it's -- so first of all, if you look at what we have today in terms of the product lines and the fuel platforms that we have, that business, the CapEx that we've been investing in the last couple of years, that's cresting down. That business and that collective activity is going to move towards a fairly nominal level of CapEx as we move into next year. We're kind of getting over the Louisiana plant turning that on. And as that happens, that means that CapEx burden goes down a lot. Second thing is, we've talked a lot about the fact that we've invested in inventory to support this business. One of the key things Dean is going to be working on with the team here is how to drive that inventory leverage. We haven't invested in new inventory. We're actually seeing that come down. We expect that to come down even further. So more working capital leverage next year. Third thing is operational performance. You see it already in our margins every quarter tipping up, tipping up, and we certainly expect that to happen early in '25. As that improves, it means our cash burn is coming down. So collectively, those things is what's going to drive, I would say, equal or more to the same step function that you referenced from '23 to '24. We expect that to happen again in '25. And that means that my net burn and net requirements are substantially less as we move into next year.

Next question. Over here. Yes, right here first. Okay. Sorry about that, Chris.

Yes, Chris Dendrinos, RBC. I guess if looking at the bridge from where you are with gross margins today to the end of next year, if you were to sort of force rank the drivers of that improvement, and you've mentioned a slew of them. What is the number one, I guess, the biggest driver for that step change or, I guess, that improvement cycle?

So Paul, you want to take that one?

Yes. So equipment, equipment and equipment. And we talked about leverage on these facilities as we sell more, the fact that we can produce 3 to 4x the capacity of things that we have here means every one that I ship, I get tremendous leverage on the OpEx base. Second, in the equipment space, the things that we're already doing in terms of rooftop consolidations, doubling down on material focus, optimization of facilities, a lot of things that Dean is going to be looking at, that's going to drive margin enhancement on equipment. So really -- and as you look at the mix, equipment will be a much more meaningful part of our sales as we move over the next couple of years. So that's really big. And the second piece is fuel. I think you've seen progressions in fuel this year from pricing increases and leveraging our own plant, taking advantage of the PTC, that's just the start. So you're going to see even more benefit from that in Q4. And then as we move into next year, as we continue to ramp the great efficiencies, all the things that Luke and Tim talked about at the plants, leveraging these price increases and getting full periods of that and then, of course, turning on Louisiana and taking advantage of that capacity at much lower cost. Those things will drive fuel. Those will be the 2 biggest factors as we move into next year, in my opinion.

I think the other one, Paul, I think about is service. It may not have the greatest impact, but it actually makes us more efficient. There are really huge opportunities in service. And there's a real clear road map, I think, with both stacks, but also balance of plants to really help drive down costs. Next question. I know there was one over here.

Henry Roberts with Truist. Andy, I think at the beginning of the show, you mentioned European policy. Just curious if you can go into some more details around that, maybe some of the opportunities and challenges in the years ahead.

Yes. I'm going to let you take a little of that, Gerry, and then I'll add on. I'll let you go then -- because I have opinions.

Sure. So we -- just like we have a big focus here in the United States on policy, we also have a lot of activities going on in Europe. We have a government affairs person who sits in our Paris office who reports up to Erin. So like in the U.S., I think policy has not moved as fast as we would like. That policy is more regulatory, if you will. Here in the States, it's focused on incentives and incentive programs. Over there, there's mandates. But those mandates are slower to roll out than we had originally hoped. We -- probably the next big test for us over in Europe is there's the Hydrogen Bank, and there's an auction process that will start again next month. This is the second round of funding from the EU. And what it told us the last time was a lot of the players were underbidding what the incentive should be. It could go as high as EUR 4 per kilogram, and we had winning bids that came in at like EUR 0.5. So we'll see how that auction goes. It starts in December and goes, I think, until February, and they'll announce the winner shortly after that. But we're very active on the government affairs front there. So Andy, I don't know if you want to add.

Yes. I would just say, if you think about the first auction, the Hydrogen Bank, we're actually indirect recipients because our customers have actually won Hydrogen Bank auctions. And so that's really where we look at it. And obviously, we like the price that goes in to be as high as possible because that creates value for us. I think that many -- Europe much more than the United States, each country also essentially is spending European money, right? So I was with one of our customers in Spain, and they were recipients of Spanish government grants. You see the same thing in Portugal. So many of the -- I think the STEF facility, for example, indirectly received support from the Spanish government. So there, in many ways, it's part of our sales process to how to engage appropriately with the right players. A little bit different in the States where I feel we're being Americans, we can lead efforts in America. There, we really need to make sure we're following the right people and working with the right people. We have, for example, folks like Scott over there who are in Brussels, former ambassador U.S., former ambassador EU from Hungary, who actually does lots of work for us. So we get the right meetings. We get -- we promote the right ideas. And quite honestly, when we do -- when I do go, they're actually quite interested in meeting with us because they really want to understand what's going on in the U.S. So we do have deep, deep engagement. Yes.

George from Canaccord.

Yes, George.

So to the extent you could share with us how you've probability scrubbed the 8 gigawatts of BEDP contracts with regard to your outlook to 2030 to give us conviction that those are sort of reasonable targets that you've set for yourselves. And second, you mentioned that you've sort of peaked in terms of your CapEx, at least in the near term. Can you help us understand what that looks like between now and 2030 as well?

So Sanjay, you want to take a shot at the first one?

Yes, sure. First off, right, I mean, just I think it's an important thing to highlight that, that 8 gigawatt number was much smaller a year ago. So what we expect is that, that 8 gigawatt is not going to stay stagnant, right? That number, we believe, is going to continue to grow, first thing. Second thing is out of that 8 gigawatts, some of them might not make it, might not get to the FID, right, runs into some potential challenges, things along those lines, right? Obviously, we have Alfred here. We are working with them and his team on 3 gigawatt out of that 8 gigawatt, right? There's multiple other projects that we've talked about that we believe is going to get to FID in 2025. Now even if you think about only 1/3 of that out of that 8 gigawatt as we keep adding to that 8 gigawatt of basic engineering design packet, that's like $1.5 billion, right? If you then think about that 8 gigawatt and if you put a dollar value in that, that's somewhere around $4 billion of value, right? And when you add up all the revenue projection that we have for our electrolyzer business from '25 to 2030, it's less than that. right? So I think we're going to keep adding to that BEDP. We're going to keep adding new list of customers. Some will fall, some additional things will get added. So when we look at -- look, I mean, every year, there could be plus or minus. But as you look at the trajectory, we feel quite good about the fact that we've really done that both bottoms-up and top-down view in terms of coming up with those numbers backed by the bookings outlook, all the activity that's going on in the market.

Paul, you want to take the second part?

Yes. And so in terms of CapEx, I guess I would -- again, if you look at electrolyzers, stationary, all the different things we're doing today, material handling, the current plants we have, even the current fuel plants, it's probably like 4% of sales. It's not a lot to maintain and sustain that activity. So we have tremendous leverage opportunity. If we think about the green hydrogen platform, we've got Texas, which we're extremely confident about the DOE loan funding the majority of that. We've got a lot of capital partners that are thinking about participating in that platform. Actually, some of them are here today to talk to us about opportunities there. So that's more CapEx intensive. But Texas is first, and we're going to do that as we lock in those funding capabilities. So I just segment it in those 2 buckets because the base business, including achieving our plan next year and all the numbers we've talked to, is really tied to that nominal level of CapEx.

Next question.

Chris Tsung, Wolfe Research. I wanted to just ask about the DOE loan again. Just assuming you're able to sign a financial close by Jan 19 before inauguration.

Inauguration is at noon on the 20th.

Fair enough, fair enough, 'til 11:59. How much of the 80% could you -- that's already been spent at Texas be used? Or like how much more CapEx is needed for Texas? And assuming you're able to restart construction Jan 1, '25, when could Texas start up?

I'll just say, I'll let you answer. I'll answer the second part. It'd be mid-2026.

Yes. So we're working through iterative processes with the DOE on the final budgets. And like any projects, they want lots of contingencies in there. So we're kind of working through that. But I think we've -- well, I know we've spent, call it, 30% to 35% or more already on that project. So the balance of what's left is the majority of that, if not almost all of it, will be covered by the DOE loan facility. And then where there's a narrow part of the gap to cover, that's where we're looking at partners and working with people. And that process is pretty robust, and we're pretty far along with that. So we're pretty confident there'll be partners that can step in and cover whatever is left because, again, in that particular project, we've already put so much equity into it that we're in a good position.

Any other questions? Yes.

Ryan from BMO Capital Markets. So we've spent a lot of time obviously talking about the 45V, and I think the kind of expectation is for an update to be provided by the end of the year. With the financial outlook that you guys provided today, the refreshed outlook in your margin progression path, what is sort of assumed in there on the 45V? Are those all baked into your margin progression?

Paul?

Yes. I think good news, bad news. When you -- in terms of the scale of activity that we're talking about, the specific PTC utilization next year, it's pretty high on Georgia and meaningful in terms of that regard. But you're talking like $16 million, $20 million in terms of that leverage. So the real benefit where it starts to compound a lot is when we turn Texas on and start taking advantage. That's 3x that scale that we can leverage there. So that's going to start to kick in, in '26 and onwards. So not -- it's incredibly important to us, but the majority of it is going to come from scaling equipment and efficiencies and other things in terms of '25 in isolation.

Excellent. I just have a follow-up, too.

Sure, go ahead.

With the convertible financing that you announced yesterday and the expansion of your ATM program, just was any of that required by the DOE to progress with the loan?

No.

No. That's -- yes, not at all. So it's a combination of prudent capital management. We're pretty excited about this long fund, the fact that they're so focused on us and where Plug is going to go. And then on the ATM, it's purely algebra in terms of both making sure we got plenty of algebra in our routine analysis we do with accounting, but also just giving credibility and comfort to customers and partners and others that we've got the bandwidth. Not that we're going to use it, but we've got that bandwidth should we need it.

So time has run out, but we do have lunch. And so the management team will be happy to circulate and answer any questions you have during lunch. But what I hope, both those who are watching this digitally and those here today, really get a sense that what Plug does is real. We have the experience. We have the customers and Dean started off with customer obsession, and I start off. We have Gap, Iberdrola, Walmart, Home Depot, Energy Vault with the first microgrid with hydrogen. We have the infrastructure, which really separates us from everyone else in this community. We have people who are hardened in both the oil industry doing big projects, in the fuel cell and hydrogen industry. It's been tough. It hasn't been an easy time. We do know how this market can evolve and grow. And this company is committed to being the leader in the hydrogen and fuel cell industry, not just for the next 5 years, but we're building a platform that will last for a long, long time. So thank you for those who are listening, and thank you for those who came here today, and looking forward to circulating around during lunch and answering any additional questions you have. So thank you, everybody.