ESS Tech, Inc. (NYSE:GWH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Chip Moore : And maybe one on higher incentives, you did a good job talking about the dynamics there, I think. I guess specifically, I thought I’d read that the DOE was going to do some funding for some demonstration projects in the space. I think it was like a 50% cost share. Is that an area you think you’d be active in or is that not as relevant for you guys?

Tony Rabb: Yeah, well, the way I think we would, we would be active in that we’ve looked at some of those funding buckets. Our approach would be to partner with an end user to apply for the money together. So, in our view, since we’re not, we don’t want to be in kind of an owner operator developer, I wouldn’t probably go and apply for a grant to do a project, there’s an ESS owned ESS operated project. But when I wouldn’t do is get together with a municipal, commercial customer and developer and look at a project that would qualify for grant funding, where our technology would be involved in incorporated into the project.

Chip Moore : Back to, I think he mentioned, sort of lead times on automation equipment, nothing overnight. When would you have to make a decision, let’s say, we get some more clarity on some of the IRs stuff and demand really takes off, that sort of like a six-month decision or any way to handicap that?

Eric Dresselhuys: I mean, it’s at least a six, probably closer to a nine-month decision. And I haven’t, I won’t profess, I haven’t looked into all of the potential mechanisms for acceleration and expedition of those kinds of things. The good news is that a lot of the way that the industry works, a lot of the project planning tend to be nine to 12 months out into the future anyway. So, we do get really pretty good visibility into the shipment plans and the customer deployment plans. And so, I think that it won’t be a constraint to us in terms of building the capacity to fill it out based on the time, the planning time horizons of the industry.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Chris Kapsch with Loop Capital. Your line is now open.

Chris Kapsch: Good afternoon. Mostly follow-up to some of the discussion items here. Just curious on the on the comments around cash burn and just, as you look to, as you call their thing, crossover to break even. I’m assuming you’re factoring in production tax credits, that will anyway to quantify how much you’ve been spared, that will diminish the cash burn? And curious if you know yet, will you be getting those for thought I was in you manufacture to date or is it, so including inventories, or to have to be capacity that’s shift or recognized on a GAAP basis? Any color on that?

Tony Rabb: So, what well, I can tell you what we know. But you’ve hit Chris, a great point on why everybody is so anxious to get the details of the IRS rules out, because the details matter. And they probably matter more at the IRS to do most places. So, what we what we expect, what we believe is that the production tax credit for us is about $45 a kilowatt hour and unit rated capacity. So, it’s a little bit of a derivative of each of our battery cells. And important to point out, the production tax credit, in our case, applies to the battery cell. So, the actual energy storage unit balance, a plant in this case doesn’t matter. And that’s $45 a kilowatt hour. And what we know for sure is that it’s something that is shipped to a customer, it has to be shipped to a third-party.