FuelCell Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:FCEL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

A lot of those projects are kind of longer dated projects, but certainly a lot of activity in hydrogen. And then we’re seeing strong growth around Co2 utilization actually, as there continues to be regional constraints on Co2 and just vast differences in pricing across Co2 in various markets. And then, between our technologies, between solid oxide — solid oxide electrolysis and our carbonate platform, kind of based on — kind of falling on the last question, we’re seeing really strong uptake around electrolysis, and our solid oxide FuelCell, and kind of steady mix around carbonate. A lot of that carbonate growth in the short run, we see as opportunities because of the Korea market being a strong opportunity for us. As we indicated, we had been out of that market for almost six years.

We’ve been back in the market for a little over a year now, and starting in January of this year, the restrictions around actually offering long-term service agreements to the existing customer base that was sold to by POSCO has expired as well. And so we see that as a really strong opportunity for the company as we are the only alternative, if you will, to do a module replacement against that set of opportunity. So we think there will be strong pickup in Korea is our expectation. There are some things that still need to be worked out, they are relative to those customers, because those customers had over the last call it five years or so, had been working under a LPSA with POSCO. So there were some things that we’re working with those customers to work through, but we feel optimistic about the opportunity there.

And then when you look at programs like the clean hydrogen portfolio standard in Korea, that’s all Greenfield opportunity. That’s 200 megawatts of opportunities a year that Korea intends to deploy. So we will compete very aggressively for those opportunities.

Eric Stine: Okay, that’s great color. I guess, maybe I should — I could have asked another one as well. I mean, if you look out two to four quarters, do you think that there is some product backlog to go along with obviously the $1 billion plus in the rest of your business?

Jason Few: Yeah, we certainly don’t give kind of outlooks that way. But what I would say is, yes, that’s clearly an expectation that we will build product backlog. And we’ve invested money in our sales organization. We brought in a new sales leader about a year ago, Mark Feasel that we brought in from Schneider who is a very experienced sales leader. And the playbooks that we’ve developed from a sales opportunity standpoint we feel good about. We feel good about the pipeline, the quality of the pipeline, our move of deals into contract and negotiation phases. So we should expect that you’ll start to see backlog product sales as well.

Eric Stine: Okay, thanks.

Operator: And your next question comes from the line of Chris Souther from B. Riley, your line is open.

Christopher Souther: Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions here. Maybe just a little bit more on the timing of the solid oxide deployment in Idaho and any update as far as what customer engagement looks like for that segment specifically, as you’re building up the pipeline, do you think potential customers are waiting to see that project up and running as it can have more clarity on kind of IRA, like what our customer’s kind of looking for and where are we in the education project?