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

Jason Few: Yeah, no, this is Jason, maybe I’ll start here. I don’t — I won’t make any comments relative to M&A or consolidation but I’ll talk about partnerships more broadly. We think that a partnership with Chart is a great example of our commitment to be able to take fully integrated solutions to our customers. Customers really want to buy energy as a service. They’re not looking to be the integrators of energy technologies. So when you think about our platforms, just as an example, and if you were to use an analogy of our platform to like an enterprise software platform, so our platform has a number of different capabilities, and you can plus those capabilities on or you can plus those capabilities off. So when you begin to plus those capabilities on let’s take something like carbon utilization in food and beverage category, as an example.

There are elements of that solution for a customer that we need, that we feel so energy, don’t manufacture, and we don’t intend to manufacture because there are other people that do that, and will leverage those technologies. So Chart, as an example is one of those companies that gives us the ability to go to a customer and say, we can deliver you on site generation, we can deliver to you thermal energy so you can either reduce boilers or replace boilers. And we can deliver to you beverage grade Co2 for use in your food or beverage process. And so doing that with someone like Chart, we can take a full solution that will include not only our platform, but other elements that you need, storage for the Co2, purification of the Co2 which we don’t do.

And so that partnership and having integrated solutions that you know you can take to customers and can replicate, also helps you close transactions faster, because you have an integrated solution to a partnership. So I think you’re going to see more of that if you look at the work that we’re doing at Toyota, right. Our platform is delivering power, hydrogen, and water. But, we don’t make fueling stations and so there’s another provider that’s delivering the fueling station infrastructure that’s also needed to fuel the [indiscernible], and the fuel the Class A heavy duty truck they’ve jointly developed with Packard [ph]. So we see these kinds of partnerships as really important to our overall strategy, just like the one we announced with MMAG where there we are working towards to do large scale solid oxide electrolysis opportunities.

So those kinds of partnerships become really important to total solution delivery. And we’ll continue to do those things where it makes sense.

Noel Parks: Great, thanks a lot. It’s really illuminating. And you talked a little bit about margins you are looking for with the generation portfolio. I just wondered if you could talk a little more broadly about sort of what’s next for the portfolio, if we look ahead to the next few quarters, are you seeing more interest or urgency around utility projects or more like the municipal or industrial water project?

Jason Few: Yes, so we see a few things right. When you think about — if I just take North America, the government’s been pretty clear about we’re focused on a B, right. They’d said, infrastructure is really important, the IRA is really important, and chips are really important. We participate in two of those things, right, infrastructure and the IRA and we have solutions that deliver on the grid side resiliency, reliability, redundancy, and affordability. We think that’s important and we are seeing more and more time to power projects, more desire to do distributed power generation where there’s actually demand for — in those demand centers, because a lot of that is also being driven by just the amount of time it’s taking to permit to interconnections or build new high voltage transmission, which is well chronicled and the challenges that exist around that.