That’s frankly been an even bigger driver of fleets and fleets coming to us that may not have been looking at hydrogen before. The experience we have gotten trying battery electric trucks for up to six to 12 months, right? And then making purchase fee decisions on battery electric trucks and trying to get chargers permitted and cited behind warehouse specs for those battery trucks. The fact that in many parts of the country, including parts of California, where you have customers where you have freight. You also have a grid that’s stressed. You have substations that don’t have capacity, in some cases, to put more than 20 trucks with the chargers bind a single warehouse fence. And you have 5- to 6-year lead times, some customers tell us to get any material number of chargers with enough power for charger to not have to sit there for eight hours, which a lot of Class 8 fleets can’t have how we’re charging.
So that’s driven fleets to also expand their view of the use case for fuel cell trucks and how much needs to be a part of their future given the frictions on weight penalty, the frictions on operating performance profile on range — and then on infrastructure viabilities. When you add the battery truck challenges, which is the biggest driver, if you ask us, of why there’s $300 million sitting in the California, the Care program today. When I joined Hyzon June 2021, when CARB opened up HP funding, they’ve released anywhere from $50 million to $100 million at a time. It’s still up 20 minutes. The battery trucks were being applied for insignificant numbers. That money is built and is sitting as fuel cell trucks come to market in part because of all these frictions on the battery truck side.
So we’re seeing a clear movement to hydrogen. We’re seeing, the use case for hydrogen trucks expand because of both the challenges of battery trucks to do the work that diesel does today. And to your point, the clear path that the government at the federal and the state level is showing in this three-step approach to fund this program from California and the ports with certainly the hubs.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Rob Wertheimer with Melius Research. Your line is open.
Rob Wertheimer: Thank you. I’ll have two, if I can. You mentioned, I guess, with the 200 — the potential, at least for expansion into other industrial end markets, including rail stationary and other — is that more of an outreach program from you guys? Or is that demand pull? And does that extend to potential strategic partners? I mean can you just kind of describe that ecosystem and a level of interest and what’s driving those comments?
Parker Meeks: Hi, Rob. Good morning. Thanks so much. I mean the future for Fuse technology is significant, and we’re excited to talk about the next markets that we see after truck. So — to answer it directly, the opportunity is as much a pull from strategic counterparties and other entities that want to get going and have real decarbonization goals as it is us pushing and identifying where that could happen. And let me give you a couple of case studies on that. One, stationary and mobile power, we announced previously a joint development agreement with Schlumberger to do that. There’s significant appetite from many in the industrial and remote work use cases for a decarbonized solution for power that can work. So that’s both inbound from partners, inbound from customers, and that’s a pretty broad set of opportunities.
It’s inbound from data center operators, inbound from entertainment industry, who was using diesel generators to film movies and TV shows and other things in time for industrial operators, which we promote obstacle oil and gas and power and chemicals that need to replace generator power is on diesel today with something that is zero carbon and fine batteries to be a tough tug solution. The other example I’ll give is the airport ecosystem of consort equipment. There are funding programs at airports today, both in the U.S. and Europe to start decarbonizing airports. I think people realize, look, we hope fuel cells are in plain certainly, but that is going to take some time. 75% of the emission profile when you take the planes out of the equation at an airport is ground support equipment.
And those use cases like aircraft tubs, and ground power units are perfect use cases to slot in 200-kilowatt fuel cell power today to that airports and airlines and others in the aviation ecosystem, who are quite interested in have goals they need to achieve. So we’re — those are things that we’re working on actively that we would like to see come to market as we have the trucks launched and scaling, we’re taking a prudent approach to manage our working capital and our resources. But those are markets that we fundamentally believe are going to be ready to go as soon as the trucks are launched.
Rob Wertheimer: All right. Perfect. And then Parker, you’ve touched on this in two questions in a couple of different ways. But just contextualize California, clean truck mandates are difficult to meet. I think you’ve mentioned that sometimes battery electric just isn’t up to the duty cycle, et cetera. What are your customers saying a potential customer saying, are they waiting around until fuel cells are fully tested mature? Do they expect to have to buy batteries? I’m just curious what that environment feels like and if there’s a real launch in 26 or whatever people like wait for it and then go after it. And if I may, when you’re dealing with your trial customers and customers, are they typically playing you against and benchmarking you against other fuel cell providers? Or is everybody like finding a customer and testing it out at this point? It’s not really competitive between you all on fuel cells. I’ll stop there. I know that was two questions.
