Andrew Marsh: So let me take the Georgia question, and then I’ll let Paul deal with all the financial questions. So we when we look at Georgia, we’re at the final steps of drying the box to liquefier out. And you have to dry it out to bring it down. So we heat the whole liquefier up to 400, 450 degrees and essentially dry it out to ensure that when you start running at 25 degrees, Kelvin, which is almost absolute zero, you don’t have anything in the liquefier that would impede its performance. There are eight kind of elements that need to be dried out. And so last night, we dried out the first debate, which took only 24 hours. I don’t expect the others to go as rapidly. But that’s really kind of making sure that liquefier is completely dry before we turn it on is one of the risks.
The liquefier has been tested before it’s left the supplier, but there is always a big difference bringing up in the field. There’s a lot of confidence it will come up cleanly. But that’s probably where the risks reside. So that’s how I think about it. I’ll let Paul answer the rest of your questions. So when it comes from a — from the finance point of view.
Paul Middleton: Yeah. There was a lot in your questions, but let me try and do my best. A couple of things. Anymore with the filings, I mean, the way the rules have progressed and the regulations feels like 80% of what’s in my filings anymore is risk factors and caveats, right? So we follow the rules. We’re compliant, and we want to make sure we’re disclosing and doing everything according to the rules. But — so that’s what we do. And — but in terms of the financing themselves, they’re not — it’s not like they’re contingent on Georgia being turned on. That’s not a caveat to us making the decisions on which ones we’re going to pick. It’s not — there’s a whole range of options that we have available to us, and it’s really, again, back to just us being prudent and thoughtful about what choices we’re going to make.
In terms of the amount of cash that we need next year, really, we’re in a great position because — I mean a good position, I would say, because — you look at the fact that we’ve largely spent what we need for Georgia, we’re by and large, we don’t have much left relatively speaking on Louisiana. We can pace Texas in New York, the big facilities kind of commensurate with the right solutions and trying to figure out which of those are the right solutions. And when you look at our growth, we’ll talk more about it in the January business update. But given our forecast for next year, both in terms of top line and margin, we should be in a good position to middle to latter part of next year. We could be crossing into the positive operating cash flows.
And so really, in the big scheme of things, it’s not a lot to kind of get to that bridge to where we need to be. And life changes for us dramatically as we cross that threshold and in terms of access to institutional money and funding the next round of projects and things that we’re doing. So we’ll certainly talk more as in the January business update and as we get through our year-end filing. But we feel good about the range of options that we have and the position that we’re in and where we’re poised to fund our business plan in the near term.
Vikram Bagri: Thank you. And in terms of inventory, is that sort of like – sort of source of liquidity for you guys in the near term? Can you bring that number down meaningfully from $1 billion now?
Paul Middleton: Yeah. We absolutely can and are focused on it. So as – when you’re scaling a bunch of new things at the same time and you’re kind of focused on speed to market and scaling up the breadth of platforms, it’s hard to focus on efficiency and optimization as much. But now that we’re really starting to scale those products up, we’re able to kind of think more and ramp more from an optimization and efficiency standpoint and also time things better and work with the vendors better on deliveries and consignment and other tools that we use that can drive that down. But it is a substantial source of liquidity. And obviously, it means we can spend a lot less as we ramp that down in the near term.
Vikram Bagri: Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Martin Malloy with Johnson Rice. Please proceed with your question.
Martin Malloy: Hello. Thank you for taking my question.
Andrew Marsh: Good evening, Martin.
Martin Malloy: Good evening. I was wondering if you could maybe talk about nuclear operators as potential customers for electrolyzers?
Andrew Marsh: Sure. Do you want to take that one, Sanjay?
Sanjay Shrestha: Sure, Andy. Again Martin, it just makes a lot of sense, right, in terms of when we think about all sorts of clean energy and how some of those clean energy can be used to produce green hydrogen. So look, I mean, we have some effort going on along those lines. So there are some activities happening. So we certainly see that as a part of our electrolyzer business opportunity, whether it’s just a direct electrolyzer sale? Or does that also expand into potentially even building a liquid plant there. But the — it’s a very fair question. And short answer to that question is we have some of those activities going on and look forward to sharing a lot more with you all. And again, some of these areas, whether it’s nuclear or some of the other opportunity here in the U.S., this bigger opportunity, I think, are going to get unlocked here as we get further guidance surrounding what exactly is going to be the language from the treasury on the PTC and IRA.
Martin Malloy: Great. And for my follow-up question. I just wanted to try to get a sense of level of interest that you all have and maybe monetizing some of these green hydrogen plants as you bring them on in terms of selling down interest in them? I saw the Fortescue news that you shared with us. But maybe if you could give us your thoughts around that?
Andrew Marsh: Paul, do you want to take that one?
Paul Middleton: Yeah. I guess, my bias selfishly is to not sell equity out of those plants because that obviously is the most expensive capital. So it’s better for Plug, but we have to think more broadly than that, given the breadth of agenda that we have and the capital needs and the solutions that we have and the timing and also the partners that we’re working with. I mean in the case of Fortescue, the fact that they’ve got interesting investment alternatives and platforms that we can co-invest in their platforms, that can be a meaningful opportunity for us. And so we’ve not necessarily acted on some of those opportunities. We continue to nurture them, and we continue to see more expressions of interest with multiple parties that would like to take equity stakes in our plants. And so we’re going to continue to nurture those concepts and discussions in context with other alternatives and work towards what we think is the best answer. Hopefully, that helps, Martin.
