Tom Pokorsky - Fluence Corporation Ltd https://omny.fm/shows/ceo-interviews/tom-pokorsky-fluence-corporation-ltd
Thanks for the heads up. Included the link to the interview in its entirety. Worth a listen (30 minutes) to hear Tom give an overall view, current and future.
Snippets of the Q&A below:
Q) Right, I see. Just a more fundamental question here, do you regard Fluence as a technology company or a construction company?
A)That is a very good question. We absolutely are a technology company and a services company. By history and by volume of work we could easily be labelled a construction company and that’s not what we want, and that’s not where we’re going. We will not do another Ivory Coast type project.
Q) You’ve been in this business for a long time, what sort of reception are you getting from the American customers?
A)Extremely good. Our pipeline is – just to give you one example, there is a meat processing company in America, I’m not going to give a name but I’m positive if I say it you’ll – I believe there’s plants in Australia too. They have 40 slaughterhouses in America. We started working on the first one with them that could be as big as a $10 million project for us for just technology. They have signed a contract with us to do project development for them, in other words they’re paying us to work with them to best suit how this project goes together to use it as a template for their other plants. You should also know that for the slaughterhouse industry the US government is cracking down hard on their treatment capabilities, the industries to begin with and then on top of that the recent laws that were passed allocated $25 billion in tax credits for people who do waste to energy projects. That money could mean as much as a 30 per cent-35 per cent value of the capex on a job.What we’re working with these people to determine money, we got one proposal where we’re saying we will treat your wastewater and we will take the energy from the methane and give you some of it back for a fee per month for 15 years, or you can build a plant and we’ll run it for you and you get to keep the methane but we get an operating contract for 15 years, or some combination thereof. No matter what it’s between a $5 and a $10 million sale of equipment.
Q)How many others are you pitching against when you’re going to talk to slaughterhouses?
A)The fact that they signed and gave us $100,000 to do it, or $80,000, whatever it was, I doubt they’re doing it with too many people and there are not anybody else I know of that do the system the way we do it. There are other competitors that sell one component or two components of these systems but someone has got to put the plan together for them. We have just a plain – we got a job with a honey processor that we have just signed a letter of intent on and they’re waiting to get permits for it, it’s only about a million dollars but it’s a small honey processor where we’re just going to put the equipment there and they’re just going to run it and take advantage of the gas to run the boilers at their plant. These take all different forms, so we have a lot of interest and we’ll being well received. Again, a good reason is because we have 40 similar installations running and producing gas and giving revenue to the customer from the energy.
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(20min delay)