Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the first day of our second annual Sustainability Week. My name's Thomas Boyes, as the Vice President on the Sustainability and Mobility Technology team here, covering long-duration energy storage and next-generation environmental services. Today, we have the pleasure of hosting Eric Dresselhuys, who's the CEO of ESS, and Tony Rabb, the CFO. Before we begin, I just wanna draw everyone's attention to the top right-hand corner of their screen, where there is a Q&A chat feature. Feel free to submit any questions you might have, and then I can ask them anonymously on your behalf. But there is a slight delay, so don't hold the questions until the end. Eric, Tony, thank you so much for joining us today. Hey, Thomas, thanks for having us. Thank you. Maybe at the top of the session, if you could just introduce the company to the audience for individuals that may not be familiar with ESS. Sure. Well, ESS is, we're headquartered here outside of Portland, Oregon, and we work on what's known as long-duration energy storage. So within the category, kind of the broader category of energy storage for the grid, we do long duration, which means we focus on durations greater than four hours. So, you know, typically, if you, if you look at the storage space, there's kind of short-duration batteries, lithium-ion being the dominant technology that does kind of 30-minute to four-hour batteries. But as the market for renewables and the desire to create a sustainable, resilient electricity system come in, you need something that stores energy for longer, and that's where we step in. We build what's known as an Iron Flow redox battery, so it's a power-focused battery for the grid that uses some pretty simple ingredients: iron, salt, and water is the core electrolyte. This is really focused on what's known in the space as the intra-day space, so kind of an everyday battery that you're gonna use to time shift excess solar and wind throughout the day to ensure that you have a 24/7 green energy system. Oh, perfect. No, that's very helpful. You know, maybe first, I was hoping you could walk investors kind of where we are in the journey towards profitability for ESS. I know there's been obviously some structural or not structural, some strategic shifts in how you're doing volumes ahead of having a kind of a low-cost, EW, unit out in the field proper. Oh, sure. So, you know, we feel that iron flow is one of the great long-term cost entitlements of any technology in the space. We think we can deliver a kind of value proposition that's unparalleled, but, like any new company, we're early in that journey. So we've been working aggressively to take cost out. Along the way, what we've decided to do is to moderate our shipments until we get to that crossover point of profitability, and then really ramp up our shipments. And, the current timetable is, you know, we'll cross over late this year into unit profitability. We'll start to really crank up the volumes, and then it becomes a game of, you know, hitting volumes to cover all of the fixed cost of the business, on our path to overall profitability. Yeah, then maybe it's, t here's been some, actually some impressive cost reduction efforts already, right? You've brought the unit costs down by about 60%. Can you just briefly talk about those improvements that you made? And for the additional 40% that you're targeting, you know, where is that coming from? What levers do you pull to get to that point, by the end of the year? Sure. Well, there's really three areas that you get cost out. The first is from design improvements, literally just improving the product design and taking out things that add cost that don't add value, or doing it in a less expensive way. The second is through automation. So, using, we've been implementing fully automated manufacturing facilities, and that takes a lot of the labor content out, plus it improves quality and yields and all of those good things. And then the last thing is volume. So it really kind of happens in that order. You're designing the product for improvements. Some of that is technical innovation. A lot of it's just kind of good meat and potatoes kind of engineering work. Implementing the automation lines to take out labor costs and improve yields, and then, as I mentioned, you know, the volumes will really start to ramp later. We've increased our volumes quite a bit in percentage terms, but it's been off a small base. And so, we'll start to get better, you know, kind of, pricing from vendors and, you know, better input costs as we get to higher and higher volumes. Got it. And then you had announced kind of a second manufacturing line, which obviously bodes pretty well to kind of your forward-looking view on what demand is gonna be. But I was just wondering if you could talk about, you know, what learnings you're able to kind of take from that first line that you bring to that second line, and what type of improvements maybe on a CapEx per megawatt hour basis that you could see for line number 2? Sure. Tony, you want to take that one? Yeah. Yeah, sure, I can take that one. So line one, it was our first fully automated line, and as you can imagine, our engineering team was able to take a lot of the learnings from the semi-automated lines that we were producing on previously, that they then transitioned to that first fully automated line. And that substantially allowed us to reduce the amount of labor that was required to produce the stacks, as well as significantly increased yields, throughput, and quality of the product. And so, as you can imagine, the same thing happening with the production of the first line, there's a number of learnings that we were able to take from utilizing that line as we looked at starting to design this, the second line. So the first line had quite a bit of flexibility built into it- That you know had a little bit of higher cost associated with that flexibility in terms of the robotics. The second line, same amount of automation, but some of those learnings that we've been able to transition to now what is a more established product, allows us to design something that has much higher throughput. And so our engineering team has put quite a bit of effort into ensuring that we can get a lot more throughput with the basically the same amount of square footage from a production line. And also the line itself is slightly less in cost as well. So a great improvement moving from line one to line two. That's helpful. And then, you know, if the idea is that the line will be operational in kind of the first half of next year, you know, if I'm trying to think about this, which is, do you think that's really going to address a lot of the Energy Center type of demand, or how do you think about kind of what that line will really be servicing as far as the product? Both lines produce the same, essentially the same kind of stacks, battery stacks. The, you know, that we anticipate that a lot of the volume growth, next year will be coming from, Energy Centers. So, yes, that will be to address that, incremental volume, and, and we do anticipate that to be more Energy Centers than Energy Warehouses. Got it. And then for the first Energy Center, you know, that's operational with Portland General Electric. I think there's another system that's already going to be constructed at the same site. Can you kind of talk through some of maybe the profitability expectations for that offering relative to an Energy Warehouse? And, you know, what levers do you kind of pull that gets you to those higher, you know, profitability higher margins, versus what's going on with the Energy Warehouse? Sure. Well, the Energy Center is really designed as a, you know, higher volume product. So the biggest thing that Energy Centers do for us is it expands the kind of cost effectiveness from a customer's perspective, if you look at the products on a per kilowatt-hour basis. Energy Centers have longer duration, have twice the power in the same kind of footprint on the ground. So it's really the product that's designed to drive much larger scale projects. Energy Warehouses are more of a behind-the-meter and kind of first product to get familiar with. The Energy Centers are really designed towards scaling towards much larger projects in the, you know, tens of megawatts and beyond. As Tony alluded to, the same core components, so the same battery stacks, the same electrolyte, the same electrolyte health system, go into both products. So the difference between the two is really just balance of plant. And again, a lot of learnings from the Energy Warehouse have been incorporated into the Energy Centers. As we get past these first prototypes and start manufacturing at scale late this year and then into 2025, we'll ride the same kind of cost curves down on the balanced system that we've had with Energy Warehouses. And then, of course, we'll be leveraging the combined volume of all of those for the core componentry. And we had just one investor question come in, it along the Energy Center question path. Is that the market where that the product will be targeting substantially different than the Energy Warehouse? I think it's, like, by region. Is this something that you see most applicable in Australia or in, in the U.S., in certain in ERCOT or in others, in certain markets versus others? Yeah, it's a good question. It's, there's not really a geographic difference for where one product versus another comes into play, so there's no real difference between, say, California and Texas or, Australia and, you know, Michigan or something, as a geography. But the Energy Center is definitely designed towards a larger, you know, larger scale projects. And so, you know, what we've seen happen, as this whole category of long-duration storage is really starting to catch traction, is that the projects over time are gonna keep growing and getting bigger. And as you get to bigger and bigger sites, you're gonna wanna have solutions that are more cost-effective at larger scale. And that's the bigger driver. There's somewhat of an inclination I would've told you a year ago that the Energy Centers would've been maybe more focused towards the front of the meter market, so, you know, larger scale utility projects. Whereas the Energy Warehouses might have had more of an inclination towards behind-the-meter projects, so at the customer side. But I tell you, even our thinking there is starting to get skewed, because some of the scale of the behind-the-meter projects is getting really big. This idea of microgrids and the number of people like data centers who are looking for 24/7 kind of clean power is those projects get pretty big pretty fast, and I think those will end up being Energy Center projects more than Energy Warehouse projects. Oh, interesting to hear. The other thing I want to touch upon, too, is just on the technology side, because I think that, you know, certain investors are maybe familiar with certain flow battery technologies and maybe some of the issues around why they traditionally haven't worked as well. And I just wanna kind of, you know, hone in on maybe what the secret sauce is for your system and what kind of characteristics you can offer relative to kind of other flow batteries, or even maybe you could talk about lithium-ion a little bit, on where the performance is better, or what's being valued by a potential customer. Yeah, sure. Well, a lot there we could cover, I'm sure, the rest of our time with that, but I'll hit a couple of the highlights. You know, when you compare us to lithium-ion, lithium-ion's great at a lot of things. Lithium-ion's great in phones and in cars and lots of places. At the grid scale, though, you know, there's some real limitations. Of course, we all know about the duration limitation. They actually don't last that long. Most grid things are looking to last, you know, upwards to 20 years, and lithium, as we know, goes through pretty severe capacity degradation or, well, capacity fade, as we say in the battery world, where, you know, it works 100% of the time, you know, 100% of its rated capacity in the beginning, but as you cycle the battery more and more, it'll start to lose some of that efficacy. Anybody with a cell phone has experienced that phenomenon. And so people have generally wanted something that's different, that's really more custom-designed or, you know, kind of, application appropriate, and that's where flow batteries have come in. Some of the flow batteries that have existed in the past have used things like vanadium, which can work, but the problem with vanadium is vanadium is really expensive, and so it violates one of the core principles that we're looking for here, which is, how do we create a really cost-effective solution that hits the, you know, DOE and other groups have put out these so-called Earth shots or goals for what would it really take to drive massive volumes? And cost is a big part of it. And the cost, the core cost of vanadium, when you compare it to lithium or other technologies, is just too expensive. That's why our battery is, you know, so compelling to people because it uses iron, salt, and water as its core electrolyte. So of course, those are both earth abundant. There's no kind of sketchy supply chain issues that come behind that, and as importantly, it's really inexpensive. But it also lasts for a long time without losing its efficacy. So you can cycle a battery 20,000 times, you know, over 20 years and still have the same basic performance that you had on day one. The magic, the secret sauce, if you will, was: how do you do that, overcoming what had been one of the historic challenges with an Iron Flow Battery, which was, how do you keep the electrolyte in balance and healthy so that you can cycle a lot? And so that's where, a few years back, the founders of the company went to the DOE and got an ARPA-E grant to develop a thing that we call a Proton Pump, is a brand name, but it's really the electrolyte health system that allows you to cycle the battery, a lot without having to shut down, and do a manual kind of rebalancing of the electrolyte. So that's really the thing that's been the breakthrough. Absolutely. And certainly, the ability to decouple the power of the- Right S ystem from the overall capacity just by adding more electrolyte, kind of allows you to, to offer something that, that the lithium-ion can't. Yeah. Maybe the other thing, though, is really on safety. You know- Yeah W e hear a lot, a lot about for lithium-ion particularly, but certainly for applications where it can't be flammable, right? That it's part of the spec, and I was just wondering if you could walk through, you know, what those customers are looking for and why this would maybe be a more compelling solution. Yeah. Well, and, and you're right. It, it's still an issue. There's a big fire in Southern California right now from a lithium battery. There was a big fire last week, or maybe it was the week before, in Germany, where we're doing some work, and, you know, it's, it's outright fires, it's off-gassing. There's just lots of safety issues with large-scale lithium batteries that have just, led some people to say, "I can't put it anywhere near people," right? And if you think of all of the use cases we have, coming up for deploying batteries, using it for resiliency and reliability, in addition to kind of the bulk shifting of renewable energy, which is what most people think of with, with batteries, we have folks that are, like SMUD, as an example, one of our clients, who wants to put batteries right out in the distribution network to help alleviate some of the transmission and distribution congestion issues that we all talk so much about. One of the problems is those batteries get put next to people, or they get put into environmentally sensitive areas, and people are simply not willing, on an increasing basis, to, to place batteries that are gonna fire or off gas in those environments. And all of this is ignoring kind of some of the end-of-life recycling thing. I'm sure many of the folks listening will be aware that there's a ton of folks out there working on finding ways to, you know, do a better job of end of life and recycling of lithium batteries, but it's kind of a big problem today. And, if we don't solve that problem with all of the lithium batteries that are getting put out into the world, we're gonna have a real, environment- a new environmental issue of what do we do with the disposal of all of these items? Our battery, on the other hand, because of the nature of its components, is something like 98% recyclable at the end of life. In fact, DOE did a comparison and kind of rated us the most kind of lowest total carbon from manufacturing through to disposal of any battery you can buy. Perfect. And maybe this, this next question kind of ties into the cost discussion that we were talking about, but just on round-trip efficiency for, for your technology and the levers that you can pull to kind of improve that efficiency, I would imagine some of it has to do with, with the electrolyte, right? Whether you can improve the, the density there, and I'm just wondering what, what efforts, you, you've made or you have visibility to, or improvements on the anode and the cathode, or, or how you're kind of thinking about that. Well, you know, the old, t here's an old gag that says, "You can never be too rich or too thin," and in the world of batteries, you know, you can never have good enough long round-trip efficiency, you can never have long enough duration. Different use cases will prioritize things differently. So we're certainly working and have made some good improvements on our TE. We're also doing a lot to reduce, you know, auxiliary loads and other things that can, you know, be a drain on the system. The thing we find is that the offset to that is because of some of the, the characteristics of our battery that are really positive- so things like the ability to cycle multiple times in a day. Most lithium batteries are, in order to kind of maximize their performance, you get a lot of rules around how you use them. Once you start to discharge, you have to discharge till, you know, a relatively low rate, and then you have to charge it all the way up before you start discharging again. Because if you don't do any of those things, it'll really exaggerate or accelerate the, I should say, the capacity fade. Whereas our battery is pretty happy to go from charging to discharging on a moment's notice, and that's a really handy tool when you're thinking about some of these applications like grid resiliency or kind of harvesting excess renewables. When you can do that and the input energy costs are a lot lower, then if you have slightly lower round-trip efficiency, it kind of isn't actually as important as the ability to grab the free electricity when you can. So, we're working, of course, all the time on how to improve the efficiency of the throughput. You can do that through electrolyte. That can get you longer duration and less space as well, auxiliary loads, improving the Coulombic efficiencies of the battery, and things like that. Great. No, I appreciate the color there. Before, you know, moving on to maybe some of the project wins, because I definitely wanna address those, I was interested in maybe your view on, you know, domestically sourced energy storage solutions. You know, with passage of the IRA, obviously there's been a lot of support there, but I was just wondering if you'd kind of talk through ESS's ability to deliver on the domestic sourcing for what goes into your solutions. And then maybe just because there's been a lot of recent development, you know, any sense of the proposed tariff changes and how you think that might impact the landscape, domestically? Yeah. Well, our kind of inside joke here is that we're the poster child for the IRA's domestic content incentives. We build everything here in Oregon today. We're in, you know, well north of 90% domestic content based on the IRS rules. So we've been we are doing and have been doing exactly what the IRA was encouraging people to do, and we've been doing it for a few years now. So we feel great about that, and we get a lot of. Because our content is so high, one of the misunderstood things, or like, misunderstood maybe is the wrong word, not well understood things about the way the domestic content works, is if you have a higher level of domestic content on one component, say, the battery, that can actually help lift the overall domestic content of a project from the customer's perspective. So if a customer is building, say, a solar and a storage project somewhere, you look at the overall, we blow up the 40% minimum out of the water, but you can then combine our 90%+ domestic content with somebody else's lesser domestic content, and if the overall project can hit 40%, you can qualify for the 10% domestic content adder. So that's a, people are super excited about that. You're right, the tariff discussion has been hot and heavy the last couple of weeks. The tariff on grid batteries has been the relatively modest 7.5%. It's being proposed to go to 25%. I would call that a pretty good down payment. Is it the total solve? I don't know, but it's certainly a move in the right direction to help create a kind of a level playing field and a fair marketplace in the world of energy storage. Prices, as people may know, have come down pretty dramatically, certainly much more than costs have come down. And so the allegations of dumping are pretty rife in our business, just as they are in the solar panel business. So we think it's a great move to see storage be included in that. Absolutely. And you know, we've seen a lot of solar-plus-storage projects. We're just getting y ou know, it's all module for panels, and so you know, cells are a little bit further off, and so people are looking at ways of qualifying these projects, and obviously, having that kind of ability certainly hopefully helps to move the needle. For the recent project awards, there's probably like one or two that I think would be valuable for investors just to go through. One is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that you had earlier this year. You'd replaced a prototype ESS system with now you know, a current gen one. I was wondering if you could talk about you know, that deployment. Do you see that as kind of the that type of application or that type of customer as an important end market for ESS? And then, you know, what was the kind of the attributes that we went through that, you know, were so highly valued by the Army Corps of Engineers when they chose your solution, than, say, you know, lithium-ion? Yeah. Well, you know, as some folks may know, we've in our early days here as we're now, you know, ramping up our commercial operations, we have targeted certain applications that we think unlock much bigger overall market opportunities in the coming years. And certainly, the Department of Defense has been a leader in decarbonization and thinking about climate. And, you know, I'd encourage anyone that isn't, hasn't been read up on that to look at some of the things they're doing, 'cause they really have been a very progressive organization around climate. Specifically here, they're looking at forward-based deployments and how do you create energy resiliency in forward-based operating environments, and how do you do that in a way that would take off, say, reliance on, you know, local assets for energy that may not be there. So how do you do microgrids and other things at a military base? And we think that's an exciting application, and that's what, at Fort Leonard Wood, that's what we're demonstrating with Army Corps of Engineers what the attributes that they like, you know, we did do, they were one of our very early adopter prototyping customers, so we're excited to get them kind of up to the latest gen of product. What do they care about? Well, they care about long duration, right? Because their operating use cases are much longer than 2- and 4-hour use cases. But safety is a big deal for them. Imagine just you're putting a battery on a military base, and maybe Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri isn't the highest risk base, but they're testing this for to learn about deployments in other places that are gonna be much more problematic in terms of safety. You wouldn't wanna put anything on a military base that has a high probability of blowing up or going into an off-gassing mode where it could compromise the troops. And then the last thing is that total carbon impact is, I say this, I'll make it the second to last thing, that total carbon impact, so end of life and how does it get disposed of, is really important. They think kind of whole life cycle in the military. But the last thing is, buying a domestic battery takes on new meaning. People are probably familiar with a battery that was deployed at Camp Lejeune, that turned out to be quite an embarrassment. You know, Congress got involved because this was all, this was a Chinese battery and battery system with a Chinese company, you know, battery management system, and people started to worry about what are the national security implications. So buying domestic content probably, you know, has some added meaning to the military, to DoD, than it does to anybody else. You've obviously made a lot of progress in, you know, the U.S., Germany, and Australia. But one of the other awards that was interesting was a partnership with Sapele Power in Nigeria, and for a longer long-duration application. I was just wondering if you could talk about how that award came about, you know, what use cases that system would be addressing, and maybe how you think about that opportunity in Africa longer term, or maybe in other geographies? Well, well, it is an interesting one that came along. You know, we've been focused on the U.S., Australia, and Europe because, frankly, if you look at where renewable penetrations are the highest, those are the regions where there's the most. And, you know, one thing we've seen is the higher your renewable penetration is, the more long-duration storage starts to make sense. When renewable penetrations are relatively modest, kind of single-digit%, you know, people just rely on either old coal plants or natural gas peaking plants to step in and ensure reliability. As you get to higher and higher levels, you can't really do that anymore. Certainly, if you're on a mission to get to 100% decarbonized grid, as most of the developing country is now, you come to the realization that you can't get there without long-duration storage. So why does? what does any of that have to do with Africa? Well, Africa's got this very interesting thing happening in their energy system, and, you know, there's quite a bit written about it. Well, of course, a huge population growth, huge demand growth happening in Africa for energy as the economies develop and industries develop. And so they're going through a phenomenon that looks frankly a little bit more like, you know, the cell phone phenomenon that happened in India years ago, where, you know, you don't go through the progression of having run cable, you know, like copper wires everywhere and then eventually get to cellular. You kind of leapfrog to the latest generation, and that's what we see happening in Africa now. People are gonna start to shut down some of these fossil assets, where frankly, in some places, they're still burning oil to generate electricity. And they're gonna skip all those interim steps and move right to a renewable plus storage way to create a more microgrid, a more distributed, more resilient energy system. And Sapele is, well, one of the largest generators in Nigeria. They're a very big player. This first project will kind of get them some learnings, but right behind that, they're looking to build a project that, for all the world, looks exactly like the projects we're doing in Australia and Germany, which are very large, green baseload energy projects. Now, we don't have a presence in Africa, so our model has been to be an OEM and focus on technology, and then find local folks to help support and do a lot of the services work. Makes sense. We are coming close on time, but I had two more that I definitely wanted to get to. The first being just the partnership or relationship with Honeywell, which I think is pretty important. I was wondering if you could kind of describe what that looks like and why it's so important, and what kind of attribute or advantages it could unlock longer term for the company. Yeah, no, thanks for that. We're really excited about the relationship with Honeywell. And, you know, certainly a lot of corporates have been investing in the clean energy space, but most of that's kind of come from kind of a corporate venture capital perspective, where they have a separate fund. And this deal is very different than that. Honeywell had spent a bunch of time looking at flow batteries, and specifically iron flow batteries, and had decided that, you know, this was really the winning technology going forward. When we met, they said: "Hey, you guys are further ahead, and so why don't we just combine forces?" So the deal really had three core elements to it. The first is they became a big investor in the company, and we're very fortunate that, unlike a lot of companies, that people might think of in the emerging tech space and energy, we have some very large brand name, Honeywell, SoftBank, Breakthrough Energy, you know, large holders who have been long-term holders of the company. So they made an investment. That was the first step. The second step is they made a big purchase commitment, so they agreed to buy initially $300 million of product. We've already started to deliver against that, and the go-to-market teams are hard at work. And then the third element is we've signed what's known as a joint development agreement. So we're off looking at all the things we can do. You mentioned RTE, but efficiencies, lower cost materials, you name it. We've got a very robust pipeline of products and improvements that Honeywell, with their vast experience in material science and scaling technologies across, you know, an amazing array of industries, for a company like us to be able to tap into that resource and those that experience and expertise is really a phenomenal thing. Excellent. Well, maybe just last one, and then, I'll let you go. But just to get your view maybe on, you know, long duration. Three years ago, it felt like we were gonna have ultra long duration almost immediately, and that's somewhat, you know, modified over time or moderated over time. But what I'm seeing now is just attending a couple of energy storage conferences, seeing a much greater focus now on longer duration applications. And I was just wondering, you know, if there are specific states or markets that you're really constructive on, or how quickly you think we get to, on an average basis, you know, 6+ hour duration requirements? Yeah. Well, I think it is developing, but, you know, usually in the energy market, there's an initial boom of excitement, and then the, you know, the reality sets in. And one thing that I would tell everybody is from three years ago when I joined as CEO, every macro tailwind in this space has gotten better for long duration than the day I joined. Whether it's the IRA or the regulatory environment, and you hit on it. You know, IRA is great, but in the U.S. specifically, state-level regulation still matters a lot. That sets the rules for what utilities and independent operators in those states do. So California is certainly making progress, but there are states that you might not think of. People like Michigan is a great example. Michigan passed a law to get to zero carbon, so that's the first step that usually happens, and everybody kind of cheers and says: "That's great." But then they hand it off to their public utility commission and say, "Okay, go implement the rules that are gonna help make this happen." Unfortunately, that takes a little longer than people might like. But what happens then is you get the rules instantiated that are gonna implement, and there's a number of ways you can do it, but capacity markets, bidding markets, and real-time energy market settlements all are things that drive the adoption of long-duration storage. So we're excited about places like. There's, I think, 13 or 14 states now that have set specific targets for long-duration storage and are now putting rules in place, and it runs the gamut from coastal places like Maryland and Connecticut to California, to places like Michigan in the middle of the country. And eventually, we think that'll, that'll spread everywhere. And then I'd add to that, that places like Germany or Australia are, which is why we're so excited about, you know, the European markets and Australia, they're frankly a little further ahead of us. They've got higher renewable penetration in most cases, and so they've seen the resiliency and reliability issues. The one thing that's very interesting in a place like Germany is that on top of all of those good operational and decarbonization reasons, it's now become a matter of national security. Because the plan in Germany, as they shut down coal, had been to then rely on Russian natural gas as their transition fuel, and it turns out that cutting a deal with Vladimir Putin isn't quite as reliable a trading partner as you might have hoped for. Absolutely. Well, we'll have to end it there. I really appreciate the insight today, gentlemen. Thank you so much, and I hope that you have a great rest of the day. Thanks for having us, Thomas. Thanks for having us.