Capstone Energy Plus, Inc. (CEPL) September 2026 Conference Transcript

everyone. Thank you for coming to H.C. Wainwright's 28th Annual Global Investment Conference. I'm thrilled to introduce Vince Canino of Capstone Energy, and we'll open it up for questions at the end.

Thank you, Madeline. So who would have thought that a single moving part riding on a cushion of air would be on the stage of today's world's energy Renaissance when this technology was developed almost 40 years ago the world was trying to solve a different problem power was abundant the grid was available and growth followed infrastructure and back then Nikolai Tesla was right and Thomas Edison was not. Distributed generation then was relegated to efficiency, economics, or a backup solution. But that world has changed today, and in a very fundamental way. Today, we're seeing the fact that our baseload generation is shrinking, combined with severe weather outages, wildfires, and things like that and then you layer on top of that everything that we all know about data centers and the growth and the need for power there but also lurking in the background is advanced manufacturing that's using robotics and ai to run their factories and so this whole landscape of how energy was being consumed and thought of has fundamentally changed now capstone back then also was in the distributed generation space chasing efficiency economics and and sometimes backup and we played in a lot of different swim lanes and today we still do but a lot of those swim lanes are moving from smaller megawatts to bigger megawatts and that's the neat thing about where capstone has gone over the years is we are a scalable product that can meet not only today's needs, but the future needs. So just to think about, well, how does that play compared to the hundred-year-old technology that everybody knows distributed generation that they would use for distributed generation, like ReSIP engines? And the way you have to look at this technology, yes, it is a little more expensive up front, but when you think about that single moving part riding on a cushion of air no friction no oil no lubricant no coolants a much simpler design not only to operate and maintain but to also install and so as a result of that when you look at a total cost of ownership we actually can play even in a simple cycle scenario when you recover the waste heat and turn it into chilled water or hot water the economics get very exciting and as a matter of fact this very hotel has 12 of our c65 units producing about three and a half million BTUs an hour of hot water and 200 tons of chilled water and that's the way this technology had always worked but we've taken that technology and we've grown it and we're going to talk more about how it plays on a bigger scale. This is just an example of when I talked about the simplicity of not only operation and maintenance, but also of installation. You see, because of that single moving part, the maintenance intensity is significantly less. It's much lower, less maintenance intervals, and then also the actual maintenance itself is less intense. So when we have to take a unit down for maintenance, we're only down for hours. We're not down for days or months. We're just down for hours. And that's one of the advantages. But then when you start looking at all the ancillary equipment that has to go along with those traditional re-sip engines, your site starts to get a little messier. It's a little more complicated compared to another six-unit installation. And it's much cleaner because everything is on board inside that package two hookups, a gas hookup and a power hookup. And that's why we believe as the world has changed and now the blocks of megawatt are getting bigger, we believe we can play in that space and we think we can play very nicely. So when we look at our future and we look at our traditional, what we call C&I, commercial industrial space, and we see that growing and we're also seeing some of those megawatts get bigger. We also looked at some of the other bigger markets out there, what we call our major growth market use cases. And of course, data centers are front and center. We don't have to talk about that. We are going to touch on a few ideas that we have for the data centers. But the reality is that at some point, the data centers will start to flatten out a little bit. And that's typically what I've seen in my career, is data centers will accelerate, then they'll level off, and they'll accelerate. And so during that leveling off phase, we want to make sure that we have other major growth markets that we're well entrenched in. So we're in particular very excited about the whole port electrification program and how we can help solve the problems at the ports. And we're also excited about how we can help the utilities and what we call the utility grid guard. You see, because today it's not the grid versus distributed generation it's a grid plus distributed generation or behind the meter and we believe that we can help utilities when we think about we talked about those weather events and having the ability to have subset substation protection programs or field deployed transformer programs or capacity guaranteed programs those are all very valuable resources that the utilities can leverage in their arsenal. So this is an exciting area for us as well. So we believe that there's much more out there than just data centers. We are very focused on it. But at the end of the day, we also believe we want to have a broader approach to a bigger market that's out there. So let me talk a little bit about the data centers, because I know everybody wants to talk about it, and you can't ignore it. A while back ago, we were having a meeting with a very large infrastructure partner. A lot of you heard their names. And one of the things that one of the engineers had asked was, well, if I'm going to be out in front talking about Capstone, what's the value proposition? And so this was the result of a whiteboard exercise. And we really broke it down into four main categories, speed to token, CapEx, levelized cost of electricity, and then community. And in the beginning, we would chase speed to token. We thought that was, you know, the most important. We felt like obviously CapEx and LCOE or cost of energy were also important. But lately, we're all seeing what's happening with community pushback, right? It's about low emissions. It's about no water usage. It's about low noise. And these are all things that play very well into our technology. Why? Because of that single moving part riding on a cushion of air, low noise, low emissions. So here's two approaches that we've been talking to a number of data center folks about. And actually we've hired an engineering firm that's very well known in the data center space to help us pressure test these concepts. And the first one is a little bit more complicated than the one on the right. The one on the right is just power only. And that plays well into that clean, simple installation that we talked about earlier. But the one on the left is not for today, but we believe in about two years, three years, data centers are going to start to realize they need to start blending in and reducing the amount of electric chillers that they're using for chilled water. And so by capturing the waste heat from our units and making chilled water through absorption chilling, we can reduce their PUE from 1.35 down to 1.15. So we not only check the efficiency box, but we also give them some better redundancy and reliability over the long haul. So if we think about, okay, that's all well and good, but Capstone's been a small player for a long time, how are you going to stand up and rise up to the demands, especially of these big power orders that are that have been going on well we've since redone our factory using lean manufacturing principles and 5s actually we now use 7s but the whole goal was to go from two megawatts a week to seven megawatts a week and we've we've we've completed that transition and that transformation and that's all just on one shift and then when we go to two shifts, we can then get ourselves over 700 megawatts. And the beauty of the way we're set up, we can actually find another location very quickly because we don't need a lot of expensive transformation equipment at the factories to do our final assembly and final test, because that's what we do in Van Nuys, California today. So we have the ability to meet those demands, and we've been working very closely with our supply chain, because at the end of the day, they have to then deliver the parts to us. And so that's something that we've been working very closely with them on. The last part towards the end of where I want to go with this is some of the things that we're thinking about for the future. And these are just four projects, but we have many others in flight as well. And the first one is very real. And we're still trying to sort out where this is going to go in terms of when nvidia announced the 800 volt 800 vdc architecture now the beauty was our technology already produced 760 volts vdc so it was very easy for us to go to 800 and then all we were doing was taking that dc architecture and converting it back to ac to deliver to the traditional power systems so we can easily provide that and we've been running our own unit on 800-volt DC since this past January. But we are looking to try to get that into some other pilots as well. The other one that really resonates well is this 5 ppm liner. So I talked earlier about community pushback about emissions. And one of the advantages of this single moving part with no lubricants and no oil is you don't have oil carryover that contaminate your combustion process that's what other gas turbine technologies fight with that's what recent engines fight with because we're an air bearing we don't have that and then with our combustion design technology we're able to get to 9 ppm today and we're well on our way to 5 ppm and actually we might even be able to get lower work these past few weeks we've been doing some more testing in the cold temperature ratio once we have that all completed we'll be able to release where we're going to go with this new emissions technology. But again, this saves a lot of money because now you don't have all the emissions abatement that almost every single data center project will have to have because of the emissions levels that they've got to deal with, both on a local basis as well as the federal basis. The next one is our C250 engine. And we originally, this had been a project that was worked on and shelved. we we dusted it off and we were going to release it pretty quickly but then we started to realize what we really need is to drive some more efficiency gains out of the technology so we're going to delay that release a little bit but we got some really exciting ideas of how we're going to improve the overall efficiency of the product so not just release a higher power density product but also a much more efficient product and so that's that's what's happening there. And then lastly is on the heat recovery side. And again, this is something that the best way, the best kilowatt hour generated is a kilowatt hour saved. The next best one is one that you're using 80 to 90% efficiently. And that's what combined heat and power or combined cooling heat and power does. And so this heat recovery module is very important to those spaces that need that. So, and then lastly, when we think about those engines, there's the C250, and then we want to get to a 500kW engine, and then eventually a one megawatt engine. And the reason why we're looking at it this way is we're trying to, you know, see where the data center trends are going. And as GPU consumption or computing power grows, and there's going to be a one megawatt chip out there very shortly. We want to be able to match up to those kinds of loads. So that's something that's in our sights as we look out into the future on what we think about technology. But, you know, we've gone from a company that had been around for a long time. A lot of people were excited about the technology. And, you know, we like Delta Airlines, we had our chapter 11, right? But what we did was we learned from that, we fixed a lot of things, and we believe that the turnaround is very measurable and on our way. We'd certainly like to continue to see more growth out of that, at least the base business. But we also see that this market is growing, and it's not just growing in data centers, it's growing in a lot of other places. And that's why we have a focus on those other major growth markets, because when one goes down, the other could be going up. And so our goal is to keep a real diversified portfolio of markets that we can we can attend to. And the other thing I think over the last two years we worked really hard on was cleaning up that capital structure. It was it was it was a sticky one, but we're not fully there yet. But we've got a great partner in Monarch, and we think we've got a great future in the next six months to even clean it up even better than what it is today. So, yeah. So, I mean, at the end of the day, this is a technology that's been proven. And unfortunately, maybe people didn't know a lot about it, and that's what we're seeing in the data center space. And so it's really now creating that awareness and that interest that this technology has its right to be on the stage of the world's energy renaissance.

So with that, I'll open it up to questions. Great. Thanks, Vince.