Capstone Energy Plus, Inc. Common Stock H.C. Wainwright 28th Annual Global Investment Conference

Thank you, Madeline. 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. Back then, Nikola Tesla was right and Thomas Edison was not. Distributed generation then was relegated to efficiency, economics or a backup solution. That world has changed today, and in a very fundamental way. Today, we are seeing the fact that our base load generation is shrinking, combined with severe weather outages, wildfires, and things like that. Then you layer on top of that, everything that we all know about data centers and the growth and the need for power there.

Lurking in the background is advanced manufacturing that is using robotics and AI to run their factories. This whole landscape of how energy was being consumed and thought of has fundamentally changed. Capstone back then also was in the distributed generation space, chasing efficiency, economics, and sometimes backup. 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. That is 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. Just to think about, well, how does that play compared to the 100-year-old technology that everybody knows, distributed generation, that they would use for distributed generation, like recip engines?

The way you have to look at this technology, yes, it is a little more expensive upfront, 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. 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. As a matter of fact, this very hotel has 12 of our C65 units producing about 3.5 million BTUs an hour of hot water and 200 tons of chilled water. That is the way this technology had always worked.

But we've taken that technology and we've grown it. 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 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. When you start looking at all the ancillary equipment that has to go along with those traditional recip engines, your site starts to get a little messier. It gets a little more complicated compared to another six-unit installation.

It's much cleaner because everything is on board inside that package, two hookups, a gas hookup and a power hookup. 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. 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.

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. 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. We're also excited about how we can help the utilities in what we call the utility grid guard. You see, because today it's not the grid versus distributed generation, it's the grid plus distributed generation or behind the meter.

We believe that we can help utilities when we think about, we talked about those weather events and having the ability to have 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've heard their names. 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?" 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. In the beginning we would chase speed to token. We thought that was the most important. We felt like obviously CapEx and LCOE or cost of energy were also important. 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.

Here's two approaches that we've been talking to a number of data center folks about. Actually, we've hired an engineering firm that's very well known in the data center space to help us pressure test these concepts. 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. The one on the left is not for today, but we believe in about 2 years, 3 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.

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. We not only check the efficiency box, but we also give them some better redundancy and reliability over the long haul. 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 have been going on? 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 2 megawatts a week to 7 megawatts a week. We've completed that transition and that transformation, and that's all just on one shift.

When we go to two shifts, we can then get ourselves over 700 megawatts. 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. 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. 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. 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 VDC architecture. The beauty was our technology already produced 760 VDC, so it was very easy for us to go to 800. All we were doing was taking that DC architecture and converting it back to AC to deliver to the traditional power systems. We can easily provide that, and we've been running our own unit on 800 volt DC since this past January.

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. 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 contaminates your combustion process. That's what other gas turbine technologies fight with. That's what recip engines fight with. Because we're an air-bearing, we don't have that. 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.