Nextpower Inc. Class A Common Stock BNP Paribas Annual Power Up Conference

My name is Mike Rietbrock. I am the Director of Research at BNP Paribas. It is my pleasure to welcome you all to our second annual Power Up conference. Hopefully, you guys are having a good day. Thank you for making the time. I know that everybody is busy. I know that it is probably the worst week of the year to try to get around New York City, so we are very appreciative that you are here. Let any of us know if we can do anything to make your time more efficient. I would also just like to quickly thank Moses and his team, as well as our corporate access team, who do a great job of putting this together. It is a lot of work, and it always goes off. With that, I will introduce the panelists for our solar CEO panel.

First, our MVP down, well, sort of in the middle is Dan Shugar, who is here for the second year in a row and played an important role in putting this panel together. We are also joined by David Zwillinger from DESRI, Yuri, and then, finally, George Hershman from SOLV Energy. With that, I will turn it over to Moses. I think Moses will lead a discussion for 40 or 45 minutes, and then we will turn it over to questions from the group.

Thank you again. Perfect. Thank you, Mike, and it is a powerhouse of a panel.

Very excited to have you all here. I think one thing I want to almost, excuse me here, to get started, if I summed up the solar space right now, at least from the perspective of some of the investors, and I have had some of them even approach me about this today, this morning, the first thing they want to know, is this a net tailwind time or net headwind time? Are we in a good solar market or a bad solar market? If you follow all the data out there, if you pull up all the projects, what was safe harbored, what is projected out a few years, usually you could just take one McKinsey and add 10, 15 gigawatts into the out years. That is our secret sauce, actually.

Yeah. If you look at other things, we had the Section 232 come out a little over a month ago.

It has created a lot of confusion. What will this mean for inflation on solar? What will it mean for access to solar panels? Followed suit by the Trump executive order, which is accelerating the timeframe of pushing out some of the Chinese product. I do not want to monologue on that, but if I set the backdrop of AI power, load growth, solar is the cheapest, the pipeline looks like it is great, against a bunch of these headwinds in the way.

How do you put this all together? Would you send, as a sort of clarifying message to everyone here to start, projects are still continuing along and we are making it through these stumbling blocks, and maybe solar comes out stronger, or do we have to rethink our numbers and our models? So, maybe if we could start, let's just go through sequentially here. What are your thoughts? Sorry, Yeah Please provide a little bit of background of your business too.

Sure. Good job. I think you are going to hear different perspectives because you have different groups in the supply chain of delivering power here.

I think it will be a good perspective of where we sit, and maybe the fact that there is what you hear and what you actually see. SOLV Energy is an EPC and O&M. We provide the construction services and the operations and maintenance for solar and storage plants. From our perspective, we take it from the development assets that David and Yuri work through and their teams to develop projects. They come to us then to build and operate them, and maintain them through their life. What we are seeing is that our projects in our backlog, we have reported our backlog as about $8.5 billion.

We're seeing that that backlog that is really a 24- to 30-month slice in time for building and deploying projects is strong. We're seeing those projects are continuing to move forward. Product is secured for them. We've had long conversations with all of our customers. The demand is still there. Those projects are moving forward. From an execution standpoint, while there are clearly challenges around the executive orders and how do we have to pivot maybe an inverter manufacturer on a project that's in design, those kind of things are happening. I'm not going to say it's all rosy. But we have procurement teams that are working through it. Dan Shugar will talk about his supply of inverters into the market and things that are coming to help address some of these challenges. But in the near term, we're seeing that execution certainty is a requirement.

Our business is continuing to grow. We're seeing continuous incoming on a daily basis of more demand that is continuing to fill the backlog that we're putting in place every day. I think from where we sit today, the The near term, 24, 30 month outlook is really strong.

Yeah. I've been doing this for 18 years, and on stages like this where we sort of self-flagellate about whether the industry's succeeding or not. Every year we succeed. I have a basic belief in the capability and ability of the leaders in this industry to succeed. We've done it through a lot, and it's not always easy. I think the biggest changes that I see. By the way, my name's Yuri Horwitz. I run a company called Sol Systems. We're a clean energy IPP based out of Washington, D.C. Most of our projects are in the Midwest. We've got some exposure to Texas and SPP as well. We're in the middle of constructing about 800 megawatts of projects right now. We've got about 3 gigawatts in our pipeline and we operate over a gigawatt of projects.

We started doing some very different things and have migrated into the IPP space, and have positioned the company to do clean energy infrastructure as well as sustainable infrastructure writ large. So, a few things. Number one is we are at a political moment where there is significant opposition within this administration to what we do, and concern, and I think we have to acknowledge that. That is a time in the moment. We are also at a point where data centers and manufacturing in the U.S. will drive an increase in demand, overall electricity demand, from anywhere from 12%-19%, depending on which report you read and who you believe.

I would posit that the first one is a time and a point in time, and the second is a fundamental alteration of our economy, and I would bet on the second long term, not the first. Certainly the question is who's going to meet that? I'm not going to advocate or argue that it's going to be 100% solar, but I think it's pretty hard to avoid the fact that solar is going to be a huge part of that demand. Or, sorry, meeting that demand, that generation. It has been. It will be. I bet the long game as I have been building this company for 18 years, and I see that on the ground in our projects.