A Climate Change with Matt Matern
Climate Podcast

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host and I have Andy Marsh, CEO of Plug Power on the program today, I’m really excited to have Andy on the program. And he’s the CEO of a publicly traded company that is a $12 billion valuation currently by the market. And, you know, it’s, it’s a leader in the hydrogen space. And Andy, I’m glad to have you on the show.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Matt.

Well, tell us a little bit Andy, about your journey to getting to Plug Power and what, what led you to that that position?

Oh, wow. It’s, you know, I started out at Bell Laboratories, and maybe your listeners who are over 50 years old not remember what Bell Laboratories was, it was the premier r&d research arm of the Bell System, you know, renowned for figuring out how old the universe was the lasers, the first transistors, and I was fortunate enough to work for Bell Laboratories for 18 years. And my primary focus was the development of power systems.

And if you think about fuel cells, for example, power systems are quite, quite a quite a good fuel to get a start into movie into fuel cell space. Then Matt, I went and started a company with two buddies and company that powers most of broadband, about 30% of broadband in the US, for outdoor applications.

The building I’m sitting in is probably powered by a fullier power piece of equipment. It’s still the premier technology. It was a company, I started with a couple of friends, we grow to $100 million, and about it, six year period, we sold it and then I was looking for my next opportunity in life. And I’ve rolled into plugged with about 15 years ago. And that’s how I’m here.

Well, that’s that’s a great story. So tell the listeners a little bit about what Plug Power does. My understanding is that you started or one of the major focuses was was power for forklifts and energy systems, instead of kind of the old batteries that forklifts used to run around with, which I understand would probably be similar to a car battery. You use your Plug Power developed hydrogen cells to run those motors. Is that correct?

Yeah, that is correct. I think the journey is even further than that. And that plug is actually 25 years old. And as I mentioned, I’ve been here for 15 years. And when I joined it was a pure research company. You know, we had research and work going on and fuel for different fuel cell technologies. We had, you know, lots of government projects. And, and my responsibility was and why I was hired was to transform this company into into a commercially viable business.

And, you know, we ended up focusing on fuel cells, putting them into forklift trucks. And then that led us other paths. But the advantages were, and I think this is really interesting, because when you talk about advantages for on road vehicles for fuel cells, they’re actually very similar. You know, why did Walmart and Walmart today has over 10,000 Very units? Why did they choose this products because they could fuel them fast comparative battery, they would run one and a half times longer.

They could eliminate all the complexity of the battery room. But as we were dealing with Walmart, what we found was that, you know, there really wasn’t air storage. When I read the SpaceX story, in some ways, it’s much more his very, very comparable. What we found was there really wasn’t folks who could build hydrogen fueling stations at scale. So we learned how to build hydrogen fueling stations.

And as time has grown on, you know, we’ve we’ve reached the point where, you know, we’re building hydrogen generation systems across the country. We’re looking at 70 tons available by the end of the year of green hydrogen produced by plot. We became this really incredibly vertical integrated company. Today, you know, we have over 60,000 fuel cells running around in places like Amazon and Walmart. Today, we built over 180 fueling stations.

Today we have joint ventures for on road vehicles for light commercial vehicles with Renault and France. You know, we have a plan to build out 500 tons of green hydrogen here in the United States, by 2025. We have a JV with SK and South Korea, the third largest Korean conglomerate that build large scale stationary products.

So we, you know, the company has gone quite long distance and you know, talking about the fuel cells and forklift truck business, which isn’t the sexiest business of the world. But during COVID, in March of 2020, about 25% of food in the US touched one of our products. So, you know, it’s so that really is the plug store and how we got to where we are?

Well, I think that starting small and finding a niche that is a viable niche, and then expanding and growing is a good business model. And I would, I would say, you know, I was exposed to hydrogen fuel cell technology back because my dad, his degree was in chemistry. And so he’s a chemist, and so he had all these chemistry journals.

And he talked about fuel cells back 40 years ago as being kind of the wave of the future. And I was kind of just waiting and waiting for, you know, play out in the real time. And then I got my first fuel cell car about four years ago that Toyota, Mariah, and then I got my second one about a year ago.

So I’m a believer in the technology, just a little warning there for the listeners, but we have something in common. My dad worked on fuel cells to furnish for General Electric and NASA. And so I was exposed to fuel cells at a very young age. I wasn’t really paying that much attention of what my dad was doing, but I knew he worked on it. And the osmosis I learned a lot about the technology.

Yeah, well, it’s like, we’ve been talking, it’s been around for a long time. But I think one of the great things about putting adapting it to real life purposes is you start to see okay, here are the little pieces that you have to create in order to build out the infrastructure to make it work on a grander scale.

And it’s great to see what your company is doing on that front. One of the things I wanted to ask you about you, your company has gotten into the electrolyzer business, does Plug Power actually manufacture those electrolyzers. And how does it you know, what’s the future of that look like?

Yeah, so future electrolyzers is really bright. We, we have the actually the largest factory in the world of make electrolyzer MBAs. So, which is in Rochester, New York, we bought two companies, which really helped propel us into that business. One was a company, which was an r&d company called gainer earwax, in Concord, Massachusetts. And we purchased them because they were known to have the best stack technology in the world. We then went and purchased a company in the Netherlands, which really had expertise and system development.

And we really have combined those two capabilities together. Now, when you look at our sales funnel, you know, which is everything we’re talking to people around the world, you know, it’s over $24 billion today for electrolysers. Mat, not all that comes from the through the funnel. Usually when you’re talking about funnel about 10 15% eventually filter through. But when you look at what’s going on in your there’s a big push for electrolyzers.

You know, we’re building a plant with a company called h2 energy in Denmark. Denmark’s looking at 30 gigawatts of wind power by 2030. And they feel the best way to move energy is via hydrogen versus electricity. And light has to do with, you know, how you know, the losses and the cost of pipes for building hydrogen out versus building electrical grid down into Germany.

But, you know, when you go through Europe, across the northern code in the Baltics, and in the North Sea, there’s this huge demand for wind power, and you’re leveraging that wind to create electricity and And, and then when you take a look at Northern Africa and thinking about solar, there’s a big push in Europe, in places like Tunisia to build solar farms, coupled with hydrogen electric electrolyzers, generating hydrogen, the put that in pipelines from Northern Africa into southern Italy, using pipelines that existed day.

So, you know, it’s the electrolyzer businesses, especially in Europe, a great deal of focus has been going into the fact that it’s a replacement for natural gas, it helps clean their carbon footprint up. And certainly what’s going on in Ukraine has really accelerated that. And here in the US, and I know, we’ll probably get into a bit.

The production tax credit, which is part of the inflation Reduction Act, we’re already seeing can be a huge accelerator for the generation of green hydrogen, because that act provides makes green hydrogen, you know, more competitive than natural gas today.

That is pretty amazing. Well, you’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. And I’ve got Andy Marsh, CEO of Plug Power, on the program today, got so much to talk about with Andy, he’s really at the cutting edge of clean energy technology. And we’ll be right back in just one minute.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern. And I’ve got Andy Marsh, CEO of Plug Power on the program today, Andy, you’re just talking about the electrolyzers that your company is building out and the need for those going forward, just for the audience’s sake, my understanding is, one of the big problems that we have with wind and solar is that a lot of times we have wind and solar power being generated, but nowhere to really send it to, and that if we have the ability to use these electrolyzers, to take that energy, turn it into green hydrogen, then we can use that green hydrogen at a later point, which would basically be good energy storage mechanism.

And I My understanding is we’re building a huge storage facility in Utah that I believe is government funded, and that could store a lot of hydrogen there for all the wind and solar that’s being generated in the West. I, you were talking about Denmark, and I was just in Copenhagen this summer, and they were talking about how during the winter, they are generating over 100% of their energy through offshore wind. So they I guess they’re probably that’s going to go up higher, and therefore they’re going to need this energy storage capacity to and that that’s where your green hydrogen will come in.

Right. Yeah, you know, Matt, couple points. The first one is in Denmark, what they actually are thinking about is how to become a net net exporter of energy in New York. And so you’re absolutely right, they probably have sufficient wind power to meet their needs today. But they’re actually thinking about building more and more when because it’s a one of their differential advantages of you know, that they see that they can be huge generating energy, creating hydrogen and the supplying that energy to Central Europe and be a replacement for Russian National Natural Gas. Here in the States.

I you know, I’ve really, I’ve really found your comments are really interesting, because if you take a look where you are in California, some of the best work that’s been done has been done at UC Irvine. By Dr. Jack Brett tack per hour. And some of that work talks about you know, how you manage wind and solar on the California grid when the California grid becomes 100% renewable.

And, you know, storing hydrogen in caverns is not new. Natural gas is stored in caverns today also. But you could change those caverns in California to be storing hydrogen. And as you mentioned, using electrolyzers to create green hydrogen, when the sun shining a lot in the winds blowing a lot and storing that for a rainy day. And when that rainy day occurs, one can think about hydrogen fuel.

We’ll sell plants, replacing today’s present peaker plants, and be able to generate high electricity right on to the grid to support California during the long, seasonal times, where the wind and high wind and solar’s you know, the uptimes not sufficient for their needs. You’re seeing the same sort of work going on around the world, now with SK by 2024 2025 will actually have 400 megawatts of power plants to support the North Korea, South Korea, North Korea, that would get me in trouble. The South Korean grid.

So yeah, I had Professor Jack Brower on the program a while back great guy and yeah, hydrogen guru.

Yeah, we yeah, we have about four projects going on with Jack because a great research facility and great, great leader in this industry.

Right? Yeah, I’ve also had Mayor Rex Parris, who is a big hydrogen believer, Mayor of Lancaster, California, who has has invested a lot in hydrogen technology. I don’t know if your firm has worked at all with it, Mayor Paris,

I haven’t but we are building a green hydrogen under environmental permitting now in Mendota, Calif, to generate 30 tons, and I think we’re looking to grow at the 45 tons per day green hydrogen, you know, for your listeners, that’s probably equivalent to like 90,000 gallons of gasoline per day. But that actually, we’ll be using solar power, where we’ll be using our electrolyzers to create green hydrogen.

No, what’s really interesting, we’re actually going to be using wastewater, and cleaning it up in the community to be used in the electrolyzers, then circulated back, so no part of that water will be able to, you know, provide the needs for water for the local community. So, you know, it’s, you know, it’s that pure circular loop we’re looking at. And, as you know, match your state is really one of the leaders, if not the leader in the world, in hydrogen fuel cells is one of the reasons we’re building a hydrogen plant in California.

So where are we in, in terms of this goal, the Biden administration had created this earth shot goal of making one kilogram of hydrogen $1. And I think it’s now what around seven $8 To make a kilogram of hydrogen, where are we in that curve of getting us closer to $1?

So I would say that we’re not you can generate hydrogen at a much lower costs than seven $8. Today. When you look at the hydrogen that used to, in refining oil refining for the sulfur isation. Now that hydrogen is probably about a buck 50 today. Now, it’s probably not to the quality you need and certainly doesn’t have the co2 footprint you need.

But if you think about electrolyzer technologies, and a lot, Matt has to do with kind of how you count that, you know, if you if you think about putting hydrogen in a pipeline, say it, you said 4040 bar so you know, if you if you’re getting electricity at two cents a kilowatt hour, you can get pretty close to that first shot numbers even today. But you know, what’s a real plant? And that’s, you know, one of the things that I think about a lot is that you have to think about everybody will throw numbers like that around.

But you have to think about what it really takes. And you know, if you think about you know, deliver hydrogen today, we can deliver liquid hydrogen to customers. They cost in the four to $5 range kilogram today, which when you compare that to the costs, for example, a diesel, it’s very, very competitive with diesel today, and the investment tax credits just make it much more competitive.

I would tell you, that you’re paying too much of the tag in California because you There’s not enough hydrogen players in the world today. But that’s about to dramatically change because the level of competition for hydrogen is about that the much different, because in reality today, there’s only about two players that support hydrogen generation. And I think if you’d look, five years from now, there’ll be 10 people, and competition will drive down costs.

Well, that’s great to hear some say hydrogen can never compete with electric battery technologies. What do you say to this? You know, and Elon Musk’s comments, the full cell is that just trash talk from?

I would say this. I am not a purist. I think anyone who thinks that there’s one solution to our energy crisis, and to our climate crisis is formed for for young people. I mean, you know, there’s a great report about the five scenarios to get us to net zero by 2050, that was done at Princeton. And, you know, when you read those studies, batteries don’t solve it all.

So there are areas where hydrogen for example, there were batteries aren’t really helpful at all, when it comes to things like you need hydrogen for fertilizer manufacturing, for high heat to make green steel, for green concrete, battery solve none of those problems. batteries don’t really work for heavy duty vehicles. You know, you get to a point and this is work that real work real life work done by DHL, you know, for like their Panel Trucks.

And when they show that anything that goes over 100 kilometers, that fuel cells have a distinct advantage because of their lighter weight. And 150 kilometers, batteries are just too heavy and they they fill their whole cargo up with batteries and not packages, which is their business. And so I think when you talk to customers like Amazon, Walmart, DHL, batteries are really not meant for light commercial and heavy, especially heavy duty vehicles that have to go any range.

Well, that’s a that’s a fascinating topic as to how and when we’re gonna roll out hydrogen technology for trucks and heavy vehicles. You’re listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern, your host and we’ll be right back with Andy Marsh, CEO of Plug Power. Stay tuned.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern, is also the founder of Matern Law Group. Their team of experienced employment, consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation, contact 844-MLG for you, that’s 844-MLG for you, or 844-654-4968, 844-654-4968.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. And I’ve got Andy Marsh, CEO of Plug Power on the program. Andy is the government US government making the playing field level so that hydrogen has a chance to compete against, say, electric battery powered vehicles?

Because from what I see, the government is kind of putting the finger on the scale in favor of electric and has been for the last few years? Just starting to kind of give some help to hydrogen doesn’t look like it’s quite as much. How do you compete when the when the government is giving a little bit more to electric technology versus hydrogen?

Well, Matt, I actually think you’re wrong there. Okay. Hydrogen actually was one of the real big winners in the inflation Reduction Act. You know, there are three aspects of that Act, which is really beneficial to hydrogen and fuel cells. One is his production tax credit of $3 a kilogram for green hydrogen. It actually makes green hydrogen in this is work that was based on work by Bernstein, probably the lowest cost gases liquid energy carrier In the world, it also is position the US from a technology point of view, the drive customers like IT companies like plug that really invest in the development electrolyzers and build hydrogen plants.

And we’re even given a great deal of thought how you can export globally Hydrogen Generator in the United States. So it really, you know, that credit should not be understated. There’s also a great crew, we’ve talked a little about storage, there’s actually some great enhancements to storage credits, which are part of the bill. And third, the fuel cell investment tax credit for 10 years, which provides users with 30%. Tax Credit for fuel cells is really beneficial. And top that off with the extension for solar wind, which meets the electrical costs for solar and wind, you know, provide a steady footprint.

I mean, I’ve seen numbers out there that fits, you know, 1.5 cents kilowatt hour for solar, oppose this bill, that generates helps generate really low cost green hydrogen. I personally think the work done by people like Senator Schumer, Senator Manchin, the White House in the inflation Reduction Act is really give hydrogen a real push. And then when you look at the infrastructure bill, Matt, there is a billion dollars for building hydrogen hubs and another billion dollars associated with electrolyzer r&d.

So, you know, you couldn’t find, I’m also the chairman of the fuel cell and hydrogen Energy Association. And we’re actually thrilled by what the government did to really help accelerate this industry.

I guess I’m thinking more retrospectively than then this last six months, definitely things have kicked in to gear for, for hydrogen, but I asked you to tell the audience a little bit more about hydrogen hubs and why these are important. And what do they mean?

Yeah, I think hey, you know, there will be in the United States, probably a build out of four to six large hydrogen hubs, which will be a place that where hydrogen will be generated, there’ll be a place for hydrogen will be distributed, which will be make it easier for fuel cells to be leveraged. There’ll be four of these hubs in the United States, which will become kind of the building blocks for building out the hydrogen economy.

You know, if I was a betting man, I would think there’s going to be one in California, probably one in Texas, probably one in West Virginia, and probably one in the Northeast. And I think all those will be hubs, which will be demonstrating a multitude of ways to generate hydrogen, both from Green hydrate, both green hydrogen, blue hydrogen, as well as being the baseline for really accelerating the deployment of fuel cell vehicles, and usage of hydrogen for a variety of applications.

So in terms of renewables, and generation of wind and solar energy, am I kind of going a little bit too far and thinking if at some point in time in the not so distant future, we’re going to be generating so much renewable power that we can make green hydrogen, add scale to to power? You know, all the vehicles that we need in our economy is that is that day? How far out is that day? Was that?

You know, I think that day sooner than you think, Matt, I think there’s there’s work going on with by plugs that generate green hydrogen nationwide. There’s people like NextEra, there’s all sorts of folks who were working in looking to build out. You mentioned the large project with Mitsubishi with storage and, and using electrical generation with present day gas turbines with hydrogen. So that day is probably much sooner than you think.

And, you know, I don’t worry too much about the capabilities of how you go build out facilities to build electrolyzers I think probably the biggest challenge is how fast the solar wind rollout is in the United States. And, you know, it’s, you know, I think that when you look at the numbers, it doesn’t really scare you, I think the biggest year for solar wind was 2020, or 2019. And I think you’d look back at those numbers and how much more we have to start producing each year. It’s not a number that, you know, as an engineer, I’m not floored by the increase, it’s required for us to do that.

So it’s, you know, it’s going to be a journey between now and 2030, which will accelerate rapidly, and then even faster between 2030 to 2050, to get the net zero, to where we’re at a point where, you know, people like Bloomberg and McKinsey talk about 20% of world energy coming from hydrogen, whether it’s 15%, or 25%. I think the build out will be pretty rapid as we go towards these net zero goals. And look, you see what’s see what’s going on in Florida today that they’re horrific storm. You know, there’s a, you know, obviously, you can’t say that was climate change. But certainly he’s had an impact with making the ocean warmer and making the storms more dangerous.

Yeah, it’s, it’s certainly a scary situation, and we need to do something and we need to do something fast, because we only have one planet. And if we screw it up, there’s no going back. As far as hydrogen powered airplane ships, trucks, is that a is that a business area that plug is investigating? Are you going to leave that to others to we’ve actually, not only we have a lot of interesting work going on planes.

We’ve invested in a company called universal hydrogen. We’ve have other we have a couple other investments in companies, and we’re developing products for those applications that I can tell, you know, as you know, I’m an engineer, Matt. So I there really might forward looking work activity. And, you know, I was with my team earlier in the day talking about how we can reduce the weight of fuel cells by, you know, up to 75%.

And, you know, that would be beneficial, obviously, for aircraft. But you know, lighter weight, higher efficiency, longer range is good for every applications old and middlee. So, we’re investing a lot of times in planes. You know, we, as I think we talked about, you know, we have our JB with Renaud from vehicles. You know, shipping, I haven’t done a lot in I, I saw that. A train that we have some products running in actually ran for the first time yesterday. So that’s, that’s a, that’s a new scoop there, Matt.

And, you know, so you know, all those applications were lightweight durability, long range, you know, we were involved and fuel cells are really interesting. I haven’t dug deep in the ships yet. But I think ships are really probably green ammonia is probably the right solutions for long distance shipping ferries, probably for fuel cells, but no green ammonia made with hydrogen, nitrogen, green hydrogen, nitrogen, I think is a real interesting market.

And I think that green ammonia running ships, especially for long haul is probably the answer. When you see the work going on. We’re also involved with Airbus looking at looking to position the first hydrogen of for hydrogen generation for planes for Airbus. So that’s what we have going on.

Well, that’s exciting. So will they need to reengineer the entire plane to make that work? Or is that something that can be done with an existing plane? That’s a kind of a gas using, you know, plane?

Yeah. So universal hydrogen, which is doing really interesting work is developing a retrofit kit to essentially for for regional aircraft, which essentially allows you to, you know, roll wind change out the row in liquid hydrogen, and to make certain changes, you know, when you would normally retrofitted an airplane and retrofitted up to hydrogen. So it is a change out but it is pretty straightforward.

That’s an amazing potential because obviously Uh, you know, building the entire worldwide aircraft fleet from from scratch would take a tremendous amount of time. So if we can retrofit those planes without having to kind of, you know, go back to square one that would be incredible.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got Andy Marsh on the program CEO of Plug Power. And we’ll be back in just one minute to talk to Andy about a number of other topics.

You’re listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got Andy Marsh on the program, CEO of Plug Power. Andy, I’d like to shift gears a little bit and talk about the missions and goals of Plug Power, say for three years, five years, 10 years? Where do you see the company going? I mean, obviously, some of it’s kind of unknowable, because technology’s changing, you’re acquiring different companies, but kind of just general directional trends. Where do you see, where do you see company going?

So that we’ve been really clear that by 2025, we’re going to be able to achieve $3 billion in revenue, and that will be profitable revenue. But how we get there really has a lot to do with some of the basic work we’re doing today. One is that, as we talked about, we’re building out this green hydrogen network across United States, we’re, we’re beginning to build our own hydrogen generation plants. In New York, for example, at the port of andfor, having low costs, green hydrogen available, will be a great accelerator for our fuel cell market.

And we have some exciting projects products going on there. One is the continual refinement, and improvements in our material handling business where we envisioned 25% of forklift trucks by 2030, could ultimately be ran on fuel cells, we think a great deal about, you know, stationary products we’ve done. You know, with Microsoft, we’ve done some leading edge work, developing fuel cell products that can be integrated with data centers.

And you know, every major every major data center company in the world has been engaged with us on this product development activity, as well as it’s right there for a second on the data center front, because we know that data centers consume an enormous amount of power. And I assume it’s just going up exponentially as every year. Tell us a little bit about why this is a good product for data centers.

Well, first, Matt, is that, you know, you have cut, let’s talk about Microsoft, who has been the most public about it. And Microsoft today uses, you know, about 30 megawatts of diesel generators at their site. And you know, you can because you have to make sure they work, they run probably only hour a day normally. But as you have long blackouts in California, you know, they have to back up these 30 megawatt data centers.

And when you think about, you know, their goals to be clean, that fuel cells and hydrogen, are really the only solution for them to have meet their net zero goals. It also, you know, when we look over time, over the next five years, you can see that that technology can be cost competitive with these old technology. On top of that, Matt, you can you know, we talked a little bit about how you support the grid.

They can use them as peaker plants, so that when the electricity bill was electricity coming as high, you know, they can use their own internal generate hydrogen fuel cells to power the data centers and not have to pay P charges on top of that they can actually use it and leverage it to put electricity back on the grid. That’s why people like Microsoft are so excited.

And for your listeners, if you Google “Plug Power Microsoft,” you’ll see some really incredible descriptions of what Microsoft unplugged power law do together. So that’s a real growth opportunity.

So with these data centers then become like little power plants contribute to the grid during peak hours and contribute more green energy to the grid. Absolutely.

You know, thank you about this micro cells. It is really cool.

Yeah, I mean, we’ve talked about micro grids on the program a number of times with lots of different guests and different pieces of this economy. And it seems as though it is the future to have, you know, many different nodes of power versus one major utility provider.

Yeah. And, you know, next year, you know, we’re in position A, I met this week with the team, you know, to have 60 megawatts of that deployed next year doesn’t sound like a big number, but it’s a big start from zero. And it’s been it’s been some of the more interesting work we’ve done. And we talked about the electrolyzer business, Matt, the electrolyzer business is not a demand issue. Kids, it’s actually a supply issue.

We got to, you know, we could sell everything we got in the electrolyzer business because the demand for green hydrogen to replace other fuels and other chemicals, you know, is, you know, you can’t, you can’t really put a number around it. But think about ammonia manufacturing, which has become really critical during this terrible war in Ukraine. And we’re already working with them green ammonia, ammonia manufacturers to generate green ammonia, and get rid of electric using usage of natural gas.

And so let me ask you to drill down on that a bit. Yeah. Or I should, should the market be responding to that and investing 10s of billions of dollars in additional funds in that technology? So we build out more electrolyzers? Or is that government’s role? Or where should we be on that front?

So mad? I think it is. I think the government is the US government, it’s actually done the work. And it’s up to companies like plug, the seller would develop our products and sell our wares. And there is customer poll. I have you know, the US I have no, no complaints about the government support. I think in Europe, there’s a great commitment.

And there is certainly a lot of activity going on in Europe in both green ammonia. Injecting of hydrogen and natural gas pipelines. And, you know, in the US is kind of easier, because there’s, you know, it’s less dependent upon government programs, you know, is much more market based. But, you know, I think a lot of it resides with people who, like me, and all the people that work for me about how to make this happen.

Well, I’m gonna ask you in terms of technology, hydrogen technology and cars, Toyota has invested heavily in it and they’re doing it. You’d say Renaud is involved in it? Where are they in that process?

Yeah, so we have a jig that we’re actually focused on. And I’m a believer that. Sorry, Matt, I know your own two cars here. I think cars are probably more like a 2035. Just because of the availability of things like fueling stations, I know California has done a good job. But the value proposition is strongest for commercial vehicles.

Were the advantages of fast charging the advantages of longer range, the advantages of Wait, wait, you know, are just so overwhelming that the value proposition is so far superior to batteries, you know, kind of comes down to the fact that you can keep the vehicle on the road all the time. If you’re using fuel cells, without having to worry about charging, you can put more goods on board with fuel cells than you can with batteries, because they’re lighter weight, and they can go twice as long as batteries and the value proposition if you’re running a commercial enterprise.

That’s where you’re going to see fuel cells dominate. Eventually, I think when you get to around 2035 You know, there’s a lot of people who know in California, I think only about 15% of people I’ve seen data could actually charge cars at their home. They live it. And I think that’s a real limit. And I think that some of these advantages of fuel cells were, you know, fueling looks a lot more like what you do with gasoline stations today has a lot of advantages.

Well, in terms of trucks, and you’re talking about, you know, larger vehicles, where are we as far as getting that technology in trucks, because obviously, we have 10s of millions of trucks on the road, we got to manufacture a lot of fuel cells to kind of make a dent in those emissions.

Right. So a lot of good work, work going on. And, and there aren’t a lot of companies working with heavy duty vehicles. But I think that when you think about and I think there’s a lot more advantages of missions. I can tell you, when we look at it, there is a lot of customer polling places like Walmart, now Amazon, the move everything from class six, eight vehicles, to fuel cells so that they can meet their netzero goals.

I think you’ll probably see more rollouts in the next three, four years. In Europe, we expect to have about 100,000 light commercial vehicles on the road for like, Amazon Prime products that look like that, to be delivering packages. So I think between now and 2030, in the commercial vehicle market, you’re going to see a lot of activity.

Well, Andy, great having you on the program – Andy Marsh, CEO of Plug Power. You’ve been listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. And, Andy, thank you again. Love to have you on the program to talk more about this exciting technology.

Thanks for having me, Matt. I enjoyed talking to you today.

Okay, well, it’s been fantastic. Have a great day and tune back in next week.