Heliogen, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Heliogen third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the prepared remarks. I would now like to turn the call over to Louis Baltimore, Heliogen's Vice President of Investor Relations, for opening remarks and introductions.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning to everyone. We're glad you could join us today for our third quarter 2022 conference call. With us on today's call are Bill Gross, Heliogen's founder and chief executive officer, and Christy Obiea, our chief financial officer. Heliogen issued its results yesterday afternoon in a press release that can be found on the investor section of our website at heliogen.com. As a reminder, our comments on this call include forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These statements include expectations and assumptions regarding the company's future operations and financial performance, including our guidance for full year 2022, the expected impact of recently passed federal legislation, discussions with potential customers, and commercial contract progress. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated in the forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially can be found in yesterday's press release and other documents filed with the SEC by the company from time to time, including our amended annual report on Form 10-K-A. During this call, we may also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. More detailed information about these measures and a reconciliation of the most comparable U.S. GAAP measures is contained in the press release issued yesterday, which is available in the investor section of our website and was furnished on Form 8K with the SEC. A replay of this call will also be available on the investor section of our website this afternoon. And with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Bill Gross, our founder and chief executive officer.

Good morning. Heliogen had an extremely busy and productive quarter. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act has significant positive implications for our business. We have looked at the incentives in depth and are now focusing our business to take maximum advantage of them. In addition to that, we have some very good news and some bad news. I'll start with the bad news first. The bad news is that we do not expect to break ground on our first commercial scale project in the fourth quarter like we had anticipated. due to having not yet signed the contract on that project. Groundbreaking is now planned to be a 2023 event. In addition, we now expect our revenues for the full year of 2022 to be in the range of $12 to $14 million, down from our previous guidance range of $20 to $25 million. This is driven mainly by delays in certain activities on our HelioPower project in California. and the associated revenue will shift from 2022 to 2023. You'll hear more about that from Christy later during this call. The good news is that because of the hydrogen production subsidies of $3 per kilogram in the Inflation Reduction Act, we are seeing more intense interest in a hydrogen offering for potential customers and provides a meaningful boost to our project economics. We had previously anticipated that hydrogen demand would not accelerate until later in the decade. But with the strong new incentives to our business, hydrogen is both viable and exciting immediately, as you will hear about in just a minute. There has been a massive shift to electric vehicles in the past year, and large scale solar and wind farms are being built to meet charging demands. Long range transportation, however, such as trucking, shipping, and aviation, still need the energy density of fuel. Hydrogen as a green energy carrier activates these enormous markets and many others. We believe the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Hydrogen Production Tax Credit will be a game changer for us. As an example of the way we're capitalizing on these seismic shifts, Yesterday, we announced that we've signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the City of Lancaster, California to build a green hydrogen production and fueling facility that is expected to supply up to 1,500 metric tons of green hydrogen fuel per year. We have also accelerated development of our 3,300 acre Brenda Green Hydrogen Project in Arizona. The project will be an example of our revolutionary concentrating solar thermal technology, creating zero CO2 green hydrogen that the IRA was designed to incentivize. Another example that highlights the diversity of hydrogen's applications and Heliogen's fit within the hydrogen value chain is the previously announced LOI we signed in August with Dimensional Energy. Dimensional Energy has developed a process utilizing hydrogen and carbon dioxide to synthesize sustainable fuels. We are embarking on a demonstration project to produce hydrogen for this process. Dimensional Energy has supported Heliogen in providing technical information for our conditional use permit with the City of Lancaster, and the Dimensional Energy team is ready to work with Heliogen to install their equipment as soon as the CUP is approved. We continue to make great progress to be able to deliver against these exciting projects. Next, I would like to give you an autonomous vehicle and production line update. We designed and built our autonomous cleaning vehicle that we call the Chariot AV entirely in-house. Using LIDAR, cameras, GPS, robotics, and our own proprietary AI software, The vehicle maintains optimal heliostat performance and lowers the cost of maintenance by automatically cleaning the mirrors each night. We recently completed initial field testing of the Chariot AV's driving and cleaning functionality. Heliogen's concentrated sunlight fossil fuel replacement technology is unique in that our components are produced in an automated factory as opposed to individually constructed in the field. That is the result of our revolutionary software control system that enables the use of many thousands of small factory-made heli stats. Since our last conference call, we have continued to make progress toward our goal of beginning assembly line heli stat production by the end of this year. We remain on track to accomplish this goal on time. We have completed the installation of all the equipment on our automated high volume heli stat manufacturing line. including the quality assurance tool that tests each mirror individually for proper shape as it comes off the manufacturing line to ensure optimal pointing accuracy and reflectivity. We are in the final qualification of our production lines to support our first customer's field. We will continue to expand our production capacity in Long Beach thereafter to be capable of producing up to 1.5 million heliostats per year. Completing final qualification next will give us sufficient time to have the necessary heliostats manufactured and ready for deployment at our first commercial scale facility in 2023. Now I would like to turn it over to Christy to give you an update on our recent progress and our finances.