Tucker Perkins highlights the unique opportunity in power generation due to rising electricity costs and declining reliability. He predicts significant growth in commercial power generation over the next 5-10 years, particularly in replacing diesel.

Learn more about how propane can get involved in power generation.

Transcription

Thanks, because I think the first thing for me whenever I’m talking in an industry, and I don’t say this very often, so maybe I got a chance to say it with you now. I always want them to do what they do best, right? They don’t need to be looking for new solutions until they’ve mastered their old solutions. And you know, marketers are so different across the country. Some are commercial only. Some might be autogas-only. Many are autogas none. And so, you know, job No. 1 is to do what you do really well, and your business will be successful.

When it comes though to power generation, I find power generation to be a unique opportunity right now for lots of reasons. Electricity is becoming more expensive, electricity is becoming less reliable. And those two things work in concert, and really, whether you focus on the residential customer, the commercial customer, industrial customers, or even if you think about some nontraditional customers, like ports or even office parks, the opportunities are there now to serve propane. And so it doesn’t really matter what your focus has been, you can talk to your customers about making electricity. Residential standby’s been our bread and butter, not really been our best class of customer, for lots of reasons. But you know, even in the residential space, we’re just starting to ease into new systems that would produce a little bit of power. And it’s even magnified if you think about commercial.

I do think the next five to 10 years will be a period of rapid growth in the commercial industry, mainly around power generation, mainly around replacing diesel. But, let’s just look at a commercial customer. They soon will, in fact, now have the opportunity to decide on any given day, do they want to take power from the power company? Do they want to sell power to the power company? Or do they want to do their base load power, perhaps that they generate alone and take some or sell some? And the technology is there to kind of do that math on an hour by hour basis.

And we’re having those conversations with customers that even two or three years ago we weren’t even thinking about. And so power generation, everything from one kilowatt backup to two megawatts, they’re in play now.

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