Fluence Energy Inc. - FLNC
can FLNC manage to outperform Tesla?
I’ve been puzzling over this company for the last couple of weeks and for the life of me I just can’t figure out where the added value steps in: to me this company is primarily and not much more than a distributor, servicer, and partial-assembler of products other companies manufacture and provide. Having said that, read on and draw your own conclusions. As far as the sizzle in the story, apparently at some point around 2008, power utility giant AES Corp. approached German industrial giant Siemens AG about coming up with a giant battery storage product that can be used at some of their utilities. What they came up with eventually became FLNC, and when you have a couple of industry giants like AES Corp. and Siemens AG either directly using (AES) or hawking (Siemens) your products and making the sales pitch, what’s not to love?
Fluence Energy Inc. (FLNC - $18)
Shares Outstanding: 115M normal “A” shares, 58.5M AES B-shares, 9M options (about 40M “A” shares in the float)
The rise of renewables has unfortunately also led to the rise of the unpredictables, since the wind and sun don’t always blow or shine exactly when and where you would like. Here in California it leads to the rather grotesque plea by elected officials and utility companies for consumers to reduce power usage between 5pm-9pm, which is typically when people get home after a long day of work, but is also the time when the sun is setting and the coastal winds are dying down. In the old days, 5pm-9am used to be a separate cheaper rate tier, but now it’s a premium tier. This is forcing some utilities to install storage products on site to store energy that isn’t necessarily used right away so that they can leak it back into the power grid during times of heavier use. What AES and Siemens managed to come up with is something they call the “Fluence Cube,” an 8 foot by 8 foot by 8 foot stack of batteries they segment into products called the Edgestack, Sunstack, Gridstack, and Ultrastack that utilities or large power users can put to various uses depending upon the source of the power. AES and Siemens were so pleased by the results that they spun the results of their labor into its own company (Fluence Energy Inc.) and allowed the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar to be the first major investor.