BrenX expands Hungary site, advancing first integrated industrial energy center

so their price for energy is like five times more than the US uh, manufacturer. They are eager to find replacement. So it's not a renew renewable environment thing, it's just a survival thing.

Welcome back inside our Proactive Newsroom and joining me now is Nir Brenmiller. He is the CEO of Brenx. And Nir, it's good to see you. How are you?

Very good. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, good to have you along. excited to learn a bit more about the company. I know you've had some recent news out. we'll talk about that in just a second. But tell me a bit about the company.

We started this company 15 years ago. Uh, we are coming out of solar. We developed technologies for solar, we sold all this company to Siemens. We saw this missing link before industrial energy, uh, that is missing a battery. You have batteries for your phone, we have lithium batteries like the Tesla wall, uh but you need a battery to store heat. Heat accounts for the majority of energy in the world.

If you want to electrify industrial heat, if you want to be more efficient in the industrial sector or distric eating by the way. So you need a heat battery. and heat battery that we all know is like a hot water tank for low grade heat. We developed a technology for high grade heat that can integrate into uh in this to energy intensive industrial processes and generate steam or hot air or oil and decouple it from the grid and from concurrent consumption and be aligned with the renewables and whenever the energy is available.

Yeah. And then this is a growing industry. It it continues to grow year after year after year, right? The need for it is great.

Right. Thermal batteries are a hot topic now. Um you see Bill Gates invest in most of the US companies out there, personally, uh because it's a missing component. Okay? You you just need it in order to electrify the industry. We electrified our cars. Now we move to electrify like we do heat pumps or air conditioning, okay? So you want an electrical source of heat. If you are tapping into peak prices, it doesn't make sense. So you need some device that you can store heat at low at low cost and when the grid is available. So it's hot, but it's still early stages and these are, you know, novel technologies, deep tech, it takes time.

Yeah, near what what sort of uses would you have for it? Is it like data centers, things like that, or is it a combination of a number of different things?

So, an industrial client uh takes 80% heat, 20% power on average and now computing also, you know, enters into the game. In data centers, what we can do and do is develop a way to uh use the heat for industrial applications. okay, you have heat that is 24/7 stable. If you can take it and move it to peak hours, then it's usable. But uh, we mainly replace gas boilers for traditional processes like food, beverage, commodities, manufacturing of uh any goods requires heat.

Okay. Um I know you had recent news out as I mentioned at the beginning of this that you've acquired some land uh next to where you are in Hungary and that's going to be a a key part of of the sort of the growth plan for the company.

So, we moved from developing the technology to developing a business a business model. So we started with just selling the the the boxes or you know, the batteries, then we realized we need to give it as a service in order to to to the end customer to know how to they don't know how to, you know, buy technologies, they know how to make pasta. And then we realized it makes a lot of sense to give them the full energy partnership. So they have X amount of power, Z amount of heat. Now they want some computing, there is also, you know, it's computing is a power, land and water. So it's also ingredients we know how to supply and we are moving into an industrial energy partner and we own the the supply chain. So what we did is we purchased a solar field across the street uh to our future customer. We also purchased a nearby land so we can put batteries in our system batteries and in the future we consider developing now to put a data a data center there.

And so we are moving for a business model that is also developing the the other side, okay, the the source, the energy source, because we can utilize it.

Um give me some thoughts on what's up next for the company in the next six months to a year. What are some of the things we should be looking for?

So we are now delivering the first commercial project. We are uh starting the construction of the second one. We are moving as I mentioned into a more proactive development. So we'll see more land acquisition, power plants acquisition uh and other services or technologies that are making sense to our uh value proposition to the end client. You will see more future clients that are becoming our partners and I think that uh, but you know, slowly but surely, we're not going to be a $200 billion sales next year, but you will see that we are moving to a more aggressive sales and uh delivering and being commercial. I think we are the first commercial thermal storage company out there.

There are others, but we are the first, but for sure, we are the only listed company uh in that space.

Yeah, listed on on the NASDAQ BRNX is the is the ticker. Uh just lastly, uh I just want to ask you about uh markets. Is it is it Europe, US, North America? Is it everyone? Where where you where, where do you see the key parts?

It's going to be everywhere, everywhere you have uh renewables and industrial players. But we target Europe as the low hanging fruit because Europe suffers deeply from, first from the situation with uh Ukraine and Russia, second now with the, with the Gulf situation, bottom line, Europe will relies on natural gas that is liquefied. The prices surged dramatically. They are now dependent on the US liquid natural gas, so their price for energy is like five times more than the US uh manufacturer.

They are eager to find replacement. So it's not a renew a renewable environment thing, it's just a survival thing. So you go first to places where people need you in order to survive. Second, they have a very high penetration of renewables, meaning volatile prices, meaning more opportunities for us to purchase electricity at low cost or even negative prices on the electricity side.

Yeah. Fascinating stuff for sure and as you mentioned the need is only growing. Nir, thank you so much. Great to see you and appreciate the update on the company. Good to see you.

Thank you, see you soon.

All right, there's Nir Brenmiller, he's the CEO of Brenx.