Tecogen: Providing Safety and Reliability in a Cost-Effectively Way

For hospitals, keeping the power on isn’t just about convenience or comfort, it’s about life or death. Providers and patients depend upon reliable energy to power the medical equipment used during procedures and patient care. Tecogen (TGEN – $4.24) provides that kind of critical reliability to hospitals.

The Company’s state-of-the-art InVerde e+ cogeneration units meet the rapid blackstart requirement for Emergency Power Supply Systems, giving hospital managers and clinicians the peace of mind that their patients will never be left in the dark, or placed at risk because of a power outage.

Moreover, Tecogen’s solutions give hospitals the ability to reduce operating costs and to minimize emissions. Consequently, the Company has successfully served the hospital industry for over three decades.

Most recently, it received an order for three InVerde e+ 100 kW Combined Heat and Power (CHP) units from a medical center in Brooklyn, New York. The three units will offer on-site power generation and efficient heating and cooling capabilities to the nearly 300-bed hospital and a community care clinic.

The $1.6M order – the highest announced order for Tecogen this year – is just one example of Tecogen’s growing presence in the health care industry, and its focus on multi-machine orders.

“Hospitals function 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and require round-the-clock reliable energy,” said Robert Panora, president and COO of Tecogen. “Combined systems enable hospitals to reduce energy costs, improve environmental performance and increase energy reliability.”

Additional Benefits

While patient safety is obviously a top priority for hospitals and other health care organizations, there are additional benefits provided by the InVerde e+.

• Cutting Costs: By recovering free waste heat from the electric generator for use in climate control and to provide hot water, the e+ can cut a building’s energy bills in half. The average InVerde e+ saves customers $50-100,000 annually on their utility bills. With concerns about the rising costs of health care so prevalent these days, this kind of savings provides big benefits. “Resources saved are often redirected to improve patient care,” said Panora. Typical equipment payback periods range from 2 to 5 years and many Tecogen customers qualify for additional incentives, such as investment tax credits, accelerated depreciation benefits, clean energy incentives, and demand response subsidies.
• Controlling Emissions: Tecogen is known for its environmentally friendly products. Its patented technology nearly eliminates criteria pollutants and significantly reduces customers’ carbon footprints. “Hospitals consume large amounts of energy and cogeneration offers immediate savings as well as an environmentally sensitive solution,” Panora added.
• Flexibility: Tecogen doesn’t manufacture 300 kW units, but in many cases, multiple machines make the most sense. In retrofit installations, for instance, small doorways or facility rooms simply can’t accommodate a large single 300 kW unit. In addition, for maintenance purposes, when one machine is turned off, the other two can continue running to pick up the necessary load.

Getting the Word Out

Tecogen and its management team are widely recognized as experts in the energy industry, often exhibiting at trade shows and speaking at association conferences. At the recent CHP Association’s Combined Heat and Power Conference in Washington, D.C., Benjamin Locke, Tecogen’s Co-Chief Executive Officer, was a featured speaker on a panel discussion entitled “CHP and Multifamily Housing” with the discussion focusing on the benefits of CHP use for multi-family housing and promotion of its deployment for this segment of the market.

Tecogen representatives as well as TTcogen attended the World Energy Engineering Congress, the largest energy conference and technology expo held in the U.S. specifically for business, industrial and institutional energy users. This was the first major industry conference featuring both Tecogen and TEDOM (via. TTcogen) alongside, showcasing the entire expanded product range from 35kW all the way up to 4 MW systems as well as chillers and heat pumps.

Conclusion

Providing reliable, efficient, and affordable on-site power generation along with precision heating and cooling services is the backbone of Tecogen’s long track record in the hospital space. With thousands of hospitals in the United States on an ever tighter budget, the market for Tecogen’s money-saving CHP solutions is wide open.

In addition, the Company is spreading the word on the attractive characteristics of CHP in general, and on Tecogen’s reliable and near-zero emissions technology in particular. Consequently, we expect more orders from the healthcare and other sectors in the future. Buy recommendation.

Smallcaps.us Advice: Buy	Price Target: $9.41	Latest Company Report (pdf)
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