Not Your Father’s Data Center - Beyond Generators – Building Energy Ecosystems for Tomorrow

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

In this episode, Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer at Compass Datacenters, sits down with Brad Meissner, Director of Product Management at Generac and proud Milwaukee native. Brad shares his journey from growing up as a farm kid in southeast Wisconsin to earning a mechanical engineering degree from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and ultimately leading Generac’s industrial stationary generator line.The discussion explores Generac’s bold entrance into the data center market with the recent launch of high-capacity (2.25–3.25 MW) generator sets—addressing pressing supply chain and lead time challenges within mission-critical power. Brad delves into Generac’s evolution from primarily consumer backup power solutions into a fully-fledged energy technology company, including strategic acquisitions in smart controls and microgrid systems. The conversation also highlights Generac’s agility in manufacturing, its commitment to local production in Wisconsin, advances in monitoring and managed services, and the growing role of sustainable fuels like HVO.Timestamped Overview00:00 Intro & Brad’s Generac Career Journey04:38 Celebrating Generact at Summer Fest07:58 Evolving into an Energy Tech Company10:42 Generac's Rapid Strategic Entry14:08 Streamlining Standby Power Lead Time18:35 UK's Leading Generator Control Supplier19:44 HVO: A Versatile Fuel Alternative23:20 Exciting North American Expansion Strategy

There's customers who want a monitoring solution from you. So we're monitoring their generator sets, and we're managing that fleet of generators for them. We're deploying our service tech. And there's others, like in the data center space, but we see it more common if they want to be able to do that and connect them ourselves. So we build out our solutions on our onboard,

our onboard generator controls in order to be ready to interface with their system. All right. Welcome to another edition of Not Your Father's Data Center. I am Raymond Hawkins, and today we are joined by Brad Messner. Brad is coming to us as a proud boiler maker, but today, Director of Product Management at Generac. Brad, tell us what in the world is going on at Generac. Yeah, Raymond, it's a pleasure to be on, really enjoy joining doing things like this. So I'm happy to be here and talk to your audience and yourself.

So what's going on at Generac? Pretty exciting for us in the data center space. So we haven't really been in that data center space up until about two months ago. We launched a product that focused down the 2.25 to 3.25 megawatt generator sets, really the backbone of the standby power generation for data centers. Perfect opportunity for us to get into the space. Obviously, there's tons of constraints right now around backup power for data centers. And really the lead time and the supply chain challenges give it the perfect opportunity to step into this. So a lot of excitement around it, a lot of excitement internally as well as externally with our customers. And that's probably the biggest news for us. You know, beyond that, we have just

rebranded our industrial space from industrial power over to industrial energy. And that really hints at where we're going, the future of the company and the multi-affet strategy that I'm sure I'll talk more about here. All right. So just a couple of months in, so I don't feel too embarrassed to think, hey, I didn't know Generac was in the data center business. So the fact that it's still relatively new, saves me from a little bit of embarrassment. So before we get into what made you guys switch and what you're doing, why don't you back up and tell us how you got in the power business, a little bit about you, where did you grow up, where you go to school, and how did you end up at Generac?

Yeah, yeah, great question. So my journey, you know, up into the data center world and the Gen Set world, all really started kind of with my roots. So I'm going back years ago with the farm kid. So I was always around machinery, always wanted to tincter with stuff. And I kind of led to a love of machines that led me to engineering school. So I went to engineering school, mechanical engineer by background, went to a school called Milwaukee School of Engineering, very, actually, very closely tied with MSOE, the founder actually of MSOE, or sorry,

the founder of Generac, Robert Kern, had very close ties and actually been a very close donor throughout his years. Transitioned into working for other company in the generator space for about a decade out of school left the industry for about a year, a year and a half, and then Generac called me back in about a year ago. It's really exciting. I got the opportunity now to lead their entire industrial stationary line of generator set. So, you know, I started my career, as an engineer, developed the products, and then got the opportunity to be the product manager for them, which is really cool, really exciting because you kind of got to understand what the customer pain points were and then work with the engineers to actually bring those solutions

to life. And that's really what I enjoy about what I do today. So you said, kid. Did you grow up in Indiana or did you grow up in Wisconsin? I grew up in Wisconsin. Yes. I've always been from Southeast Wisconsin. So I grew up in Southeast Wisconsin, went to school in downtown Milwaukee and still live in the area today. So we probably should dedicate a couple of minutes to talk about Summerfest. I mean, you can't grow up in Southeast Wisconsin and not talk a little summer fest. Come on. Oh, Summerfest is fantastic. And actually really exciting. This is what I'm talking about. Let's get to the Summerfest. I want to hear your best Summerfest story. The best act you've seen in Summerfest, come on.

Oh, boy, the best concert. I don't know if I have a best one. There was a lot of great ones. It was really cool back when I was in high school. You'd get there early and you'd hang out right by the front of stage. You know, you get the opportunity to smack people's hands and stuff like that from the band. It was great. So it was almost like a ritual.

And now they do it over a couple of weekends. They break it up. Back when I was in high school, it was like an 11 or 12 day stretch. And it was just like a grindy. had to go every single day and see your friends there and get there early. So, yeah, it's a blast. It's kind of cool to go relive that and really exciting now. Generac is actually a sponsor for one at one of the stages.

So during the event, Generac sponsored a whole bunch of different events and stuff going on. Well, the PR team's going to be proud of us for working Generac in the Summerfest. That was brilliant, nicely done. I did not know they've broken up into weekends. Yeah, I guess I've been a half dozen times and done the marathon you're talking about, right? six or seven days in a row and, you know, nine different acts in a day and, you know, you're dehydrated and you just figure out how am I going to get enough fluids in me before I go back tomorrow. Good stuff. You probably have one great, embarrassing Summerfest story, but we'll make

sure your PR team. Yeah, we should, we should save that for a later day. We'll make sure the VR team lets us play this episode, so we won't make you get into that. All right. Back to Generax. So you grew up in southeast, Wisconsin, went to school down in Indiana, uh, been in, an industrial business for a while, switched over to Generac, how long ago, year ago, year-ish? Well, year and a half ago, about 18 months. All right. And this industrial group talk, you said you renamed it to industrial energy. Is that what you guys are calling?

Yeah, let me give you a little bit of breakdown of the company. So, really, there's two really big buckets for the company. There's our consumer power division. That's probably the one that most people would know what's by. Again, consumer-facing, we're all consumers, even if we work in industrial spaces. That's where we put most of our marketing dollars at their home standby. You might be infomercials and commercials and things like that out there for that space. And then you see a ton of them sitting next to people's houses.

We're the industry leader by far in that, really, we created that space. The industrial side of the business, which is very, very sizable. It's over a billion dollar business for us. We've been in that business actually longer than we've really been in that consumer power business. And we're a leader in things like telecom generator steps. We're a leader in natural gas generator stuff, but had primarily focused. down the smaller end of the solution. So, like, our largest generator set

until a couple months ago was two megawat. And that really doesn't, you know, play in that large data center space. So we've extended up to 3.25 now and really positioning ourselves to that mission critical space. Gotcha. All right.

So moving into larger capabilities or larger power and moving into the data center space, is it really a response to the demand in the data center space? or is there something else to it? Was it really driven out of, man, that space is constrained over there? So it's multiple pieces. You know, there was the three-eater partnership piece

and the engine suppliers and the all-caneer suppliers and the clueling packaging suppliers and stuff like that that made sense. Obviously, the market opportunity opened up. You know, it was a crowded space. There's multiple suppliers in the space. They were meeting the needs to the customers. Now, with the lead time, so constrained, it wasn't an opportunity to step into it.

And then beyond that, it's just a great growth of our, our core business. And our core business is generator set. So for us to introduce a new product to the market, not just to focus in the data center. We have a whole distribution business that focused on things like health care, water treatment, large industrial site. Because of the demands, the data center site, their scarvins were procted as well. It's an opportunity for us to grow our capabilities. So, Brad, help me understand from the residential side. You know, it sounds like you guys are relatively new in this industrial side. Give me a breakdown in however you guys break it down, I'm going to say residential versus industrial. But whatever categories

you guys use, what does the business look like from a share of your revenues? I think I'm just going off the top of my head here. But based on like our earning presentations, I think consumer powers probably just under two-thirds of the business. So it's certainly the largest portion of our business. But industrial is still a very sizable chunk. I think that's about a third overall. The reason it's a little bit hard for you to break up is because we've been, we had so many acquisitions over the year. So up until about 2010, we're really just a generator set-focused company. And now we've really evolved into a true energy technology company, both in the industrial space as well as in the consumer power space. So in fact, we bought companies like

EcoB. EcoB is the kind of the center of our energy hub for what will become like a home energy ecosystem. We've made a strategic investment into companies like Wallbox for EV charging. We have a whole energy technology company that focused on home energy storage, so like home energy batteries. I'm talking in with like solar system. And then on the industrial side, we're basically having the same similar strategic acquisitions.

Maybe there's not as much household names as you'd be expecting the consumer side, but we have acquisitions like Blue Pillar that lead now into our general acquisitions. Last year, we bought a company focused on battery energy system, a company focused on microgrids, and we're building out the energy ego system for

businesses, for industrial sites. and they'll be like behind the meter microgrid. So that's really the future of our business is going beyond just power generation and getting into true full energy collisions. When you say behind the meter microgrid at the residential level or at the industrial level or both? At the industrial level. At the industrial level. So our, you know, we have a home ecosystem and we have a industrial ecosystem as we're building out.

So Brad, you got to forgive my ignorance. Most of the folks who listen to us are data center, you know, centric people like myself. I don't have an appreciation for the scale of the Generac business. So how big is that residential business? So the overall Generac, the enterprise is a little over $4 billion. Okay, all right. Yeah, so we're a sizable enterprise, S&P 500 company. So we're not a small fish.

Yeah, plenty of money to invest in the industrial business. That's what I was getting that. Yeah, yeah. All right. So this industrial push, first of all, the move to get to bigger generators dead on, exactly right, love that move. Can you talk me through how long has this been in the works? You know, hey, you guys started thinking about this three years ago. Walk me through not only the product development to get to the bigger, I think you said three, two, five is what you're at now,

is the big one. So walk me a little bit through the product side, but also walk me through the strategic side of the business started thinking about this three years ago, the business started thinking about 18 months ago. Walk me through both the thought process as well as the product life cycle. How did you get up to three, two, five on the size? So this is, this is, this has been a discussion for some time. It's kind of been kicked around of what the strategy, how do we get there, how do we add value in that space? My entrance into discussions really happened about 18 months ago when I joined the company, so I won't speak beyond that, but really it kind of fully came to fruition about a year ago, and then we've been just rapidly entering

this as quickly as we can. And that's one of the key things I'll point out about Generac. It probably sets it apart from many of our competitors is our agility, and that's really a core competency of us. So when we, you know, commit to doing something, we're going to do it with PACE and very rapidly from the way that we stand up new factories, from the way that we adjust our supply chains for things like tariff impact or supply chain impact to the way we we develop our products. We've really focused on that agility. So talk to me briefly about where the, at least the industrial side, where is it getting manufactured today? Yeah. So the affecting thing about Generact manufacturing footprint is it's pretty much all relatively local to Wisconsin.

So we have three, actually four industrial factories now that are all located in Wisconsin. Our headquarters in Waukesha, Wisconsin, about 20 minutes away, we have a factory called Eagle. The actual generator set for these larger ones would be produced up in a place for Alka. It's about an hour a half north of where we're at our headquarters. And then we have another plant we just put up. It's actually our largest plant in North America called Beaver Dam, that's the location of it. And then our mobile business is up in Berlin, Wisconsin. So they're all within about a two-hour drive of our headquarters.

And the awesome part about that is they all feed each other, then they can all balance and, you know, ship demand or, I should say, supply around as we need. So it's really cool to feed the operations book for into our company. What's the likelihood I'm going to find a green-based Packer sticker inside one of my generators if I really dig? Is it possible? I mean, it just sounds like it might be possible. No, our quality theme will not let that flip.

The KQC teams are top of the end. of finding a Green Bay sticker, though, than a bear sticker. I think if somebody put a bear sticker in there, they might lose their job. That unit wouldn't function. This is Packer Country around here. Yeah, Packer Country. Very territorial. I get it.

I get it. So Oshkoshkosh is famous for something else, too, right? Well, there's Oshkoshkosh corporation up there, which I think many people might know. Yeah, isn't there a big air show in Oshkosh? Oh, yeah, the EAA Air Show. Yeah, that's huge as well. Yeah, yeah. I think it's the largest share show in North America or maybe even the world.

Yep. Yes. It's exciting around here. The whole like southeast Wisconsin area, kind of a buzz when that's going on during the summer. Well, I'm amazed when they hold the show, you know, where they have to park the planes. There's so many planes. You just, you get these aerial views of, you know, miles and miles and miles of fields where they've parked the planes because so many planes have come to town. So I know that.

I know that's a big one. All right. Enough with my aviation hobby. Let's get back to Generate. So you guys are new. You got worthy competitors in the space. You've mentioned manufacturing being in here in North America. You mentioned being agile.

If you got to talk directly to an end user and said, hey, why would you pick me over the guy you're used to? As a project manager, product manager, I'm guessing you got a pretty solid pitch there. So I can assure you there are people who make generator decisions who listen to our podcast. So what would you say to that person trying to spec out? the next gen set they're looking at. Yeah.

So I think there's a couple key pieces, kind of like the key pillars of our strategy as we come here and bring additional value. And I think the first thing right now is solving the pain point of that, that lead time, that availability piece. We're hearing that the market, you know, 50, 70, 100 week lead time,

needing to foot money down on generators in 2027, just this massive pain point of trying to get your standby power to get your site online. So for us, I think the piece that's really standing out to people and we go to them and say, hey, we can get you fully packaged deaths in 50 weeks. We can work with you and even reduce that after the first order and really be agile. Beyond that, the product itself is really built for that mission critical application.

So the engine that we're using, it's new to the North America market. We're the strategic partner for the engine manufacturer to bring it to the U.S. But that's not a new engine. It's used in Asia, Europe, all the different, you know, outside of the U.S. territories today. And we're bringing it to the U.S. because we really provides the service network and the support network that they need in order to do that. Plus, we have the longstanding generators that experience. That's a huge piece of it.

And then the full turnkey solution, so the type of support from end to end. So from the initial quote stage to getting the proposals in front of them, to managing the project through all of our packaging suppliers, Daxstream suppliers, getting it turnkey to their site, and then actually supporting it in the field. So we have great experience of that.

We've had many direct customers. I mentioned before that we're the primary supplier to the telemarked, You know, large carriers that you can think of. We have tons of expertise of managing kind of that end-to-end business for them. So we're bringing that into the data center, too. I got two questions. And if I don't ask them both at the same time, I'll forget them. So that's why I'm going to ask both.

But you can take them at whichever pace you want. One, can you tell me a little bit about the engines you said that are coming from outside the U.S. and that you're the exclusive distributor up. And then two, you said that you mentioned an end-to-end solution. Can you talk to me? You've worked with Telco's of similar environment. where uptime is crucial. That's why you're there.

But being able to monitor the generators and being able to understand their performance, I'm assuming you've done that on the telco side. It's a big deal on the data center side. So can you talk me through both? I know they're not terribly related, but if you can take me down both of those paths, I'd like to hear those both.

Yep. So I'll hear the engine supplier first. Our engine supplier is, for the one. They're well known in the data center space outside of the U.S. They've become a brand probably over the last 10 years. launching their 12m55, they're 16m55. You've got to say it again for me. I didn't catch it.

The name of the supplier. Baudwan. It's French. So I might be saying it wrong. I'll be the first to admit maybe it's not the... I'm sure I'm hearing it wrong, Brad, so it's okay. I think by my French, at least in that one word, is okay. So Bauduan.

So they, like I said, they produce outside of the U.S., they sell outside of the U.S. are in international business. So, you know, one of the disputing acquisitions be made with Pramac. they're based in Italy. They've used these engines for many years. But as they looked at bringing them to the U.S. and EPA certifying them, they had no support network for that. And they've really needed a strong partner to kind of do that sales and support piece for them. So that's why we're the exclusive partner for sales into North America. Gotcha. So that's the engine inside your generator wrapping. Yes. Got it. I'm not going to try to say it because I know I'll mess it up. All right. Talk to me about monitoring of the systems and how you guys.

guys, you know, you're already in that telco space. I know you're familiar with it, but tell me how you're envisioning that transition to the data center side, because at the end of the day, you know, predictive analytics, understanding, maintenance, you know, all of those things are crucial because, as you know, we're the backup source, but when the utility goes down, we can't not be there. So I'm interested to hear how you guys manage that. So there's really been two strategic things we've done to manage that. And why say two strategic things. There's customers who want a monitoring solution from you. And we have actually telecom customers who want to do what we call managed services. So we're monitoring their

generators set, then we're managing that fleet of generators for them. We're deploying our service tech and doing that, Pete. And there's others, like in the data center space, but we see it more common is they want to be able to do that and connect them themselves. So we build out our solutions on our onboard, our onboard generator controls in order to be ready to interface with their system. So the two strategic things we did is we bought a company called DeepE Electronics. They're a UK-based. They're actually the largest supplier, independent supplier

of generator control into the generator. They have extremely well-known, really liked by service technicians because it's easy to use their deep internet tools. And so that was a first piece of it. That happened in 2021-22 time frame. And then we bought another company called Blue Pillar,

which is now transformed into what we call our Generac Link solution. So all Generac generators above, 200KW now ship with hardware on it for monitoring. So then with cellular-based monitoring, goes back to our cloud-based system and we'll have the ability to remotely monitor

any of those assets. And that really ties into that piece of doing the type of managed service type contract long-term. And so it's really up to the customer what they want. We can tailor make whatever type of solution that they need for aftermarket support or monitoring that they want. Gotcha. So I don't mean

this as a curveball. So if it is, just say, we see a lot of generators now being, you know, running HVO instead of running diesel. How do you guys feel about that? If you address that, what's your thoughts on alternative fuel generators? So HVO is, it's great. It's a fantastic fuel. You know, if you look at the properties of fuel versus traditional Fahel diesel, I'll call it,

really is a drop in an alternative. Like, you can't go wrong. In the U.S., they all fall under what's called the AFTM, D975. I forget what the acronym fully means. but traditional fossil diesel meets that standard and HBO meets that standard so our engines are ready to go with

HBO if you want to fill your tank up with that the beauty of it is they can be mixed in any percent of blend so say you want to fill up your diesel tank with HBO on day one if you can get it but then in an outage period all you can get is that just a fossil you can jump in and you can fill it up

and then it's really that that offset in that light cycle emissions so if your HBO is made with like weight streams of fuel, it's almost carbon neutral, which is fantastic. You know, you still get your tailpipe emissions and stuff from a generator set. So from a local compliance perspective, you're not getting around those things. But overall, you know, sustainability is really improved at HBO. The biggest issue right now for HBO, though, is availability.

So data centers in the U.S., ability to get it is very constrained. Pockets of California are probably the easiest to get it right now. But I actually had issues in the past just even get it. I think it to test my generators because availability is very scarce in Wisconsin area. But no, when you're testing, no issues from a performance perspective. No, no. Yeah, yeah. Like, it's basically a drop-in alternative, but negligible.

And like long-term benefits on the engine, it actually can be an improvement. Yeah, it's marginal, but it's not going to degrade your engineer. I don't know. All right. So we've covered some of the very important stuff. We covered Purdue basketball when you guys were owning the Hoosiers. with E at Center. Did he win two players of the year?

I think he did. I think he did. I think he did win it back to back years. We covered Summerfest. We're going to avoid any drunk Summerfest stories to keep your team happy. You punted when I asked you on your favorite act. I'm going to go ahead and tell you

I had a dear friend of mine that was Grateful Dead, what they call those folks, the Deadheads that would travel with the band and follow them for a year. So this guy was, you know, intimately aware of every note they were going to play, and he took me to see the Grateful Dead at Summerfest. I'm like, dude, I couldn't name one Grateful Dead song.

He's like, you're going to love it. And it was a hoot. It was an awfully good time. Good. Yeah, so Grateful Dead at Summerfest with one of my dearest friends is probably my number one summer fest thing. The other thing I'd say is, and you got to correct me, Brad, it was like along the interstate there wasn't, it was near what I thought was a highway downtown.

it. Am I thinking right? Is it not right? Yeah, there's a bridge. It's called the Beluth of the Hon Bridge, where Summerfest, like the entrances, like right at the start of the bridge, and it goes up over it. In fact, if you ran the marathon, you probably ran over that bridge. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. And then, and then, I can't remember

the great, is it a museum that looks like the sailboat? Yep. Yeah, that's the art museum. Yeah, okay, the Galatrava. There you go. It's almost like bird wings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I propose to my wife right in front of it. So I know very well. All right. She said yes. All right. We love that. Good stuff.

All right. Well, man, we're excited to have help. When you say we can help with lead time, everyone's ears perk up, right? I mean, that is the issue in our space today. There's so much demand and there's limited manufacturing capacity. So having another provider throw their manufacturing capacity, especially North American manufacturing capacity, so we're not worried about, you know, travel time is great news for the folks in our industry. You know, a great brand name. We know you guys know what you're doing because you've been doing it so long in the

residential space. So excited to hear that. Good luck on the journey. That would be pretty cool for you to get to lead a product into this new space with the backing of the company that's been doing something else and generating billions of revenue at it for decades. So that's a pretty cool thing to do. We look forward to watching you guys and your future success.

We thank you for hanging out with us for a little bit. not only talking generators, but talking Wisconsin and Big Ten basketball. And now we know where your wife said yes. So all good stuff. The whole industry does now. That's fantastic. That's right. That's right.

And you're going to get people that are asking you and say, hey, I heard you asked your wife. All good stuff. Brad, man, we really appreciate you hanging out with us for a little bit and talking data centers. And welcome to the space and excited for the future for you guys. And we look forward to seeing how you guys go about helping the industry get, capacity faster out the door because, man, it does not seem to be slowing down. All right, Brad. Thank you so much.

I appreciate it. My pleasure.