Who pays the most, and why?
The end user installing the machine, because only they price it against what they would otherwise pay for new equipment and a six-year wait. Everyone further down the chain prices against what they think they can resell it for, less their own risk and margin. The closer to the machine's next job, the closer to its real value.
The catch is that end users are the hardest counterparty to reach and the slowest to move. They buy when a specific project needs a specific frame at a specific date, and that window opens and shuts without reference to your retirement schedule. Reaching them requires either knowing the project pipeline or waiting for it to find you.
What are the six, in practice?
They divide on one question: does this counterparty take title, or does it arrange a transaction and get paid either way. Three of the six take title and carry the asset. One takes components. One takes a fee. One takes the metal. Ask which you are speaking to before anything else.
| Buyer | Takes title | Typically pays | Demands | What you give up |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| End user installing it | Yes | Most, when the timing lines up | Full records, own engineers on site, often a warranty they cannot get from an as-is sale | Time. The window is theirs, not yours |
| Principal taking title to redeploy | Yes | Below an end user, above everyone else | On-site assessment, records, cycle position | Margin, in exchange for certainty and speed |
| Service and parts houses | Sometimes, usually components | Component value, not machine value | Specific parts in specific condition | The machine, which stops being a machine |
| Firms selling on commission | No | Whatever the market pays, less their fee | Access, photographs, and usually an exclusive period | Certainty. You still own it until someone turns up |
| Original manufacturers | Rarely | Publish no buy-back pricing | n/a | Little, because the door is mostly shut |
| Scrap and demolition | Yes | Materials value | Nothing | Everything else |
Do the OEMs buy machines back?
Not on any published basis. GE Vernova advertises an engine exchange programme and an engine lease programme for aeroderivatives, not a buy-back. Siemens Energy operates a rotor exchange that puts your rotor into a refurbished pool, and a Brownfield Engine Exchange that replaces an old machine in place. Neither states a take-back credit. Mitsubishi Power publishes nothing of the kind.
The one major OEM with a public pre-owned offering is Solar Turbines, which advertises used, unused, refurbished and low-hour packages and explicitly serves end users and resellers. Even there, the page positions Solar as evaluator and refurbisher rather than as a stated purchaser, and Solar's frames are industrial rather than heavy-frame utility scale.
There is a structural reason for the silence. The OEMs are supply constrained, not inventory constrained. GE Vernova entered 2026 with 83 GW of gas equipment under firm order and is pricing new slot reservations ten to twenty points above existing backlog. One utility paid a $25 million reservation fee for a turbine delivering in time for a 2030 commercial operation date. A company in that position has no commercial reason to build a used-equipment desk.
Who is actually buying in 2026?
Data centre developers, and they are buying existing machines rather than waiting in the queue. Fermi America acquired six Siemens SGT-800 turbines, six heat recovery steam generators and an SST-600 steam turbine originally destined for an LNG project, then separately bought three GE 6B industrial turbines and a paired steam turbine previously in service at a New Jersey industrial site.
The pattern behind that is worth understanding, because it is what has moved the market. Data centres represent roughly 70 per cent of the 230 GW interconnection queue in Texas. PJM forecasts a 70 GW increase in summer peak over fifteen years. Developers describe themselves as choosing between building, bringing or buying generation, and a machine that can be at site in months beats one that arrives in 2032.
The same demand has created a class of principal that converts retired equipment into deployable packages. ProEnergy, majority-acquired by Energy Capital Partners in 2024, buys retired CF6-80C2 aircraft engine cores and converts them into 48 MW gas turbines; it has sold 21 units into two data centre projects, more than a gigawatt, and is delivering thirteen 50 MW sets to Crusoe in 2027. Several of those installations are explicitly bridging power for five to seven years, after which the units are expected to be sold on or moved to backup duty. Equipment in this market is not being bought once.
What about the firms that advertise inventory?
Read carefully, because several of the best-known names never own anything. Surplus Record is a directory: dealers pay for membership, individuals can post items free, and buyers contact the seller through an inquiry form. It carries more than 90,000 items and handles none of the transactions. Machinio, acquired by Liquidity Services in 2018, similarly connects buyers and sellers and does not take title.
Others will do either. Federal Equipment publishes four routes and names them plainly: outright purchase, where it buys the equipment upfront in full; auction; liquidation; and consignment, where the proceeds are split on predetermined terms. Which route you get changes everything about your risk, and it is a fair question to ask on the first call.
Where a sale runs through an auction house, the published industrial norms are a seller commission of roughly 5 to 15 per cent of the hammer price and a buyer's premium of 15 to 20 per cent charged on top, with the seller also carrying marketing, cataloguing, photography, storage, rigging and removal. Those figures come from general industrial auction guides rather than power-specific sources, and no auctioneer publishes power-sector rates.
What do the parts houses want?
Components, in known condition, for frames with a live service base. Gas Turbine Spares publishes what it buys: turbine buckets and blades, fuel nozzles, transition pieces and rotors, as-removed or used, across GE Frames 5, 6, 7 and 9, the LM2500 and LM6000, and the Westinghouse W251, W501D5 and W501F. That is a parts list, not a machine list.
Most of the larger aftermarket names do not publish a purchasing programme at all. MD&A lists spare assets it holds without saying it buys from owners. EthosEnergy sells newly manufactured reverse-engineered rotors rather than resold surplus. Chromalloy references used serviceable material for the LM2500 and LM6000 without describing how it acquires it. If your unit's value is in its hot section rather than its shaft line, this is the right channel, but expect to sell a parts inventory rather than a machine.
What is the honest first step?
Work out which of the six you are actually talking to, and ask directly whether they will take title. That single question separates a counterparty carrying risk from one arranging a transaction, and it changes what the rest of the conversation means.
Genloop sits in the second row of that table, and should be assessed on the same terms as anyone else in it. We take title as principal, with our own and partners' capital, and our own engineers run the inspection and the rebuild assessment rather than outsourcing the judgement. An owner chooses between direct acquisition, where title and risk move to us on the day, and a recovery mandate, where we take the unit through restoration and redeployment and the owner captures the spread. Fleets run under a divestment mandate, sequenced unit by unit; where an owner would rather keep title, the unit can be restored and put into contracted service instead. The asset never goes to the open market, and the owner deals with one counterparty from valuation to settlement.