Bloom Energy starts to grow up - By Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Aug 1 2011)

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   Out in Sunnyvale, California, low-key Bloom Energy shows signs of expansion. The fuel cell/green-energy-as-a-service (g-e-a-s) company won AT&T as a customer.  Since this spring, it has quadrupled its manufacturing facility and grown its workforce by over 70 percent in 2010, plus hired an executive to focus on developing the company's international presence.

   AT&T announced it will power 11 of its California sites with Bloom Energy Servers, producing 7.5 megawatts of cleaner power.  Using natural gas as the feeder fuel, AT&T will cut carbon dioxide by around 50 percent compared to grid power and nearly all of the SOx, NOx, and other smog forming particulates, but the true significance of the announcement is AT&T's embrace of the technology. 

   As an old-line phone company, AT&T is very, very conservative about the technology it uses, so Bloom likely had to jump through plenty of hoops to show the company 1) Bloom's fuel cells were extremely reliable than other alternatives, and 2), provided significant advantages over other alternatives.

   Back in April, Bloom bragged about providing over 1,000 new jobs in California, along with expanding to over 210,000 square feet of space for manufacturing purposes.  It also provided some fun with numbers by saying it had grown 525 percent over the past four years, starting up in 2001 with eight employees to experience "exponential growth" to meet increasing demand for Bloom Energy Servers.

   At that time, the company said it had deployed 120 Bloom Boxes around California at places such as Google, Walmart, Caltech, eBay, Staples, The Coca Cola Company, and Kaiser Permanente, not to mention more than 55 million kilowatt-hours generated and eliminated approximately 60 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.

   Towards the end of May, Bloom announced Mr. Girish Paranjpe joined the company as Managing Director for Bloom Energy International.  Paranjpe is responsible for creating new solutions around the Bloom Energy Server and the Bloom Electrons g-e-a-s offering.   Partnering is in his portfolio, hooking up Bloom with "energy industry innovators, and leading solution and infrastructure providers" to expand to the global marketplace.

   It's a significant appointment because the majority of Bloom's boxes have stayed within the confines of California.  Paranjpe says the company will enter into a few select markets that have unmet customer needs, the right policy environment, support for the right infrastructure, and "strategic like-minded domestic partners."   Be interesting to see if a couple of those geographies include Germany and Japan.

   All of these announcements would seem to foreshadow growth above and beyond the (small) number of Bloom Boxes currently deployed today.  Hopefully, Bloom will provide some more details on growth and production ramp rates by the end of this year or early in 2012. 

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