Bloom Energy Introduces Load Following Capability to Enable Customers and Utilities to Meet Variable Electricity Load and Demand
Intermittent electricity sources are struggling to meet this demand, leaving substantial shortages in power.
In cities around the world, variable load, power-intensive applications, such as AI data centers, EV charging stations and commercial developments are rapidly coming online. Intermittent electricity sources are struggling to meet this demand, leaving substantial shortages in power.
To address this growing problem, Bloom Energy (NYSE:BE), a world leader in fuel cell electricity production, today announced a new flexible load following solution for its Energy Server® platform. This solution rapidly handles fluctuations in supply and demand for heavy power consumers, ensuring them power certainty and quality while delivering significant cost savings.
The new “Be Flexible” offering can operate on either side of the meter, providing both utilities and end customers with an on-demand solution. With the “Be Flexible” offering utilities are better able to deal with disparities between their peak and non-peak demands due to its dispatchable nature. Customers behind the meter are better able to accommodate the variability of their loads.
With more than 1 gigawatt of deployment, Bloom is a market leader for distributed baseload, always-on power generation with its proven solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology and groundbreaking Energy Server platform. With this new load following capability Bloom has now extended its value to new applications where the ability to ramp power output up or down quickly is required to address a customer’s variable load and demand throughout the day.
“We continue to innovate and solve the unique challenges created by the energy transition and the AI revolution,” said KR Sridhar, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Bloom Energy. “The Be Flexible offering provides a solution to customers that is technically, economically, and environmentally superior to legacy alternatives such as diesel generators and gas turbines. This solution can play a critical role in keeping the lights on when intermittent renewables are not powering the grid and the grid is unable to meet customer demand – a situation which is becoming more common in states with high renewables penetration such as California, Texas and New York.”
“I have been in the power generation business for more than a decade and selling gas turbines for the past six years. Providing utilities with a significantly cleaner dispatchable source of electricity with Be Flexible, which ramps up and down significantly more than turbines, reciprocating engines and other alternatives, will enable them to add more renewable electricity in the mix,” said Aman Joshi who recently joined Bloom Energy as the Chief Commercial Officer.
“The rapid response time of ‘Be Flexible,’ due to its solid state architecture, is immensely important when we consider the intense energy fluctuating demands like those from AI data centers, which we are increasingly dependent on,” said Peter Gross, a leading expert on data centers and advisor to Bloom Energy. “Data center power demands can nowadays easily jump from 50 percent to 100 percent in a matter of seconds. A power source that can’t deliver in such a short time will trip the entire site’s power, causing costly disruptions.”
In a whitepaper released in conjunction with the announcement, the new Be Flexible Energy Server is shown to follow an electricity load increase from 40 to 100 percent almost instantaneously. The Energy Servers can be configured in standalone microgrids or support grid operators during times of unstable supply and high demand. As the demand for flexible, responsive and sustainable power generation solutions grows, SOFC technology has the capacity to meet electricity demands for customers such as utilities, retail, AI data centers and EV chargers.
As discussed in the white paper, the key advantages of the Be Flexible offering for the Energy Server compared to legacy standalone power generation solutions include the following:
- Quick Ramp-to-Power: The Bloom Energy Server generates electricity through the direct conversion of fuels like natural gas, biogas or hydrogen, eliminating multiple energy conversion processes and the mechanical inertia of combustion-based solutions such as turbines. This enables them to reach the target power more than five times faster than other power generation technology.
- Cost Advantages: Compared to gas turbines where the efficiency dramatically reduces at lower loads compared to full load, load fluctuation has minimal impact on the efficiency of Bloom’s Energy Server. This provides as much as a 50 percent cost advantage depending on the application.
- Sustainability: CO2 emissions from Bloom’s Energy Server are significantly lower (up to 50 percent at part load) and minimally impacted by load fluctuation compared to gas turbines. They require practically no water during operation and emit no NOx or SOx particulates because they operate through electrochemical, non-combustion processes.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains certain forward-looking statements that are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “should,” “will” and “would” or the negative of these words or similar terms or expressions that concern Bloom’s expectations, strategy, priorities, plans or intentions. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, Bloom’s expectations regarding the cost savings versus the grid, including Bloom’s ability to meet the current or future electricity demands. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results due to a variety of factors including, but not limited to: performance of load following capability at scale and other risks and uncertainties detailed in Bloom’s SEC filings from time to time. More information on potential factors that may impact Bloom’s business are set forth in Bloom’s periodic reports filed with the SEC, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022 as filed with the SEC on February 21, 2023 and our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended March 31, 2023, June 30, 2023, and September 30, 2023, as filed with the SEC on May 9, 2023, August 3, 2023, and November 8, 2023, respectively, as well as subsequent reports filed with or furnished to the SEC from time to time. These reports are available on Bloom’s website at www.bloomenergy.com and the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. Bloom assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements.
About Bloom Energy
Bloom Energy empowers businesses and communities to responsibly take charge of their energy. The company’s leading solid oxide platform for distributed generation of electricity and hydrogen is changing the future of energy. Fortune 100 companies around the world turn to Bloom Energy as a trusted partner to deliver lower carbon energy today and a net-zero future. For more information, visit www.bloomenergy.com.
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