Maybe it’s a holdover from his days as a university professor, but ask Bloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar about the company’s fuel cell technology and you’ll first get an expansive response about the state of energy today.
Sridhar, who is also the company’s co-founder and chairman, argues that once you appreciate the extraordinary changes underway in the energy and technology landscape, you can better understand why Bloom’s technology is gaining customers and market share.
“We are the best available option using the cleanest of fuels that’s available in abundance now,” Sridhar told Newsweek.
Energy demand is surging, Sridhar began. New manufacturing, the rising popularity of EVs and the boom in AI data centers will push power demand to record highs.
“Put them all together between now and 2030, it’s more than 100 gigawatts of additional demand that needs to be created in terms of generation,” he said.
At the high end of projections from energy analysts, data centers are expected to consume up to 12 percent of all the electricity produced in the U.S. within just a few years. A recent study by the Electric Power Research Institute projects that just training large-scale AI models will soon consume gigawatts of power—the equivalent output of a large power plant.
“The math simply says you can’t meet even half of that through traditional means of generating power someplace and transmitting and distributing,” Sridhar said. It’s not just a matter of building new power generation, he pointed out, but the delays in permitting and building electric transmission that will make it hard, if not impossible, to deliver all that energy through the traditional grid.
“The old model is not going to be able to keep up at the pace that we are talking about here,” he said.
And that brings him to Bloom Energy technology and why he thinks the company is well-positioned to provide rapid, on-site power to bypass the bottlenecks in electric transmission while making cleaner use of existing fossil fuels.
“It’s very clear that on-site generation has to play some big role, much bigger than it ever has, since the time of Edison,” Sridhar said. “You have to produce the power where you need it.”
Before launching the company nearly 25 years ago (it was first called Ion America), Sridhar was a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona, where he directed the school’s Space Technologies Laboratory.
Space technology and energy technology are not so far removed. Many of the advances in fuel cell technology trace back to work done to provide power for spacecraft and sources of oxygen for astronauts.
Sridhar explained that the Bloom fuel cell uses natural gas as its fuel source, but unlike traditional gas-fired generation of electricity, there’s no fire.
“We take a molecule that has chemical energy, and, with no moving parts and no in-between steps, we directly convert that to electricity, no combustion,” he said.
Sridhar said the fuel cell is more analogous to a PV solar panel than it is to a gas-fired turbine. No combustion of gas means a far lower emissions profile and far higher efficiency because energy is not lost as heat.
Unlike gas-fired power plants, a gas fuel cell produces almost no oxides of sulfur and nitrogen—pollutants that cause lung and heart ailments. The fuel cells do produce carbon dioxide emissions. But due to the greater efficiency, the company calculated in a technical paper that since it first started supplying power to customers in 2011, it has offset about 6.3 million metric tons of CO2, equivalent to taking over 1.4 million cars off the road for a year.
Emissions from natural gas do not come just from the end point of use, however, and methane leaks from drilling platforms and distribution networks are among the main sources of this powerful gas.
To lessen that impact, Sridhar said, Bloom Energy works with a nonprofit called MiQ to purchase gas from suppliers that can prove they have addressed those methane sources.
Sridhar said that the global demand for energy is such that it can’t yet be met with renewable energy sources, and other low-carbon energy such as nuclear power can’t be built fast enough to meet near-term demand.
“Don’t get me wrong, we need to be putting more wind out there, we need to be putting more solar out there,” Sridhar said, but dismissed the idea that renewables alone could meet the coming demand given the limitations on transmission and available land at the point of energy use. “The idea of solar and when providing that power on an intermittent basis is not an option,” he said.
Sridhar argued that it makes sense to make existing fossil fuel supplies and infrastructure cleaner while still working toward a clean energy future.
“Better being the enemy of good is a terrible option when you try to make a transition,” he said.
Bloom Energy customers have included Walmart, Coca-Cola and FedEx, but the biggest growth area now is data centers. The company has agreements with data center developer Equinix and Taiwanese electronics makers Quanta and has deployed over 400 megawatts to data centers worldwide. Last month, the company announced an agreement to supply power to Oracle for its cloud infrastructure data centers in the U.S.
Bloom Energy will be among the companies participating in a panel discussion on energy and AI during “Powering Ahead,” a live event on September 25 during Climate Week NYC. You can use this link to register to attend or view a livestream.
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