Verizon is also buying a bunch of fuel cells from ClearEdge Power for operations in other states, but is specifically installing Bloom Energy’s fuel cells within California. While Verizon wouldn’t comment on why it chose Bloom Energy as its supplier for California and ClearEdge as the supplier of fuel cells in other states, I speculate that the choice to go with Bloom in California was because Bloom works with California incentives to reduce the cost.

Verizon is one of a variety of telecom and Internet companies that have been increasingly turning to clean power to help provide electricity for infrastructure and buildings. Google has invested over a billion dollars into clean power projects. Apple (a AAPL), eBay, and Microsoft are deploying substantial clean power at data centers. AT&T has also purchased Bloom Energy fuel cells for its operations in California.

Internet companies are embracing clean power both to help add off-grid resiliency, as well as lower carbon emissions. Verizon’s Chief Sustainability Officer James Gowen told me back in April that the company’s clean power initiative is being driven both by the desire to add energy resiliency to Verizon’s facilities as well as the company’s sustainability goals.

During superstorm Sandy, a Verizon fuel cell installation in Long Island that powered a switching station (using fuel cells from UTC Power, which was acquired by ClearEdge Power) never went down. Verizon is also looking to cut its carbon emissions footprint substantially by 2020.

Verizon’s Bloom Energy fuel cells will be installed at two call-switching centers in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and a data center in San Jose. In total, Verizon’s clean power technology, including solar and fuel cells, will provide 70 million kilowatt hours of electricity for its operations, which is the equivalent of enough power for 6,000 homes per year.

Fuel cells look like industrial refrigerators, and they use a chemical reaction to produce electricity and heat. They are filled with large stacks that are lined with a metal catalyst, and a fuel (natural gas or biogas) runs over the stack, creating a chemical reaction that produces electricity and heat. The benefits of fuel cells are that the electricity can be created on site where it is used (so it’s more efficient), and if biogas is the fuel, then the electricity is also free of carbon emissions.

Bloom Energy has raised over $1.1 billion, including a recent $130 million, to grow its business. We’ll be interviewing Bloom Energy’s VP of Mission Critical Systems, Peter Gross, and eBay’s VP, Global Foundation Services, Dean Nelson at GigaOM’s Structure conference on June 20 in San Francisco.

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The 4.8 MW portion of the site has been up and testing since October, according to Apple, and the company expects the full 10 MW farm to be installed and online by January 2013. Apple filed to boost the size of the project last month. However, filings about the cost of the project were kept confidential.

When fully completed Apple’s fuel cell farm will be the largest out there that isn’t owned by a utility. eBay has also been building a large fuel cell farm for a data center — at 30 fuel cells and 6 MW — but now that Apple doubled its project, it has taken the fuel cell data center lead.

Apple’s massive solar farm in North Carolina, photo by WCNC-TV

Some other interesting tidbits of the projects have come out in the new filings. Apple says it plans to sell the power from the fuel cells to local utility Duke Energy, which means Apple won’t necessarily be using the fuel cell energy onsite to power the data center. The fuel cells will use biogas, and Apple can earn money by selling the power and associated Renewable Energy Credits to Duke. It’s unclear if Apple will also be selling the power from its solar farm to Duke Energy, too. Apple also boosted the size of its solar farm from 20 MW to 40 MW.

If Apple is using grid power from Duke Energy for its data center, and selling the clean power to Duke, then it puts Apple in an interesting position. The computer giant on one hand would be contributing significantly to adding clean power to North Carolina’s energy mix, but at the same time would be running its data center off of the state’s mostly dirty grid power (mostly coal and nuclear).

Apple also says in filings that it will source the biogas for its fuel cells from Element Markets Renewable Energy, and the biogas used will come from landfills, though Apple didn’t disclose which landfills would be used. The biogas will be “directed biogas” which means it will be injected into natural gas pipelines and not used directly in the actual fuel cells at the site.

Here’s some more background reading on these projects:

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In an interview last week, Microsoft’s Senior Research Project Manager, Sean James, described the new “Data Plant” project as “a symbiotic relationship between a water plant and data center.” Microsoft says the Data Plant is “the first zero carbon data center,” and is the first data center to use biogas directly for a fuel cell to power a data center.

Data Plant stats

So what exactly is this project? Microsoft’s Data Plant is a 200 kW data center — about 10 feet by 20 feet in size in a container — that is being built literally feet from the Dry Creek Wasterwater Reclamation Facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming. A system of pipes sequesters methane that is created by the waste water, cleans it, and then automatically pipes it into the data center’s fuel cell, which powers the entire container. The process is all automated, so it’s far more efficient than, say, manually taking the gas from the water facility to the fuel cells.

Waste water treatment plants produce biogas — which is gas that is produced by the breakdown of organic matter. In many cases at these treatment plants, the biogas is just burned away, because it’s usually uneconomical to collect, transport and use. The waste water needs to be put into anaerobic digesters, and over time the anaerobic bacteria in the digester digests the organic material at a warm temperature and emits the biogas.

Microsoft is using a 300 kW fuel cell from FuelCell Energy for the Data Plant. Fuel cells take a fuel — usually natural gas or biogas — and run it over plates covered in a catalyst, to chemically produce electricity. Fuel cells have long been under development, but only in recent years have started to be experimented with for data centers. eBay and Apple are building large fuel cell farms — using fuel cells from Bloom Energy — for their data centers.

While Apple and eBay are being more aggressive than Microsoft when it comes to using fuel cells for large data centers, the Data Plant is the first to use biogas directly for fuel cells. In contrast, Apple plans to use biogas for its fuel cells, but plans to inject biogas into a natural gas pipeline, which could be miles away from the actual fuel cell farm.

Brian Janous, Microsoft’s Utility Architect tells me that the entire system, including the fuel cell, the biogas system, the clean up process, the IT pack and the servers cost Microsoft $8 million (Updated: and Microsoft’s portion was $5.5 million). Since the project is an experiment, Microsoft is also not running any “mission critical” applications off of the mini data center.

Why the Data Plant?

Microsoft’s experiment will help the company work on alternative ways to power the rest of its data centers and enable its Internet architecture to rely less on grid power. Microsoft will use the knowledge it’s learned at this first Data Plant, to potentially build fuel cells and clean power at other larger sites.

The Data Plant is also an example of coupling distributed computing with a distributed power source. Microsoft is shrinking the computing and building it right next to the water plant, using sustainable power as the leading reason for the citing and building. This will become a growing trend for Internet companies across the globe as companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, eBay and Apple seek to lower their carbon emissions associated with their data center energy use. Microsoft had a plan to be carbon neutral by Summer 2012.

As more and more data centers need to be built throughout the world, Internet companies also want to become less beholden to the reliability issues of the power grid. Internet companies are turning to fuel cells namely as a way to add extra mission critical reliability in case the power grid fails.

If everything goes well with Data Plant, Microsoft might try to build micro data centers at other water treatment facilities. Janous says that water plants could make good sites for mini data centers because they are usually close to dense populations, so Microsoft can put the computing where there users are, and create a sustainable ecosystem off of the biogas.

Microsoft says it will soon start constructing the Data Plant, and will probably start running it next Spring. After running and testing it for 18 months, Microsoft says it will turn it over to the local university and the city so they can continue to run tests on it and learn how it could be used at a larger scale.

Images courtesy of FuelCell Energy (not of Microsoft’s Data Plant, but of Fuel Cell Energy’s other installations).

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As of Tuesday morning, around 7.5 million customers were without power across 15 states and Washington D.C. according to CNN. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday morning that he expects power to be out for the next two or three days in New York, “or maybe even longer than that,” and he also said that getting the power grid back up and running (along with getting the transit system online) will be the city’s “biggest challenges.” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo publicly told New York utility ConEd that its initial estimates of restoring power within two weeks were “unacceptable.”

The stark contrasts between the resiliency of our data communication networks and our power grid in these situations is unnerving. The power grid is highly vulnerable — it’s still largely a centralized system, with little energy storage capacity at the edges of the network, and it still lacks a lot of the intelligence that Internet architecture has that can deliver self-healing and re-route around damaged systems. And that’s a problem.

Electrical explosion

To witness just how vulnerable the power grid can be, watch this YouTube video:

CNN reports that the video is of a tranformer that blew in lower Manhattan Monday night. As Nicholas Abi-Samra, chair of the IEEE Power & Energy Society’s San Diego chapter, explained in an interview with IEEE about how utilities were preparing for Hurricane Sandy, there’s no way to completely protect the grid against extreme flooding, winds, rains, downed trees and flying debris. In particular, when a substation filled with transformers (like the one that blew last night in New York) is damaged, it can take months to fully repair it.

It’s the intelligence of a utility’s grid that matters in the wake of a disaster like Hurricane Sandy — how quickly can they identify outages and how quickly can they repair them? For many utilities in the U.S., the process of identifying who has lost power and where is only partly automated. Until very recently, the standard way of finding grid outages was by getting a phone call from the customer saying their power was out.

Some utilities are starting to employ smart grid technologies that can help more quickly automate the process of healing the grid. For example, SmartGridNews points out that Chattanooga, Tennessee-based utility EPB has started installing a self-healing grid that can cut the length of power outages by 40 percent. Long Island Power Authority was also in the process of installing a new outage detection computer system, but given it won’t be working until next year; little good it did them through Hurricane Sandy.

The underlying architecture

But beyond adding computing capacity and smart software to the power grid to make it smarter, the internet is more resilient than the power grid by its very nature.

The power grid has traditionally been built so that utilities have to balance demand for energy (buildings and industry consuming energy) and the supply (centralized power plants burning mostly fossil fuels to produce electricity) at all times. When there are large fluctuations in demand or supply, created by things like a power plant shutting down or a transformer blowing, the cascading effect can bring down whole chunks of the network.

The internet doesn’t work that way. When data centers, servers and network devices fail, oftentimes web sites and service providers can shift traffic to other data centers and servers or route traffic to network gear that isn’t suffering from problems. If there’s heavy traffic, service providers can rapidly ramp up and down capacity through services like Akamai’s CDN. Data network outages can also usually be discovered immediately and most often times resolved shortly — hours in the most extreme cases (some of the outages at Amazon’s Web Services have been the exception).

The internet is a distributed system. It was designed that way (by DARPA) at its core to be resilient to attack. The power grid is not (yet) distributed. When the power grid has a massive spike in energy consumption (like during a hot summer afternoon), the network can potentially go down if it’s not quickly matched by expensive (and dirty) backup power generation from peaker power plants.

Energy storage

It should be noted that it’s easier and cheaper to move bits than electrons — it’s more an analogy for how a network should be designed. To make the power grid more resilient, smarter and more distributed, it will require a massive investment in power generation, transmission, distribution, smart grid software and energy storage.

A truly de-centralized power grid would require local power generation through solar panels or other means like fuel cells, microgrids that can isolate a neighborhood in the event of disasters, and energy storage systems (like batteries) that can bank power for buildings. Critical systems and buildings like data centers and hospitals have emergency backup power (when it works), mostly from diesel-power generators, but these are inefficient, dirty, costly and not widely used (or needed) by much of the population with reliable grid power.

It’s not as weird as it sounds to move to a more distributed power grid. Large companies in India are so used to rolling blackouts there that many of the largest have their own storage and backup systems and the biggest weren’t effected by the massive blackouts in India earlier this year. Solar panels are also cheaper than they have ever been, and are being installed on the roofs of U.S. homes and businesses at a rapid rate. Of course, solar panels won’t help in a nighttime storm, but if they’re matched with energy storage, they can bank daytime power for the nighttime critical use.

STILL, distributed power systems and energy storage units need to be far cheaper for this decentralized power grid to actually be viable. When fuel cell maker Bloom Energy launched years ago it painted the picture of a Bloom box in every home providing a mini power plant to all homes and businesses — but that’s a distant dream until the price of its fuel cells drops dramatically.

Clean power

There’s also another part of the story of the power grid and Hurricane Sandy. And that’s the need for a transformation of the grid to next-generation

Aerial view of Apple’s solar farm

energy technologies, like adding in more carbon emissions-free power generation and energy efficiency technologies. Leaders like Governor Cuomo are already describing Hurricane Sandy as an example of a new era of extreme weather, without even mentioning the politicized word climate change.

Cuomo said:

“There has been a series of extreme weather incidents. That is not a political statement. That is a factual statement. Anyone who says there’s not a dramatic change in weather patterns, I think is denying reality.”

Whatever combination is leading to more extreme weather (Mother Jones has a good take on the Sandy climate change argument), reducing the world’s carbon emissions is widely believed by scientists as something that can help address the problems of climate change. That means developing and deploying next-generation energy technologies that reduce energy consumption overall, and deliver low cost and viable clean power.

Even if you’re still not convinced about climate change, it’s actually an argument about infrastructure. The power grid needs a massive investment — at even a greater degree to the investment that’s been made in Internet infrastructure — to make it a more modern, digital, and resilient network. And hopefully, a cleaner network, too.

Image courtesy of NCDOTcommunications, and NASA.

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Bloom makes fuel cells that take fuel (natural gas or biogas) and combine it with oxygen and other chemicals to create an electrochemical reaction that produces electricity. Bloom Energy servers can deliver distributed power on site at a building, and this can have a lower carbon footprint and potentially more electrical reliability than grid power.

AT&T will use the fuel cells to power its operations in California and Connecticut, and AT&T is buying the power from the fuel cells, not buying the fuel cells themselves. Back in January of 2011, Bloom Energy launched its energy-as-a-service product, enabling customers to sign 10-year deals to buy the power from the fuel cells without having to pay the high upfront costs of buying the systems.

AT&T first announced its deal with Bloom back in the Summer of 2011. AT&T told me that it would use the fuel cells to power not just administration offices, but also data centers and facilities that house network equipment. Bloom Energy has begun to bring in a good number of data center customers including Apple, and eBay (and maybe Microsoft, too), and the company launched a data center focus to appeal to these Internet companies.

Ten-year-old Bloom is a prime example of a really capital-intensive cleantech company: it could potentially be a game changer for distributed cleaner power generation, but it has needed lots of capital to scale up manufacturing. If Bloom closes this recently reported round of $150 million, it will have raised at least $800 million over its lifetime. Bloom CFO Bill Kurtz told me earlier this year that Bloom is about “halfway” to breaking even and becoming profitable.

While AT&T is now Bloom Energy’s largest corporate deal, Delaware utility, Delmarva Power & Light, is Bloom’s official largest customer. Delmarva Power & Light has about 500,000 electricity customers and plans to buy 30 MW worth of fuel cells from Bloom.

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One of the anchor east coast customers will be the local Delaware utility, Delmarva Power & Light, which has about 500,000 electricity customers and plans to buy 30 MW worth of fuel cells from Bloom. That deal is absolutely massive — a game changer for Bloom — and the largest fuel cell purchase from a utility in the U.S. to date. By comparison, other large fuel cell projects in the world include an 11.2 MW project in Korea built by FuelCell Energy, and Apple’s planned 5 MW fuel cell project in North Carolina to be built by Bloom Energy.

Other customers that Bloom is announcing on the east coast include Owens Corning, Urban Outfitters, Washington Gas and AT&T (which is already a customer in California). Construction on the factory is expected to be finished in mid-2013, and Bloom will start manufacturing its fuel cells shortly after that. Fuel cells use natural gas or biogas combined with oxygen to create a chemical reaction to produce electricity. Update: Delaware Online notes that Owens Corning and AT&T are actually California customers, and are considering east coast buys.

Bloom, a decade-old company, is usually secretive about its technology, its financials and its overall plans. But the company, in a rare video interview, tells GigaOM about its next-generation technology, which includes a 200 kW fuel cell that has double the power in the same footprint as its older 100 kW system. The new 200 kW fuel cell is 20 percent more efficient than the older fuel cell, and Bloom began shipping this technology at the beginning of 2012. For a detailed look and interview with the company watch our video!

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Buried in last week’s catfight between Apple and Greenpeace over the energy sourcing for Apple’s new North Carolina data center and how clean it would be, was a surprising fact — that the conversation between Apple and Greenpeace was happening at all.

Apple almost never reveals early details of its operations and isn’t much known for feeling like it has to respond to specific charges from activists. But Apple quickly responded to the Greenpeace report with a statement, disclosing that its new data center would consume 20 megawatts and reminding everyone that the on site solar array and the fuel cells it’s building will offset any power it draws from North Carolina’s coal and nuclear powered grid. It added that its upcoming Oregon data center would be sourced from 100 percent renewable energy.

If there was one takeaway, it’s that even companies as opaque and powerful as Apple, feel they have to communicate that they are taking strides toward sourcing clean energy for their data centers. Greenpeace reported that data center power consumption will grow 19 percent this year alone as the global power draw for data centers tops 31 gigawatts, equal to about 45 coal power plants.

Apple presumably made the decision to build in North Carolina, just as Facebook has gone to Oregon, because of cheap power. But in the last few years so much attention has focused on how webscale IT giants are sourcing their power that having a cheap power source might be nice insurance if you want to expand, but the companies are going to wind up spending quite a few bucks on ensuring their power is relatively clean.

A word about the numbers and transparency

What emerged in the argument between Apple and Greenpeace’s Gary Cook, who authored the report, was, for the lack of a better word, odd. Cook had estimated that the data center would use 100 megawatts based on the billion dollar investment Apple was making. A 100 megawatts is much more than what Apple could generate from its on site renewable energy assets, and so Cook labeled the data center’s power as dirty and noted that renewables would only provide about 10 percent of the power.

Cook responded to Apple’s statement that the data center would draw 20 megawatts, not a 100 megawatts as he’d estimated, by basically saying he didn’t believe Apple, noting that dropping a billion to produce a 20 megawatt data center ‘would be taking the “Apple premium” to a whole new level.’  In fairness to Cook, Amazon’s data center efficiency guru James Hamilton himself estimated that the 500,000 square foot Apple facility would draw 78 megawatts, noting that clearing 171 acres of land to build a solar array still wouldn’t provide that significant a portion of the data center’s power needs.

Data Center Knowledge’s Rich Miller stepped into the debate, saying about Cook’s analysis that “an obvious gap in logic” was that Cook’s accounting for Apple’s billion dollar investment didn’t take into account the cost of the renewable energy investment. We’ve confirmed with Apple that the clean power infrastructure build out is included in that original $1 billion figure used by Apple for the cost of the data center.

But those costs can be reasonably estimated. With solar projects costing around $3.50 per installed watt right now, the 20 megawatts of solar that Apple is putting in likely costs the company around $70 million. As for the 4.8 megawatts of fuel cell power, comprised of 24 200-kilowatt fuel cells,  they typically run around $800,000 per cell, adding about another $20 million to the renewable energy investment. Now throw in another $7-10 million for the 200 acre site (real estate hovers around $35,000/acre in Maiden, NC).

So we can estimate that Apple is dropping around a hundred million for its renewables project and with a comparable 28 megawatt Facebook data center costing $210 million, it’s still not completely clear how we get to a billion dollar investment. Though I take Apple at its word, that the data center will be 20 megawatts. Apple may be including ten years of operating expenses and maintenance into their total investment figures for the NC center, not just the up front capital investment, not to mention this is clearly a ten year project and we don’t yet know how Apple will fully use the site.

Now there’s a solution to these endless back of the envelope calculations that keep analysts like myself up at night. Given the large CO2 emissions associated with data centers and modern computing, companies like Apple could just disclose the power consumption of its data centers along with where they get their power. Google discloses its total electricity draw for the company, what percent is renewable, total metric tons of CO2 emissions, then makes the rest up with renewable energy credits. And maybe this last sentence was the purpose of Greenpeace’s report—to remind Apple that there’s a better way to do this.

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Apple says in the filing that it will install twenty four 200 kW fuel cells at an outdoor site next to its data center, and the fuel cells could start generating electricity, using biogas, as early as June 2012. Apple expects the entire 4.8 MW system to be online by November 30, 2012.

Apple didn’t name the fuel cell supplier in the filing, but the fact that it will use 200 kW fuel cells points the finger even more solidly at the Valley’s Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy sells both 100 kW (ES-5400) and 200 kW (the ES-5700) fuel cells. UTC, another fuel cell maker, only sells a 400 kW fuel cell.

I wrote last month that it looked like Bloom Energy is the supplier for Apple’s fuel cells. This local report states that Bloom Energy is indeed the supplier for Apple’s fuel cell farm, but doesn’t say where it got that info. That local report also says that Apple “will extract hydrogen from natural gas supplied by Piedmont Natural Gas,” and then “will arrange to produce landfill methane gas or some other biogas to offset its natural gas use.”

Update: I’ve embedded below Bloom Energy’s filing with the NCUC asking that the NCUC declare that biogas is a “renewable energy source,” so that customers that want to run Bloom fuel cells off of biogas can earn Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). Thanks to News & Observer reporter John Murawski for finding the filing.

Bloom’s fuel cells are large boxes that suck up oxygen on one side and fuel (natural gas or biogas) on the other to produce power. With Apple’s fuel cell farm and its solar farm it will be able to partly power its data center with clean distributed power that isn’t coming from the local utility via the grid. North Carolina has some of the dirtiest (but cheapest) grid electricity in the country.

Internet companies are increasingly experimenting with energy efficiency and clean power for their data centers. While all data center operators are looking to reduce the overall energy consumption of data centers, it’s still early days for adding clean power to data centers. For example, Amazon’s web infrastructure guru James Hamilton isn’t quite convinced that solar technology is a good fit for data centers.

Bloom Energy’s filing:

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Fuel cells are essentially a box that creates a chemical reaction to produce electricity and heat. Fuel cells are filled with large filter-like stacks that are lined with catalysts (a metal, sometimes platinum), and a fuel (commonly natural gas) is pumped over the stack, creating a reaction and producing electricity and heat. Fuel cells produce fewer carbon emissions compared to coal powered grid energy. Bloom Energy is a venture capital-backed Silicon Valley company that has developed a more efficient fuel cell, which it is looking to sell to utilities, data center operators and companies for corporate campuses.

A couple of years ago the idea of combining fuel cells and data centers seemed like a long shot. For decades, fuel cells have been a more expensive way of generating power, and the technology hadn’t been reliable enough to act as a “mission critical” system with a high degree of reliability. Backup power systems — data center operators commonly use generators and batteries as backup power for when the grid goes down — can’t afford to go down in an emergency.

But Gross tells me that Bloom has been working on making the fuel cell and the fuel cell power system itself highly reliable — reliable enough to act as both mission critical backup power and to contribute to primary grid power. In combination with the grid, fuel cell power could create one of the most robust systems available, says Gross.

Bloom Energy's launch event

Gross says that it’s the combination of reliability, sustainability and cost (in certain areas with high energy costs) that could lead to fuel cells being readily adopted by data center operators. “It could be a radical change for how data centers use electricity,” replacing other backup systems and also replacing a portion of dirtier grid power, said Gross.

Bloom has already sold fuel cells to telcos NTT America and AT&T, partly for their data centers, and I reported recently that it looks like Apple will be buying fuel cells from Bloom for its large fuel cell farm at its massive data center in North Carolina. Other fuel cell makers like ClearEdge Power are also targeting data center operators.

To be sure, Bloom Energy is just launching this data center-targeted focus, so it remains to be seen how popular it will be with data center operators. But, at least for Bloom, it could be a smart move. Slow moving, highly regulated utilities seem to be harder customers to sell to in contrast with forward-thinking Internet companies.

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Recently, I reported that it looks like Bloom Energy is the fuel cell provider behind Apple’s planned 5-MW fuel-cell farm at its billion-dollar data center in Maiden, N.C. However, neither Bloom Energy nor Apple will confirm or deny that they are working together.

Fuel cells look like industrial refrigerators, and they use a chemical reaction to produce electricity and heat. They are filled with large stacks that are lined with catalysts (a metal, sometimes platinum), and a fuel (commonly natural gas) is inserted in one side and runs over the stack. Electricity and heat flow out the other side.

Fuel cells are attractive to facility owners because they offer a cleaner source of onsite power. But fuel cells are still pretty expensive to install and maintain, so are still a small market.

Still, data center builders and operators are an increasingly hot market for fuel cell companies to target. Last summer, fuel cell maker ClearEdge Power told me it planned to launch a fuel cell line targeted at data center operators. Bloom has already sold fuel cells to power data centers for NTT America, the U.S. division of Japanese telecom giant NTT, as well as AT&T.

For data centers, the fuel cells can either offer primary power (with the grid as the backup) or as backup power (in case the grid goes down). Given that data centers need a whole lot of power — and the power needs to be ultra-reliable – most fuel cells will only make up a small portion of a data center’s power footprint. Apple’s data center in Maiden is reportedly going to consume 100 MW, and the fuel cell farm is just 5 MW.

Bloom is calling its data center power division its “Mission Critical Systems” practice (and it will operate on facilities beyond data centers). Gross said in a release that: “Bloom Energy will now fill a critical need in the data center industry. By providing a reliable, clean and stable energy source that is immune to disruptions to the grid, Bloom will help its customers reduce their security risks considerably, while at the same time improving efficiency and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.”

Data centers need so-called “five nines” (99.999 percent) of reliability; essentially, the power supply can never shut down. Google has said the Bloom Box it has been using on its campus had an availability rating of 98 percent, which translates into around seven days of downtime a year.

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