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Status Update

Nov 18, 2020

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the investor call to discuss Bloom Energy's approach to hydrogen. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. I'll now turn the conference over to Susan Smith with investor relations. You may begin.

Susan Seilheimer Brennan
Head of Investor Relations, Bloom Energy

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on this call to discuss Bloom Energy's approach to hydrogen. To supplement this call, we will be referring to a presentation on the investor relations website. The matters that we will be discussing today may include forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that we discuss in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q, which identify important risk factors, including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements.

These statements about the effects of COVID-19 on the company's business results, financial position, liquidity, demand for our energy server and new applications, timing of new applications, and the supporting market ecosystem and outlook. We assume no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements made on today's call. During this call, we may refer to GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles and are, in addition to, and not a substitute for or superior to, measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between the GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our quarterly shareholder letter. Joining me on the call today are Greg Cameron, Bloom's Chief Financial Officer, Venkat Venkataraman, EVP Engineering and Chief Technical Officer, Sharelynn Moore, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, and Scott Reynolds, Global Head of Structured Finance.

After the prepared remarks, we will take questions. I would also like to note that we are all dialed into this call remotely, so we apologize in advance for any audio issues that may occur. I will now turn the call over to Greg.

Greg Cameron
CFO, Bloom Energy

Hey, thank you, Susan, and hey, everybody. Today, I'm excited to continue our discussion on opportunities for Bloom's technology. As we've discussed previously, a significant value of Bloom's solid oxide technology is that it's a platform that can be used across multiple applications with limited R&D or manufacturing investment. Meaning, as we introduce additional applications, they benefit from the technology advancements, robust supply chain, and manufacturing excellence we've built for our solid oxide fuel cell. Last time, we discussed the Bloom server for marine applications. Today, we have the opportunity to hear from three of Bloom's leaders on the progress we're making on hydrogen. On page three, we introduced Dr. Venkat Venkataraman, our Chief Technology Officer. Venkat's been with Bloom for 17 years and has been instrumental in leading a team of engineers in developing the platform for where we are today.

Given our investment and expectations in technology, Venkat is quite engaged, so I appreciate him sharing his knowledge and his perspective with us today. Also with us is our Chief Marketing Officer, Sharelynn Moore. Sharelynn joined us this summer from Itron and brings a deep energy market domain knowledge. Over the past few months, she's already begun to have an impact on our team in product management, brand management, and our overall go-to-market strategy. We're also joined by Scott Reynolds. Scott's been with Bloom for 16 years and has had multiple roles across the company. Today, in addition to leading our structured finance team, Scott's played a significant role both inside and outside the company in advancing our understanding of the hydrogen marketplace. Today, I couldn't be more excited to share our progress on hydrogen and to showcase these three leaders. With that, I'll hand it over to Sharelynn.

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Thank you, Greg. One of the reasons I joined Bloom is our platform. We have an energy platform that helps us produce low-carbon energy today. This platform will also take us to tomorrow, where it will produce zero-carbon energy. And beyond that, it will also take us to negative carbon. So from low to no to zero-carbon power. No other platform that I'm aware of has this much potential. I've spent the last 20 years of my career helping create a more efficient delivery and use of energy. Now I'm excited to help transform it. The time for hydrogen is upon us. As the world is recognizing the need to move to zero-carbon, the appreciation and importance of hydrogen as part of the energy mix is increasingly clear. We're also seeing the market develop quite rapidly.

In fact, just in the last 18 months, the pipeline for green hydrogen projects has increased 20-fold. What you're going to hear today is a detailed walkthrough of our core advantages and why we think we're a critical part of a fully decarbonized energy system. We believe, and we know, we are far ahead of others embarking on this mission. We have advantages in cost, flexibility, efficiency, and scale. We have the right technology and expertise. Solid oxide is the core of Bloom. We have a mature platform, which is the basis for hydrogen fuel cells and electrolysis. We are operationally ready to scale in manufacturing and supply chain, and we are commercially ready with the right partnerships and channels. In fact, you may have just seen an announcement this morning out of Korea, which we'll talk about later.

We're experienced developers at BE, so we're taking a focused approach to six key markets. We're estimating the Bloom total available market to be $50 billion by 2025 and up to $300 billion by 2030. So now, Scott, over to you to talk about the very beginning of our hydrogen journey.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Thanks, Sharelynn. It's been great to have you at Bloom over the past couple of months, and you've made a huge impact already. I'm really looking forward to working on hydrogen with you in the future. To go back 16 years to when I started Bloom, like you, hydrogen is what brought me to Bloom. In fact, the backstory of Bloom's hydrogen work begins on Mars. It's helpful to know that our founding team, including our CEO, K.R. Sridhar, had a great deal of experience developing different fuel cell types for NASA. That team picked solid oxide technology to enable humans to not only journey to Mars, but to live on Mars. In order to live on Mars, you need a few things. The first thing you need is resiliency and reliability.

The equipment that allows you to live with reliable power was a solid oxide platform that took hydrogen that we would generate from solar electricity and turn that back into electricity at night for 24/7 operations on Mars. You could think of this as a microgrid of sorts that astronauts would use to live and not only stay on the planet, but to generate the fuel that they would need to get back off the planet. So that's where we started. Luckily for us, that program ran into some difficulties, and that was the genesis of Bloom being born. And so it's not a big surprise that our first demonstration hardware also made hydrogen. In this picture, what you see is our friend and colleague Venkat, who's standing next to one of our first units. And that unit not only made power like we do today, it also co-produced hydrogen.

We ultimately decided not to commercialize that product because the market for hydrogen was in its infancy or nonexistent. But we learned a lot doing that. In fact, we generated 19 patents, many of them have to do with technology that we're using today. And despite the fact that we chose not to commercialize hydrogen way back then, we always knew that it would be part of our long-term strategy and mission. In fact, if you look at the slide here on page five, what you see is an early Bloom strategy slide that began with us making power. But as the platform developed, as the cost came out, we knew one day that we would make hydrogen with our technology.

And so looking back on the last 16 years, it's really exciting to be with you all today to talk about pulling out that piece of functionality to now really leverage our scale and experience in the hydrogen market. The reason we were excited in the early days about hydrogen really came down to the core platform, the fuel cell itself, that enabled life on Mars. And so it's important to understand how that cell works and how it plays into the hydrogen strategy today. So what I'll do now is to turn it over to Venkat, who will describe in the next slide a little bit about how the cell works. Venkat?

Venkat Venkataraman
EVP and CTO, Bloom Energy

Hey, thanks, Scott. Thanks for the picture. I already feel 15 years younger. Thanks to everyone, and the objective for me is to go through slowly and explain why solid oxide fuel cell is superior to any competing technologies when it comes to electrolyzer. I do want to walk through all the technical details which support the claims or the takeaways that Sharelynn mentioned in terms of efficiency, scale, cost, and flexibility. I'm going to cover four items, which is because of the lack of time. One is related to the reversible cell concept we all talked about. What does it actually mean? What it means to the business? The second one is I'd like to cover the efficiency. I walked through the fundamentals, physics, which shows that solid oxide fuel cell will operate at a higher efficiency than other technologies, competing technologies.

The third one I'll cover is a more exciting one. We not only have the input electricity as the input for electrolyzer, we can also take a heat and integrate to the system, which makes sense in certain applications why it's important. Last bit is going into cost, why we think will be lower in cost. First and foremost, the reversible cell, I just want to go through the details. You can ask the question on why does it matter? What is the influence on the market space? There are a couple of things I want to point out. One, first of all, if you take the fuel cell, which is shown on the slide number six, we are capable of operating the fuel cell in two different modes. One is the fuel cell mode where we can put in hydrogen and produce electricity.

Now we can actually reverse the fuel cell in electrolyzer mode where we can have electricity and have water and produce hydrogen. The fuel cell itself, or the solid oxide cell itself, is flexible. It helps us in two different ways. Number one, we have invested a significant amount of money and effort in perfecting the solid oxide fuel cell the last 16 years. We almost invested $1 billion in terms of R&D to perfect it and go through five generations of fuel cell. Right? We can now take advantage of that. Now that it's reversible, we can plug it into electrolyzer, which puts it in a much better position in terms of competition in many things, including technology, manufacturing scale-up, and also cost. Second one is today we are more focusing on hydrogen production.

So if you kind of fast forward in the future, there'll be a situation where you have to take the energy, convert that to hydrogen, use hydrogen as a storage, and then from hydrogen, we have to produce electricity. With the reversible cell, we actually fit perfectly into the situation. We can even generate a single unit which can do both running in fuel cell mode or electrolyzer mode, which is going to provide a great advantage. And the round trip efficiency will be far higher than what the competing technologies are. Now, I'd like to go through a little bit about the chemistry and the physics associated with the solid oxide cell. On the right-hand side on slide number six, you see the solid oxide cell operating in the fuel cell mode.

The secret sauce here is the electrolyte, which is nothing but a ceramic plate doped with some components, and it has a unique ability of transporting oxygen ions through it at a temperature of 750-850 degrees Celsius, so now we can, depending on the partial pressure of oxygen, you can imagine the oxygen ion transporting through the electrolyte and mixing with the fuel. In the process of doing that, it releases the electrons, which produces electricity. This is a direct conversion of chemical energy into electrical energy. Now, you see the black and green ones, which are on either side. Those are the electrodes, which are nothing but inks, which are painted on top of the electrolyte.

One key thing to note here, which I'm going to be referring to in the future slide, is if you take one mole of hydrogen, right, one mole of hydrogen, and it takes about two electrons. Right? So essentially, what it means is the current is directly correlated to the amount of hydrogen you consume, regardless of which technology you use. That, I will be using it to demonstrate our technology, why it's going to be better than the competing technologies in the next slide. Now, you can reverse it into the electrolyzer mode. What do you do? You apply potential across the cell. Now the oxygen transport actually reverses. So if we have steam or water on one side, it dissociates and produces hydrogen as a product. The key thing to note is the basic structure doesn't change. The electrolyte remains absolutely the same.

The only thing we do is, in terms of the inks or the electrodes, we do an optimization so it will be fitting in the electrolyzer mode. So we already have a technology which is ruggedized. In terms of selection of these inks, we have already done the optimization. So when you release a product, we can apply to it in large-scale manufacturing. Now, if you go to the next slide, this is the slide which explains why solid oxide fuel cell is better than other technologies. I'd like to spend a little bit of time. Please bear with me. So this is a typical curve, which we call the polarization curve. First, to explain the chart, it is on the y-axis, what you see is the cell potential or the voltage. On the x-axis, we see what is called the current density. This is the current per unit area.

Right in the middle, you have a zero division. On the right-hand side of the chart, that represents the fuel cell mode. On the left side, what it represents is the electrolysis mode. And we are comparing in the chart different technologies, ours, including the other technology like PEM electrolyzer, as well as alkaline electrolyzer. The key thing to note, first one to note is that if you look at our curve, which is the solid oxide fuel cell curve going in two different modes, you can see there is no discontinuity at the zero point. That is basically the concept of the reversible cell. If you take any other technology, there is a kink in it. So it takes more energy. The kink that you see on the left-hand side in the electrolysis mode corresponds to additional power required to produce hydrogen.

That means that with the same amount of power, we can produce more hydrogen. To illustrate the point, I've taken a sample point. So pick the thing which is at 200 milliampere square centimeter. Now, you can manipulate your cell area to produce one kilogram per hour. As we talked about, the current and the production of hydrogen are correlated. So this is exactly the same regardless of which technology you use. However, the fundamental difference is in the voltage that you run at. Right? For solid oxide cells, we'll be operating close to one volt. And then if you look at the other technologies, they require higher voltage to produce hydrogen. Now, the conventional thing, people who have worked in this industry will know that the product of the current and the voltage is the power that is required at the cell level.

So obviously, we consume less power to produce hydrogen compared to any other cell. And that's where it may make a significant advantage. And we are highly efficient compared to any other technologies. One other thing to point out is I've chosen only one point just above our solid oxide cell. If you look at the other curve that you have, the difference is even higher. That means they operate at a lower efficiency. Furthermore, people who work in the industry will tell you that 200 milliamperes per square centimeter is good, which is close to zero. But there are people who would like to run at higher current density because they want to produce more hydrogen. But as you do it and you move to the left, what happens is there is a drop in efficiency. So this is a significant advantage we have.

So by physics, we are more efficient. One other thing I want to point out is the heat integration part I mentioned. That is, when you bring in heat, other technologies cannot take advantage of the heat that's available. So you can imagine either it's a solar concentrator or nuclear power plant where they are shutting down during the daytime because of the Duck Curve. They have not only electricity and also they have heat. In both cases, we can take the heat to our advantage because we operate at high temperatures. So the heat that is available can help us out to vaporize water to steam or integrate with the fuel cell itself. So that gives you additional amount of energy, which is going to be waste heat, that we can use to our advantage.

In addition to that, you see in the curve, I had an arrow pointing down. It also helps to bring down the so-called VA Curve, which means that from purely electric generation in the cell itself, we can be more efficient. So in summary, I think we have a technology that, based on the physics, inherently more efficient than any other technology. Furthermore, by the heat integration and the electrical integration we can do, we can even move it further. We see a range anywhere between 13% all the way up to 31% advantage based on the calculations we have done over other technologies in producing hydrogen. That means we'll be consuming less power for the same amount of hydrogen we produce. Or you can reversibly, if you take the power, you can produce more hydrogen. So hopefully, it's clear that the fundamental physics supports our claims.

If you go to the next slide, I think Scott will kind of walk through how we have done in the cost. Over to you, Scott.

Susan Seilheimer Brennan
Head of Investor Relations, Bloom Energy

Thanks, Venkat. So maybe that gives you all a little bit of a sense as to why we talk about the cell so much. The efficiency of it and the inherent advantage of that efficiency is one big driver. And it's something that we've improved over time. The other reason we really like solid oxide as a platform has to do with cost. And so if you go back to the early days of Bloom and the purposeful choice to pick a solid oxide platform, one of the big reasons was because there's no precious metals in our materials. And that lent itself very well to low-cost and high-volume manufacturing. Back then, we had grand aspirations to scale. And that's exactly what we've done over the last decade or decade and a half.

And so if you look at the chart that's up right now, there's two different sets of data. On the left, what you have is the speed of our cost reductions measured as a function of our volume. This is a tool that is referred to as learning curves. And it's used often in the renewables industry, especially when you look at things like solar. And a lot of us know how quickly solar costs have come down. If you look at the data, solar costs have come down about 26% every time the cumulative production volume of solar panels has doubled. And if you look at our technology the same way, which is to say, what have our costs done every time we've cumulatively doubled our production capacity? It's about the same level. In fact, it's a little bit better at 28%.

This in the industry is a very fast learning curve rate. And that's exactly what we expected early based on the qualities of the solid oxide cell. It just lends itself to steep cost reductions. Now, on the right part of the chart, if you look at cost not just as a function of volume, but cost as a function of time, here you have our actual cost year-ending for the last five years or so. And what you can see is that our product cost, called our product cost of acceptance, was just under $6,000 a kilowatt at the end of 2015. And if you look at the numbers that we just released at the end of Q3, we were at just above $2,400 a kilowatt. That's about a 60% reduction over five years.

So if you look at time, you can also see what's been happening to our cost. And of course, the way that we've done that is to continually make improvements to our core platform. This is the hard work that Venkat's team has put in. And because of that, as we introduce new platform changes, we've seen that really drives our cost down, especially as our power density goes up. And as you know, we're on the verge of releasing our next platform, Bloom 7.5. And we expect we'll continue to get this nice trend of cost down as our technology evolves. And what we really like about this is that the same core solid oxide platform that today makes power in a distributed setting is the exact same platform we'll use to make hydrogen in different settings.

And so now I'm going to turn it back to Venkat to describe exactly how we take a solid oxide fuel cell and turn it into a solid oxide electrolyzer that makes hydrogen. Venkat, over to you.

Greg Cameron
CFO, Bloom Energy

Thank you. I'm on slide number 9 for those who are following this conversation. I'll start with the solid oxide fuel cell. Scott ended the conversation saying where we will be landing. That is $2,420 per kilowatt. That's the current solid oxide fuel cell that we are shipping to the customers. So I'm just going to go through an illustrative example on how this translates into the electrolyzer cost. So if you take the typical module, which we have the 50-kilowatt module, you have 80 kilowatts of natural gas coming in, and then you produce 50 kilowatts of power. And if you look at the bill of materials, which is listed below, it falls into a few categories. One, obviously, we have the fuel processing as well as all the stuff related to the fuel side of it. Then you have the stacks. Right?

And then also, you have the mechanical or BOP, which takes care of the air side of it and other components. And the last bit is related to the power electronics. So this is why our bill of materials kind of gets split at a higher level. Now, if you go to the next slide, so now think about this. We've got $2,420 a kilowatt. Now I'm flipping it in the reverse mode, making it an electrolyzer. First of all, now the cell in the reverse mode has got input, which is the energy coming in as electricity, is 130 kilowatts in this case for operating this particular module. And it produces roughly about three kilograms per hour of hydrogen.

So if you look at the bill of materials, first and foremost, the significant portion of the reduction happens because we don't have to carry all the modules which are on the fuel cell. So that's good news. So we can remove them. Then you look at the fuel cell stacks. They remain the same because they are identical to what we use in the fuel cell mode. And the mechanical can be with simplification. From a top-level perspective, it roughly remains the same. And you still have these power electronics. So fuel cell is gone. We do have to add some components, which is first, you have to take the water and vaporize it into steam. So we have to add a module to it. And also, to keep the cells operational, we have to add some stack heaters. So those are the added components.

But when we roll up the BOM in this case, what it comes out to be already from a purely, purely material perspective and the construction of the equipment, we reduce the cost roughly about 10% just purely out of the number of components we have. We take the common components, take the cost, remove the ones that are related to the fuel, and add other costs. That is where we stand. Now, the normalization occurs differently in the electrolyzer. In the previous case, we are looking at output, which is 50 kilowatts. In this case, we are going to be normalizing as conventionally being done. It's based on the energy input or the electricity input, which is 120 kilowatts. So by virtue of the overall cost coming down by 10% and also the kilowatt rating going from 50 kilowatts to 120 kilowatts, we come to $908 a kilowatt.

That's the math, so we already are down below $1,000 a kilowatt. Obviously, as Scott pointed out, we have the next platform coming up pretty soon, and also, this is basically the first version we are releasing. We have lots of opportunities to go and reduce the cost, so in summary, I think our technology is reversible. It helps out going from SOFC, SOE, easy. We are on the verge of releasing the product, and I think we are pretty confident that we'll be superior to other technologies and also cost-competitive. With that, I will turn over to Scott again.

Susan Seilheimer Brennan
Head of Investor Relations, Bloom Energy

Thanks, Venkat. So now, hopefully, you're starting to see how the scale of our platform and the experience we've built over the last decade or so is really translating into positioning us well on hydrogen. One way of talking about that scale is just in terms of revenue. So if you look at the left part of this chart, it's helpful to remember that when you look at the size of Bloom today, we are larger than our six largest competitors combined in terms of revenue. We've been able to do that by growing the top line at over a 30% CAGR over the last decade. We've built an install base of over 500 megawatts. We've operated these units in the field, or if you look at the individual life of individual cells, over 800 billion cell hours.

To do that, as Venkat said before, we've invested $1 billion in research, development, and demonstration. That's what it's taken to get to the amount of scale and cost down that we've seen so far. And so what's really nice about that in the hydrogen space is that we can leverage all of that scale and experience by using the same core platform that Venkat's been talking about. We can use the same supply chain to make electrolyzers as make fuel cells. We'll use the same manufacturing process with the same kinds of equipment. And we're already working with the same partners that we have today. In fact, we're even able to leverage our same monitoring infrastructure to watch electrolyzers in the field like we watch fuel cells in the field.

And so what that sets up, going to the next slide here on page 12, is a platform with unique flexibility, we think, in the hydrogen space. And we're really excited about this. We think this is a key differentiator, which is the ability to work not only in green hydrogen from electrolysis like Venkat was talking about. So you see here on the upper left part of the chart, the green color indicates our ability to make hydrogen from renewable electricity like solar and wind, or even to use heat integration like Venkat was talking about with solar thermal. That's green hydrogen. We also have the ability, because of our ability to make use of byproduct heat, to make pink hydrogen, which is when you integrate an electrolyzer with nuclear power. Many folks have been talking about electrolysis for hydrogen, and that excitement is well placed.

But the colors of the rainbow don't end with green and pink. If you go back to that early system that we showed you, it made both power and hydrogen from natural gas. If we take that natural gas and make power, it also makes CO2. And if we grab that CO2 for sequestration, which is something that our technology is a very good fit for, we can make something called blue hydrogen. And what's even more exciting is if we take that same process, putting in gas, making power, grabbing the product CO2 to sequester it, we can make something that we call gold hydrogen if we use biogas as the fuel. And what's really neat about gold hydrogen is that that creates a pathway because the input fuel is carbon negative, a pathway for carbon negative power and carbon negative hydrogen at the same time.

That's something that we haven't heard anyone else talking about. We think it's really unique to Bloom, and we think it's really exciting. So if we take this multiple paths to make hydrogen in a variety of ways, green, pink, blue, and gold, and then look at the market, it gives us multiple avenues to demand sources to make use of hydrogen. So you've already heard us announce, for example, the partnership we have with SK to ship our units to Korea to run the fuel cells that we have today on hydrogen. That's exciting because many markets like Korea are looking to fully decarbonize using hydrogen to make zero-carbon power. So that's something we've already announced. It's very exciting.

And it dovetails nicely with other work we're doing in Korea in the shipping space, where we can take the fuel cells that we make today, convert them to being able to run on hydrogen, like Venkat was talking about earlier, which creates a pathway through our partnership with Samsung to start, as Sharelynn said, with a CO2 reduction strategy running on LNG, and then transition to a full decarbonized strategy running on hydrogen so that you would have a ship that runs on hydrogen. That's a big source of CO2 reduction in the world. It's work that we're already doing. But our flexibility opens up new markets as well. One thing we're talking to many customers about right now are distributed generation hydrogen microgrids that would run on green hydrogen. They could also run on pink hydrogen or other forms as well.

But we're seeing a trend and a lot of interest in that space. And of course, there are other applications for hydrogen as well. Long-haul transport is a good fit, blending into natural gas grids. This is very popular right now in Europe, for example. It's pushing very hard on decarbonization. There's also applications in steel and industrial feedstock. I'll talk about those more in a second. But what's nice from a platform perspective is now that we've gotten the cost out of the platform and we enabled this new functionality, we have what we think of as a very unique ability to flexibly both make different kinds of hydrogen and then attack different markets using those tools to serve our customers in different ways. And of course, that's a high-level understanding.

So let me now talk a little bit about specific markets that we think are interesting in the next couple of years. So here on page 13, what we've listed is a set of markets that we think Bloom is uniquely positioned to succeed in based on the competitive dynamics in those markets. The high-level point of this slide is when we look at these six discrete markets, we think the TAM for these products is $50 billion by 2025 and $300 billion by 2030. This is an exciting, exciting field. But in order to be successful, we want to be very careful and very analytical about where we want to compete on the basis of the technical advantages that Venkat was talking about earlier.

So to give you a few examples, one of them is green hydrogen in Europe, particularly where we can integrate for steelmaking with the byproduct heat of steel mills. Similarly, pink hydrogen in the U.S. and the EU would allow us to integrate with byproduct heat from the nuclear process. So those are two markets where our efficiency and our ability to capitalize on waste heat creates a large market for us where we think our efficiency advantage is substantially better than competing technologies. But we'd like to also create a diverse portfolio by looking at other markets as well.

In the middle of the page, what you see is the application of Blue and Gold hydrogen, where we can make, as you'll see in a second here, low-cost hydrogen and low-cost power for utilities, particularly in the U.S., where lower natural gas prices mean that hydrogen has to reach lower price points in order to make competitive power. We'll talk about that more later. But this is an exciting application of our technology. We think it's very unique. The third category is where there has been a lot of interest in hydrogen, particularly around Green hydrogen for transport, especially in the E.U. and Japan and Korea, where the relatively high value of hydrogen, given high fuel costs, makes a good fit for efficient fuel cell vehicles. That market is seeing a lot of attention right now.

Again, because of our efficiency advantage, we think that we can make lower-cost hydrogen in those markets. Similarly, our efficiency advantage, we think, gives us lower-cost ways of making green hydrogen to blend into the natural gas networks, particularly in places like Italy, the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands, that are pushing very hard on decarbonizing their natural gas grids. Of course, the ability to have insight into the size of these markets and our ability to compete depends a lot on the economics. Let me now, on the next slide, describe to you a little bit how we're modeling this, which ties into the scale and experience we've had so far developing billions of dollars of power projects with our existing platform. Many of you on the call know this.

But in a very simple way to calculate our competitiveness, we're going to look at the levelized cost of hydrogen compared to other technologies by dividing it into the capital cost and the operating expense. And I won't go through all of this, but suffice it to say that when we look at the capital cost, we're really looking at the cost of the equipment. And as I talked about earlier, our faster learning curve and scale today, we think, gives us an advantage on equipment cost. And also, as we've talked about, our ability to generate more hydrogen with the same amount of power gives us an efficiency advantage of about 13%-31%. And so if we go to the next page, we roll all this together for you to give you a sense of the analytics we're using to look at our competitiveness across markets.

So there's a lot behind this chart, and there's a backup in the slides for those of you that are interested in the footnotes. But the high-level point of this slide is that whether we're talking about green, pink, blue, or gold hydrogen, we think we have a significant cost advantage from anywhere from 9% to 24% in the case of green and pink, or as high as 53% for gold hydrogen, where we believe that we can reach cost points of between $2 and $3 a kilogram in 2025 for green hydrogen, about $2 and $3 for pink hydrogen as well. And as we scale up and costs come down, and particularly if the cost of renewable power comes down, we think we'll be at the $2 to $1 range for green and pink hydrogen.

As I said, we'll talk more in the future about blue and gold hydrogen. In these markets, we think that we can compete with SMR for blue and other kinds of bioenergy with carbon capture products to offer a low-cost way to deliver carbon negative power. As I said, there's a lot of detail behind this chart. The key point is that we think there's a cost advantage of between 9% and 24% for green and pink hydrogen based on deep analytics and our experience modeling energy projects over the last decade. If there are questions, we're happy to answer them. There's a lot of modeling work behind this. Now with the analytics and the math laid down, I'll turn it back over to Sharelynn to talk about how we plan to commercialize our platform and attack these markets. Sharelynn, over to you.

Thank you, Scott. Probably by now, you can see why I'm so thrilled to be part of this team and as a product and market strategist with a long history in this industry and really excited to see our transition to hydrogen. Let's talk about the commercialization strategy. First, as you saw early, using solid oxide to produce hydrogen is not new to us. It is part of our foundation. However, it is just this year where we've decided to enter this market because the timing is right. And we've been busy this year. We've been working to align our partner strategy to our six key segments that Scott talked about and key geographies. And as my partner Venkat can attest to, we've been busy in product development. We are ready to ship 100% hydrogen fuel cells now. We'll be embarking on these projects next year.

We'll be shipping our first electrolyzer units next year and ready for electrolyzer programs in 2022. By 2022, you'll see larger projects across hydrogen fuel cells and electrolyzers and across many of our targeted six segments we've discussed. We've also talked about the importance of partners. Today, you've seen our news that we won a very competitive RFP for hydrogen fuel cells and electrolyzers with our partner SK. It's a project in Changwon, South Korea, which is part of the RE100 Global Program. This takes advantage of one of our key segments in supporting hydrogen vehicles and hydrogen charging stations, the transportation segment Scott mentioned. We're shipping hydrogen fuel cells next month, and we'll be using hydrogen to create electricity on site in 2021, and we're also providing electrolyzers producing hydrogen on site using solar and battery in 2022. We're developing new arrangements and new projects with existing partners as well.

This is very exciting. Just today, we signed a non-binding letter of intent with Southern California Gas Company with the objective of doing a hydrogen fuel cell and electrolyzer demonstration project together to demonstrate hydrogen's potential toward their key element of the transition to a low-carbon energy future. We are aligned that there's great potential in the use of hydrogen as a clean, reliable, resilient, and always available energy carrier to advance a clean greenhouse gas-reducing hydrogen economy. We are also working on new partnerships. For instance, we are working with Idaho National Laboratory, INL, to demonstrate the feasibility of hybrid nuclear power plants. It's producing electric power and pink hydrogen that we talked about using solid oxide high-temperature electrolyzers, HTE. This helps maximize the nuclear power plant revenue by using nuclear energy to produce hydrogen at times when electricity production is curtailed.

As part of the agreement, Bloom Energy and INL will integrate and demonstrate a solid oxide electrolyzer system with a nuclear power plant to demonstrate the concept of this hybrid nuclear power plant in 2021. Those are just a few examples that I'm able to talk about today. I hope to be sharing more of these as the project evolves, as many more projects evolve. Finally, we hope you found some of this helpful. We're obviously proud of our platform and very excited about all the markets and developing market opportunities. Now, I'll turn it over to Greg to tell us what this really means to you, our investor community.

Greg Cameron
CFO, Bloom Energy

Thanks, Sharelynn. In closing, I want to highlight a couple of points. Our platform is unique in its flexibility to be used across multiple applications. Clearly, as Venkat described, the inherent efficiency benefits of the solid oxide technology is a competitive advantage. This advantage and the flexibility enables us to leverage our platform across the multiple colors of the hydrogen spectrum. We believe we are uniquely positioned to grow in the hydrogen economy. In addition, we have a competitive cost advantage today that will expand as we move forward. As we leverage the benefits of our scale, which includes supply chain and manufacturing, we expect to maintain our 15% per year cost out that we've achieved with our solid oxide fuel cell. We are committed that after a few cost out cycles, we can deliver an electrolyzer at a cost below $600 a kilowatt.

I'm confident in our proven cost out leadership. It's part of our DNA. On the third quarter earnings call, we shared we would be investing in additional manufacturing capacity. The flexibility of the platform allows us to allocate our capacity across applications based on demand. In 2025, we expect to allocate capacity to manufacturing one gigawatt of electrolyzers. Volume of this size would represent a rather modest penetration of the available TAM Scott highlighted on page 13. Depending upon market pricing, we would expect this to yield about $750 million in revenue in 2025. This would be essentially creating an additional Bloom of today in that space. We're excited about the opportunity ahead of us. I want to stress this is just one of the growth levers that we are working for our future. We will continue to share our progress on this and opportunities as we go forward.

On our investor call in mid-December, I look forward to providing an update of how these initiatives fit with our overall financial framework. With that, operator, we can open up the call for questions.

Operator

As a reminder, to ask a question, press star in the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. And your first question comes from Michael Weinstein with Credit Suisse.

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Hi, guys. Hey, Michael.

Michael Weinstein
Analyst, Credit Suisse

Hey. One gigawatt by 2025 would sort of imply over 200 megawatts a year, which is, I guess, it would almost double or triple the amount of output versus 2019, 2020.

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Is that?

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Can we expect some of this to start flowing into the, I guess, when you eventually put out your backlog forecast next year, February?

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Yeah. Are we going to see some of this in there?

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah. So here's how we think about it, right? We've got capacity today. We've talked about for about 200 megawatts, right? And we're going to make the $75 million or so of investment going forward. And that's what we announced. That would take us to about 400 megawatts. To get us to where we need to be for a gigawatt and doing the math on that, you're probably looking at one more turn of investment, so call it $100 million. Clearly, we'll share more as we go forward, but it's really around our pipeline and our backlog and our commercial acceptances that we see both in the fuel cells we have today, as well as really excited about the additional technologies that we're bringing forward.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Right. And on cost, I think Cummins, in a recent presentation, said that they were expecting about $750 a kilowatt for electrolyzers in 2025. Are you guys projecting this sort of lower than that from your technology?

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

For cost?

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Yeah.

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

That's where then that last slide, we're talking about breaking $600 kind of by the third turn, which generally, a click here is about a year of a cost out cycle. So if we're at the $900 or so that Venkat showed you, if we're getting the same 15% out a year in our electrolyzer that we've been getting in our fuel cell, we would expect to be below that price. Gotcha. Also, what kind of carbon capture are you anticipating would be the most attractive technology out there for actually capturing it? And how much do the carbon capture tax credit program, the 45Q tax credits, how much does that play into the economics?

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

So let me start with Venkat on the technology, and then we'll go over to Scott on the economics, if that works?

Venkat Venkataraman
EVP and CTO, Bloom Energy

Yeah. From a technology perspective, we actually have created the scenario on how to capture it. So we are working with a technology which has already shown to be proven to work well. We are demonstrating and finishing the integration by the end of the year. The technology side of it, what we are doing is we're using a membrane technology downstream of our unit. One advantage we have is the fuel side and the air side don't mix. So we can take the pure CO2 from the fuel side. So then we go through a separation of the CO2 from hydrogen and recycle the hydrogen back to the system, or we can actually have an opportunity to do what Scott was talking about. When you go into more on the blue-gold category, we can even take the hydrogen out as a product.

We can choose to do whatever makes sense. We have the technology right now. We are experimenting it. We already put together the unit, and it shows promises. Now it's a question of scaling up.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Yeah. And on the economic side.

Scott.

Yeah. On the economic side for 45Q, it does have a meaningful impact on the delivered cost of the power. It depends on when you're talking about, but something like $0.015 on the delivered cost of the power. The nice thing about the solution that Venkat has developed is that the marginal cost of the carbon capture is quite low because the concentration of the CO2 stream is very, very high. So one of the problems in carbon capture is it's kind of a needle in the haystack problem where you're hunting for the CO2 molecules as maybe 4% or 5% of the exhaust stream in a combined cycle plant. But what Venkat's been able to do is basically to take a very pure stream of CO2 already, pull the hydrogen out, as he said. That gives us a separate revenue stream that we can sell.

So what that means is that between the value of the 45Q credit, the low marginal cost of that carbon capture equipment, and the cost down of the platform that we've been talking about, that the economics look really, really nice, especially at scale, which is a nice way to compete in the U.S. where a lot of utilities are kind of scratching their heads a bit on hydrogen because even at $2 a kilogram, hydrogen you're talking about something like $0.11 or $0.12 per kilowatt-hour for the fuel cost. So what's nice about the carbon capture piece is that we've got a really nice technical solution that nobody else has, and it integrates nicely with our core platform in a way that produces a really attractive set of economics.

One last question. Which nuclear power plant are you guys planning on doing pink hydrogen with first? It's not Palo Verde, is it? Just curious.

Venkat Venkataraman
EVP and CTO, Bloom Energy

No, we haven't picked the plant yet. So we're working with INL to do the validation of technology next year. After that, I think we will take INL's or DOE's advice also on this and pick a plant for us to demonstrate.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Great. Thanks, Michael.

Operator

Your next question comes from Eric Lee with Bank of America.

Eric Lee
Analyst, Bank of America

Hey, can you hear me?

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah. Hey, Eric.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Hey. Thanks for taking the time today. Appreciate all the details that you guys provided here. To go through some of the questions around the slide, so some of the details you provided on slide 15 for the sensitivity-ish range you provided on green hydrogen, can you talk about what the assumed inputs within that range would be from a CapEx, load factor efficiency, and then renewable energy $ per kilowatt-hour assumed within that?

Sure. Yeah. There's a lot of thought that's gone into this. And if you want to get into the weeds, one of the things I'd refer you to is in the appendix on page 19 of the deck, there's 0.8 font of all the details we put into the assumptions. But at a high level, without dragging everyone through the math, we've done a couple of things. One on the CapEx, you've gotten a little bit of a color from the team here about how we're thinking about it. As we go into the future, we're looking at market estimates of volumes, using those volumes, calculating on the basis of our learning curve what our CapEx cost would be. And as we modeled it, we actually reduced our learning rate from 28% to 24% to be conservative.

We used for competitive technologies what the historical learning rates were for PEM and alkaline. So that kind of gets you CapEx for each of the technologies for the years that we're talking about. And then what we did is, and this is in the footnotes, because geography matters a lot to both the input cost of the renewables but also the capacity factor at that input price. So generally speaking, we varied the input renewables cost from an aggressive case of something like $10 a megawatt-hour, which is admittedly very low, but might be possible in some places that have high solar resource, up to $40 a megawatt-hour by 2025, and I think $30 a megawatt-hour by 2030.

And we assume across the board, and we've worked with a bunch of smart folks on this, that renewables get to about a 50% penetration rate or where you can use at those price points about a 50% capacity factor to model the uptime of the electrolyzer. So that's where the CapEx cost came from, the capacity factor came from. You heard Venkat talk about the efficiency levels. And so when we put all that together in a project model, we also are applying margin to each of the CapEx prices, which we think is a little bit more of a conservative way of modeling it because I know some of the research out there uses the cost rather than the price, but folks are going to buy at price, not at cost. So we've assumed margins in there as well for everybody.

And then the final thing we've done is, and this is to keep it apples to apples, but we've assumed the same project cost of capital in the project model, which is based on our understanding of where we think these things would get bid, especially as we scale up. And there's some nuance there. We could talk more about it if you want, but maybe that gives you a little bit of a sense of how we did the modeling.

Got it. Maybe not too, so I haven't seen the appendix. Just on a dollar per kilowatt basis, what's assumed for 2025 and what's assumed for 2030?

Yeah. So if you take the learning.

Is that what we're modeling?

Yeah. If you take the learning curve rates that Greg talked about, they're in the range that he mentioned with another couple of turns of the crank getting down to 2030. And like I said, the power prices are also getting lower over time so that you get down to the lower end of the range for renewables as well. And if you want.

I'm just asking on the dollar per kilowatt on the CapEx.

Yeah. So if you.

If you could just clarify the number.

Yeah. If you want, we can walk you through the detailed numbers, but you're looking at mid-hundreds of dollars per kilowatt to lower hundreds of dollars per kilowatt on the CapEx input price for green hydrogen. In the case of pink hydrogen, we've added a little bit of cost for the heat integration equipment on the order of 10% of the total CapEx cost.

Okay. Got it. Okay. So maybe just, oh, sorry, go for it.

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

No, no. I think the only thing I was going to add is, Scott, I don't think, folks, it's not been posted yet or it may be just been posted, so they may not have the benefit of.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Oh, I see you just on the other side.

I think it's loaded up on.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's there on the screen.

Yeah. I'm on the webcast slide screen.

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah. So that'll be on our website, actually. You can get through the level of detail, and you can always reach out to Scott.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Got it. I'll look into that in further detail.

Yeah, and if you want to walk through, we're happy to get into the detail of that cost.

Appreciate it. Just as a follow-up question, how much of the opportunity do you see as green hydrogen versus just so within the four categories here, within your one-gigawatt expectation for 2025, how much of that is green?

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah. Eric, I'd say we've taken a very relatively conservative view on that gigawatt, and it is linked back to the size of the TAM associated in the deck. I guess that's on page 13. We have not yet allocated specifically on each of the individual opportunities what we expect to direct to come through on that. Anything we've tried to be conservative on what overall is, and I think the speed at which we penetrate those TAMs will be partly and mostly driven by market demand. So it's a bit of forecasting when these come online, how they come online, and how our technology plays in there. So I think some of these we will penetrate at a rate higher than what we've given you as the average. And other ones will take longer to come online. At least that's how we're thinking about it.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Okay. And then in terms of the round-trip example that you provided around having a single unit that could do both H2 production as well as power generation, how would that just be the same cost as your fuel cell, but just like you add all you have to do is add the heater and vaporizer? Or how would that work?

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah. I'll give that to Venkat to talk with you.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Yeah.

Venkat Venkataraman
EVP and CTO, Bloom Energy

Yeah. So the thought process right now is that given the current demand on the hydrogen side of it and optimize the cost, as you saw, which you remove a lot of these components to take the complexity out of the fuel cell, our focus has been primarily driven to reduce the electrolyzer cost and remove the components from the fuel cell side. So because the market is kind of wide going into transportation, the application is right. You can go into power generation or you can go as industrial hydrogen. So because of the diversity, we kept our focus on getting the electrolyzer out. Having said that, if you want to go through the complexity of the reversal of fuel cell, you're absolutely right. What it'll have will be the current solid oxide fuel cell thing.

In addition to that, we need to have components for the handling of the steam. One thing, though, even in our current product itself, there is an option to put the steam generator even from the fuel cell side. We already have the component. The only thing is that depending on the volume that you're talking about, the water may not be sufficient. So we had to modify that. So in essence, you're right. I think we had to combine these two together if we do end up in. It will be in the same magnitude in the same architecture of a fuel cell anyway.

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah. And, Venkat, our primary focus early on will be around separate electrolyzers and fuel cells over time.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Right.

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yeah, yeah. So good.

Scott Reynolds
Global Head of Structured Finance, Bloom Energy

Right. I understand because you mentioned long-term opportunity.

Sharelynn Moore
EVP and CMO, Bloom Energy

Yep. No, absolutely. Yep. Great. Thanks, Eric. Hey, listen, everybody, we're at the hour here. First, I want to thank everybody for taking the time to come here. I think these work well. I'm open to your feedback on how to make them better. Going forward, we'll continue to bring different parts of technology and different parts of our leadership team to the conversation. It's part of my goal here to help drive more transparency into the company. I'd like to thank our panelists, Venkat, Sharelynn, Scott. It was a tremendous amount of work over a series of time taking our message and presenting it in a way in which we hopefully did it that you can understand where we are and where we're going and why we're so excited about it. So with that, we'll end the call, and I appreciate everybody's time. So operator, we're done. Thank you.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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