Welcome everyone to Bloom Energy's 2023 investor conference. Before we begin, please note our safe harbor notice on the screen. Our presentations today and our answers to your questions may contain forward-looking statements, including expectations, projections, and other potential future events. Our actual results may vary and may differ materially from these forward-looking statements, and we undertake no obligation to update them after today. Please refer to the company's annual report of Form 10-K and recent 10-Q filings for more information on factors that can impact our business. Let's start today's presentations. Please welcome Bloom Energy Founder, Chairman, and CEO, K.R. Sridhar to the stage.
Good afternoon to all of you gathered here at the New York Stock Exchange, and a good day to all of you joining us by live stream. Much has changed in the energy world since I was last here in this building to ring the bell almost 5 years ago. That got me thinking. You know, some people try to predict the future. Some attempt to invent the future. Very few predict and then embark on a journey to invent the future. Of those very few, a very tiny fraction actually successfully predict and invent the future. I'm proud to stand here in front of you and say a company that we founded 20 years ago, Bloom Energy, has successfully predicted and invented the future of energy. Our thesis was the following.
We said the future of energy, and this is in 2001, distributed on-site generation of electricity will be a key part of this energy transformation. Reliability and resiliency of electricity will command a premium in a 24/7 digital world. We said energy security, energy access, and clean energy will become major global needs. Based on this thesis, we dedicated ourselves to creating a solution that would perfectly be suited for a world where our predictions will ring true. A box that would provide clean, reliable, on-site energy with multiple and flexible inputs, multiple and flexible outputs. Obviously, no single product could do the job of this magic box. It would require a platform that had multifunctional capability. We had to create the equivalent of an Intel microchip for the energy world. A versatile device that could be adopted for multiple uses with relative ease.
Today, we all understand the power of the platform, the smartphone. Guess what? I didn't refer to that when I was talking about starting the company because if you all remember, when we started the company, the smartphone did not exist. The Intel platform. Platform technology and the power of the platform and that journey. Make no mistake, no one in the world had or since has built a platform technology for energy. That is what we set out to do: innovate and commercialize an energy platform. This is the genesis of our power of and, a philosophy that's pervasive in our Bloom culture. That and is in our DNA. Foundational to our platform is solid oxide technology.
A technology that large multinationals and national labs across the world have worked on for a large part of the last century and tried to make successful without any luck. The science itself was discovered in the 1800s, late 1800s. I think we can forgive the pundits when they said, when we started, "This technology will not work. If the technology works, it'll not be durable. If it became durable, it can't be scaled up. If it is scaled up, it'll be too expensive and we cannot sell. If it's sold, it'll not be profitable." Luckily for us, we didn't get those memos from the pundits. As pioneers, we didn't have maps, nor could anybody else give us maps. We had the focus. We persevered, we discovered, we invented, and we innovated our way out of many a hurdle.
While we were doing that, something else interesting happened in the world. Our predictions of where the future of energy will go have all now come true. The world has arrived at a place where the energy attributes that we predicted 20 years ago are indeed the solutions the world says they need today. They are. It needs to be reliable and resilient. It needs to be sustainable and secure. It needs to be accessible and affordable. The world agrees today that our past energy predictions are right now, and the time to transition is right now. To meet those energy needs, our platform solution is right now. We are deploying that solution at scale right now. That confluence of all these forces is creating a special inflection for our company, a new chapter, and we call this Bloom 2.0.
We now have two product lines using the same single platform. Both are based on our solid oxide platform technology. Our Bloom Energy Servers convert fuel to electricity using the SOFC or the product line that you're familiar as our fuel cells Bloom Energy Servers. That's one product line, same Bloom Energy Server. We also take the electricity and convert that to hydrogen using SOEC or solid oxide electrolyzer cells using the same Bloom Energy Server. What do they have in common? That power of and using the solid oxide technology. We lovingly call it the SOFC. It is the X factor for our company. What's there not to love about SOFC, right? With the same underlying technology, know-how, supply chain, manufacturing equipment, and field deployment, we at Bloom Energy make better electricity that will be clean, accessible, and always on. Bottled energy. Yes, bottled energy.
Because Mother Nature gives you that energy when she wants and where she wants. We humans want our energy whenever we want, wherever we want. We need to be able to bottle up that energy and be able to do that. What does this switch to 2 mean for us? It means 0 change in our choice of technology. Everything we have learned in the last 15 years, the millions of digital twins from which we get billions of data every single day, applies from our fuel cell to our electrolyzers. We have 0 concern about our relevance, our relevance during the transition, however short or long it is, to provide resiliency, and our relevance in a fully decarbonized energy world with our hydrogen products. What does it mean for our customers? It means 0 delays in getting power.
You don't have to call the utility and figure out how many years or decades it's going to be before you get your next shot of juice. Zero outages, no matter what's happening in the world in terms of natural disasters. Zero obsolescence risk and zero transition timing risk because of taking away that obsolescence risk. That's the two product lines, and that's the zero, 2.0. Okay, how does all this translate to the two metrics that matter to you all, our investors? Growth and profitability. Just like our technology and product lines, we are building a business that is reliable, that is resilient, and that's predictable. We are executing to a business plan that has robust future growth and profits. We are diversifying both our product lines and the market sectors and the geographies where we serve.
You will hear a lot more about this from Greg and our team in the next few minutes. For now, let me take a few minutes to provide you with some predictions of where the energy future is going to go from here to where it's gonna go. Hopefully, we have some credibility having predicted that 30 years ago. Number 1, the world is on a trajectory to exceed the 1.5 degree warming threshold by the end of this decade. Doesn't matter what we do. What does that mean? Natural disasters caused by climate are going to be more severe, they're gonna be more frequent, they're gonna last longer in duration, and they're gonna create more damage than we have seen so far. The grid is completely incapable of handling this.
Critical infrastructure and communities are going to rely on on-site power and microgrids to secure people and property. Dirty backup diesels cannot operate for long periods of time under this scenario, and our systems operating in microgrids have proven track record of operating through floods, hurricanes, wildfires, extreme heat, and even earthquakes. Number 2, the 1.5 degree will overshoot, and then the world will fast-track the need to remove that carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester it. Carbon capture and sequestration will become extremely important for the world to bring the atmosphere where it needs to, and we have a unique technology where concentrated carbon dioxide comes out in our tailpipes, and we see this as a tremendous opportunity, and it'll accelerate because of that future happening. In our plans, we have modest numbers for CCS right now.
Potential for huge opportunities in large scale there should companies and nations work with us on the sequestration part. We are ready with our technology. Number 3, just in the last year, we have seen more and more the weaponization of energy and the impact it has on energy security for regions like the European Union as well as Asia. Those nations looking to go to an energy transition are going to speed up. I think we are going to see our global business in these areas grow very robustly because of that. Number 4, if you look at the demonstration of our large-scale electrolyzer, we got exciting stuff to show you. You look at again, the energy security, the lack of energy fuel access, and the price volatility.
More and more nations are going to push for hydrogen, and you can already see that trend based on the incentives that various regions are offering for hydrogen. We are just beginning to see the start of this hydrogen revolution that's only going to speed up as we go, and we are super excited about that. Electrification of transportation, again, offers a phenomenal opportunity for us because we can be providing the power for the charging stations in the most efficient manner, right where you need it, reliably and resiliently. If you just look at one area that's very dear to me, most of the energy need is going to come from the emerging nations. That's where energy growth is going to be. I believe the future of energy is one of energy abundance, one of energy affordability, and one of energy sustainability.
It's an and. Our technology's becoming the base load for a microgrid with all the other technologies combined together. The abundance of renewable power, the abundance of base load Bloom, the abundance of hydrogen, all this is going to create for the emerging economies an opportunity to bloom their nations sustainably and securely. Given all this, there's plenty of opportunity for growth. Let me go from the two, growth, to the second one, profitability. The power we generate is reliable and clean and can be deployed very quickly and rapidly in places where the grid cannot provide power. These attributes allow us to command a premium on our grid power, number one. Number two, the cost of the grid is going up. You know, grid power is going up. Why? Transmission and distribution costs are becoming the dominant part of the total electricity cost.
That transmission distribution cost is steeply increasing as we put more renewable intermittence into the grid, and every time the grid has more rinse and repeat emergency repairs that are done after every single climate cause natural disaster. While our competition, the grid, is becoming more expensive, our product costs are coming down, and therein comes the profits. You got those two, and now the question is: what is the zero? You know, what is the zero for you? Hold that thought for a second. Before that, if you sense confidence about Bloom's future in my voice, it is real. It is real because this confidence is based on where I see the future going in energy, about the opportunity for growth and about the opportunity for commanding a price and a profit.
It bodes well for us to meet our growth plans and our margin plans that Greg's gonna talk to you about. Several of these scenarios that I've talked to you can very well create opportunities for us to be more aggressive with our growth than what's in our current plan. Should that happen, I want you to know we are ready and able and nimble to seize those opportunities as they present themselves to us. Okay. How about the zero? You got the two, growth and profitability. How about the zero? After the team finishes, you all have zero excuses. Zero excuses to not make Bloom your top pick for an energy company and double down on your investments. Okay. That's the zero for you.
With all the tailwinds in the market and with the rapid maturing platform, I'm convinced that the vision we painted in the year 2000 will come into focus and become a huge reality in the 2020s. This is our decade. I'm so excited that we will build this company into a dominant, high-growth, high profitable energy solutions provider for the world. Thank you.
Now Greg Cameron, President and Chief Financial Officer.
Good afternoon. Welcome. It's great to be together for our third investor conference. We have over 70 people here in attendance and hundreds more streaming this event online. Thank you for your interest and support of our company. Today, we'll share how Bloom is uniquely positioned to be an energy leader in the transition to net zero. You'll hear about our superior technology platform, the robustness of our operations, our ability to scale, and how we deliver profitable growth. As K.R. just laid out, the mission of Bloom has remained constant since our founding. The company was designed and developed to meet this moment. He said this is our time. We have the solutions, the maturity, the manufacturing readiness, and the financial capacity.
Over the next couple hours, we're gonna share our perspectives, plans, and targets, but you're also gonna hear from industry leaders, partners, customers on how Bloom's unique solution is addressing the most pressing energy issues of our time. Let me just start with a couple financial highlights. We are reaffirming our 2023 framework, as we did on the earnings call 2 weeks ago. We are maintaining our 2025 guidance for gross margins, operating margins, and service gross margins, and we are confident in our long-term forecasted revenue growth. Now, there'll always be movement in the numbers as around segments as markets develop, but we are well-positioned to deliver through 2031. Begin with that revenue framework and how we're growing our top line 30%-35% over the next decade.
We set the target that by the end of 2031, Bloom would achieve an annual revenue of $15 billion-$20 billion a year. The projection was built on delivering on our historical growth rates in power generation, which has been 25%-30% as we grow in our current markets and add new geographies. We're on track to meet these growth targets. In 2022, we achieved $1.2 billion in total revenue, with our product and services revenue up nearly 28%. This year, we're targeting $1.4 billion-$1.5 billion in total revenue, with product and service revenue up 26% at that midpoint. This has been all power generation business. The need for our product is growing, our commercial positioning is improving, the geographies we are in are expanding, and we have the capacity to meet this demand.
You'll hear from Tim today on the progress that we're making in our power generation business in our international markets. Over the course of the last year, we moved very quickly from landing our first servers in Europe in June to securing five new countries. The themes of needing sustainable, resilient, predictable power are resonating with even a greater focus on energy security. We see opportunity to accelerate both in Europe and in Asia. In addition, we see tremendous opportunities for our decarbonizing technologies. As proven in our electrolyzer demonstrations, we have developed the most efficient electrolyzer on the market in converting kilowatt hours into kilograms of hydrogen. We have a 15-year proven track record proven operating this platform as a fuel cell. We have the operational readiness to deliver over two gigawatts electrolyzers annually. Hydrogen is undeniable reality.
You can see with this momentum, the capital and stimulus going into this market. To us, it's always been a question of when, not if. The Inflation Reduction Act, hydrogen $3 PTC is driving increased commercial interest in the United States and setting the bar high in other economies like Canada, Japan, Korea, and the European Union. You'll hear a lot more today on why we're so excited about this opportunity. In addition, as the world secures the zero carbon energy needed to produce clean hydrogen, we have a technology to enable efficient carbon capture. Given that we don't combust, there's no particulates, no SOx, NOx in our exhaust. We are 95% pure CO2 from our anode exhaust when the water's removed.
There is a huge opportunity for us to partner with players from multiple industries to provide 24/7 baseload zero carbon energy at very attractive economics. Economics made more attractive with the $85 a ton incentive from the Inflation Reduction Act. In addition, we're seeing strong interest from industries that utilize CO2, like SAF, in their production process. As K.R. said, "Should the pace of the adoption accelerate, our carbon capture application could provide a significant upside to our current projections." On transportation, specifically marine, we're developing the technologies to grow in this market. There's a tremendous need to decarbonize with clean fuels, and while there's a longer development cycle for this product, we see this market significantly contributing later in our ten-year framework. These additional applications should add at least another five points of growth, bringing our overall revenue growth to 30%-35%.
If the world moves more quickly, we'll be ready with product, increasing these rates. Our total addressable market is measured in trillions. You'll hear from Dave, those global markets are trending in our favor. There's growing need for resilient, available power that reduces carbon intensity today while providing the optionality to move to on-site net zero solutions like hydrogen in the future. The effects of climate change will increasingly impact the aging electricity grid with outages, while utilities lack the power generation and the transmission resources to meet the needs of a growing global populations and economic growth. The gap is gonna increase additionally with the needs of a digitized economy, electrification, electric vehicles, and a warming planet.
What's unique about Bloom is the product as a platform, specifically designed for multiple applications across the same core platform. It's incredibly important as you think about the prioritization of our investments. We, as we invest in growth, we're not dependent upon a specific fuel, an application or geography. In addition, leveraging the core platform is incredibly important when you think about our cost down learning curves. Our story is not about growth alone. It's about profitable growth. We have targeted to get to a 30% non-GAAP gross margins and 15% non-GAAP operating margins by 2025. That's just two and a half years away. I'll walk you through how we intend to get there momentarily, but at its core, it's about leveraging the power of a common platform to drive down product costs, combined with OpEx discipline and leverage across the platform.
We are committed to achieving this target, and you should see steady improvement towards this over the next few years. This year's guidance has a commitment for us to be non-GAAP from operating income positive. Last year, we were within $30 million of hitting that target. We took all of that frustration from the team and the whole business and doubled our efforts to make the business profitable this year. We've made it a goal of the entire company, and every Bloom employee has an incentive to help meet this goal. We understand that in a high growth company, once you get to profitability, you unlock tremendous operating and value leverage. We're also committed to being cash flow from operations positive this year.
As I detailed out in our earnings call, we used $315 million in cash from operating activities in the first quarter, primarily driven by investments in inventory. The time-to-power value proposition and leveling the build plan resulted in a net increase in inventories. We also had an increase in our receivables as our EPC partner finalized their project financing. We are on track to collect the receivables and ship our inventories. We fully expect to recover that working capital as we move into the second half of the year. Two weeks ago, we secured $560 million net proceeds of additional capital at very attractive terms. We did this to ensure the company is well-positioned for the future.
We're gonna pay off debt, and it's gonna provide us the capital to drive our growth, especially as you see more and more large-scale projects that require greater and longer investment cycles that are gonna have movements in our working capital. We raised this capital with an instrument that has an exercise price above $26 a share. Let me go through the numbers here. At the end of the first quarter, we had $320 million in unrestricted cash. The convert proceeds add $560 million to that balance. We're gonna use $200 million of it for debt repayment. When you get the $315 million back to get us back to CFOA positive over the next three quarters, and we're gonna use roughly about $95 million in CapEx for the remaining part of the year.
That should give us a pro forma balance targeted at about $900 million by the end of the year. On the debt repayment, we're currently evaluating repowering our one and only remaining consolidated PPA. If we choose to do it, PPA 5, 40 megawatts, we'd expect similar outcomes and benefits to the 30 megawatts of repowerings we completed in 2022. For completeness, I've included that $120 million in this cash schedule. Throughout the company's history, we consistently achieved an annual cost down reduction on our product cost 10%-15% a year. As the world experienced the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, the impacts of inefficiencies, inflation, shipping costs, and capacity investments resulted in a unit cost increase product cost of 7% last year. Hadn't happened in our history. We weren't unique in this regard.
In the aftermath, COVID had similar effects on other companies. However, we used it as a rallying cry for the whole business. We reinvigorated our efforts on engineering costs out of the product, increasing power densities, driving automation in the factories, and reducing costs in our supply chain. While costs were up year-over-year in 2022, each quarter we had a small decrease as these initiatives started to take hold. I was really encouraged by the first quarter this year when we were down 10% versus the first quarter last year. We're on our way to a 12% cost reduction target for the full year 2023. Reducing product costs is key to us to continue improving our margins. We firmly believe we can continue to leverage these efforts further and drive down this cost curve and return to that 10%-15% annual reductions.
It's important to remember that the benefits of a common platform is these cost savings translate in reductions to all our applications, including electrolyzers. While we optimize the application, it remains the same basic design, and this is allows us to use the same supply chain, manufacturing capacity, logistics, engineering teams, and learnings across the entire platform. We are building manufacturing capacity to meet demand. Last year, we were excited to have you all at our new manufacturing facility in Fremont for the investor conference. Over the course of 2022, we increased our stack manufacturing capacity in California from 300 megawatts to 660 megawatts. You'll see in Jose's video later during the roundtable, this year, we wouldn't have been able to hold this crowd in that facility. It's filled up with tooling.
We can add at least another 700 megawatts in that facility. We can do that as we need additional capacity. At our projected growth rates, that should be enough capacity to meet demand for the next three years. In the near term, that team is focused on automating and optimizing our manufacturing processes so we can reduce costs. We'll talk about this more during the roundtable. Another encouraging data trend is we've been able to maintain price. The need for our product, especially with our time to power value proposition and the improved ITC benefits, have allowed us to capture more value. Clearly, the price utilities are charging is increasing significantly with many territories up double digits.
While we always will ensure that we're selling our product to our customers at a competitive solution, the drivers for value of resiliency, sustainability, and predictability of receiving power is increasing. Sharelynn will speak more about this. It's not solely cost savings versus a local utility, but rather our solution versus lost opportunity of not having the required power or certainty of power. We'll retain our strong pricing discipline as we evaluate new markets. We're always gonna allocate units where we get the best combination of margin and growth. In addition to reducing our product costs, we expect additional operating leverage in our operating costs. Over the past few years, our operating expenses remained about 26% of revenue as we invested in R&D, increased our commercial resources, and ensured we had the control environment to scale.
While expenses in the first quarter were elevated by some very specific program spend, for the year, we expect to be 200-300 basis points lower to about 23% for this year. As the development or our platform matures and our commercial investments scale, we're seeing enhanced operating leverage. For example, we expect to grow our operating expenses less than 12% in 2023, about half the rate that we've seen in the past. Going forward, we will maintain similar levels of annual growth. When you combine that with our expected revenue growth, this should allow us to achieve our targeted operating levels of 15% of revenue.
This should give us the appropriate level of investment in R&D and commercial, and when combined with our expected gross margin expansion, ensure we get to that targeted 15% non-GAAP operating margins in 2025. It's key to that. Let me spend this few minutes on the service business. I know that there's you guys have some areas of questions around here. There's incredible value in that recurring revenue stream as each one of our servers has a service contract attached to it. We have over $7 billion of service revenue in our backlog at the end of last year. We price each service contract to a targeted minimum 20% return. Over the last couple of years, we haven't gotten there.
The business has been impacted by negative timings on some commission cycles, on product costs, and most recently, on performance payments. For the service revenue, we've had a greater mix of Korean acceptances. You know, unlike our historical U.S. business that you'd be entering service margin, service revenue very close to acceptance, there's about a 12 or 18-month delay for our Korea acceptances. These projects, though, are now coming online, and they are gonna contribute to our service revenues as they do. Second, we talked about product costs before. Not having the costs down, that impacts our replacement module costs. Now that we're seeing again, we'll be driving down our product costs, that's gonna translate into the service business and help improving margins here. Lastly, I explained this on the first quarter call.
The end of last year and through last year, we made a call to ship more units for revenue than for service, and that had a negative impact on our power output, which has caused us to make some performance payments to our investors. We're now quickly shipping those units in the beginning part of this year. At the same time, we're making performance payments. As the power output increases, those payments will reduce, and that should improve our overall service margins. We remain committed to a 20% non-GAAP gross margin in service by 2025, and we see a path to get there. In addition to just the financial return that we see in the service business, we collect over 1 billion data points every day. The data is used to monitor output, identify service needs or adjust performance.
We utilize this data to model changes in our operating variables on efficiency, power output and stack life. The knowledge that can be applied to the specific system or it can be either applied to a specific system or leveraged across the entire fleet. The concepts of digital twin, machine learning, and AI are not new to us. We've been leveraging data to improve our product and performance since our inception. These insights have been incredibly valuable as we've matured our technology, our manufacturing and service. We will leverage these learnings as we move into more applications in the future, such as electrolyzers and marine. To scale our revenue targets, we're gonna need to continue to leverage partners. We really wanna focus on our core competencies, and for example, we need the partners to deploy our technologies for electrolyzers and carbon capture.
There are proven technology partners out there that we can line up with and scale quickly with them rather than compete with them. We're taking similar approaches for installation, financing, analytics, and IT. Our best example of a mutually beneficial partnership is SK ecoplant. K.R. talked about this last year. What began in 2018 with energy service in Korea has matured into leveraging their EPC expertise in fuel cells in the United States and global large-scale hydrogen development projects. To date, we sold $1.2 billion of fuel cells in Korea and have partnered on over $400 million in the United States. On the slide here, we show a picture of our joint venture with SK ecoplant in Korea. We're utilizing this facility for final assembly for our Korea acceptances this year. Korea is a key market for us.
The Korean government and the power generation companies value fuel cells as a key component in their energy transition, and we are well-positioned to provide both natural gas fuel cells and hydrogen fuel cells as we go forward. We are in the second year of a three-year volume agreement and look forward to working closely with KI Park and the entire SK ecoplant team to secure additional commercial wins post that take or pay contract. Global government incentives are positively impacting our business, specifically the Inflation Reduction Act. I've talked about the benefits of an increase in the investment tax credit on the hydrogen production tax credit and changes made in carbon capture. We see these as tremendous tailwinds in the U.S., as well as driving additional incentives in other geographies. Let me give you a sense for the agenda and who will follow us today.
Sharelynn will come up next, talk about the power generation business. We'll have Tim Schweikert coming, talking about both the international and marine strategies. We'll have our new CTO, Ravi Prasher. Ravi brings incredible technical chops to the job, and he's gonna give us insights around the hydrogen electrolyzer demonstrations. We've got Rick Beuttel back this year. Rick's a 30-year hydrogen veteran, and he's gonna talk us through the efforts that we're having as well as specific insights from the market leader. We'll come back, and I'll lead an operational discussion with Carl Cottuli, our engineering leader, Satish Chitoori, our supply chain leader, Jose Hernandez, our manufacturing leader, and our CIO, Cornelia Poole. K.R. will be available to take some questions. Bloom's at an inflection point. The grid's becoming less resilient and more expensive. The world needs to decarbonize.
Solutions like clean hydrogen, renewable natural gas, carbon capture, it's the future. We have those solutions, and they're in demand. We will continue to invest, reduce our costs, and build capacity. Our mature technology platform can be leveraged across multiple applications. We have the balance sheet strength to deliver, and we're at a very attractive valuation. We are extremely focused on execution. We plan to deliver robust growth at attractive returns and generate cash. We have a clarity in our mission. We're extremely excited about our future. Thank you.
We are solving real-world problems for our customers with tangible, compelling benefits for them and for their customers, their employees, their communities, and the planet. Bloom powers life. Bloom powers information. Bloom powers business. Bloom powers industry. Bloom powers transportation. Bloom powers entertainment. Bloom powers the world. Bloom powers progress.
Please welcome Sharelynn Moore, Executive Vice President, Chief Business Development and Marketing Officer.
Good afternoon. It is really nice to be here with all of you. Welcome. Well, we have real positive, solid momentum building in our power business. I'm pleased to be able to share with you a bit of our progress, as well as the drivers that are gonna continue to fuel our engine, which is our power business, our core business. With that, I'm gonna start with some business highlights. These are the few of the things that we've accomplished since we were together just last year, which almost feels like yesterday, if you ask me. There's a lot of things moving. Again, these are indicative of where we're also going to continue to see this kind of growth. First of all, in data centers. Now, data centers is not new to us.
In fact, data centers were some of our very first early adopters as customers. What we're seeing today is quite an industry shift where data centers are not getting access to the power they need to expand or build when they need to. You're seeing some of this with the successful wins as you see our business in Oregon. That same large data center customer we're working with in other parts of the nation as well as around the world. We see this only continuing. We've hired a dedicated data center focused team that's been busy out there building pipeline. They're at a data center conference every day, every week, working with customers, and that pipeline's building. We see a huge pull across segments. This is one of the top segments that we're seeing demand generating out of.
The second business highlight is our Korea business. Greg did a great job walking through the strength of that partnership that's been building. We are the preeminent fuel cell leader for utility-scale power in South Korea. Through our partnership with SK, we will continue to retain that dominance as that industry or that market shifts from a portfolio standard, Renewable Portfolio Standard, which was our natural gas fuel cells. As they shift into hydrogen, we're well-poised to take advantage of that shift with them as our fuel cells can easily transition into hydrogen as well, including we can also help support new hydrogen generation, such as a project SK announced with us for a nuclear project using our electrolyzers. SK ecoplant also provides synergy in our business and our go-to-market.
We found really great success when they're out moving in the market as such a big organization, and they bring us in, as well as when we are working on really large, complicated projects, and we can bring them in early. What we're finding is this better together of wrapping our solutions together has been very successful in a lot of key areas. You'll probably see some continued opportunities where we've been able to work with each other and provide additional value through that synergy with our customers. By no means are we only working with SK, but when those conditions all come together, it's a real advantage that we have such a strong partner to work with. The third business highlight is in our waste-to-energy business. If you think about waste-to-energy, it's really two segments for us.
I'll cover the first one. The first segment in waste-to-energy is renewable fuels or Sustainable Aviation Fuel or biodiesel. In this segment, we essentially are the primary power that can help those developers provide their product at a lower carbon intensity or a lower CI score. One such example is a customer named CVR Renewables. We're working with them on a large development in the Midwestern United States, where we're the primary power to their large renewable fuel biodiesel project. Our power offsets their carbon intensity score, which more than offsets any difference in cost of what would have been just electron to electron. In addition, they're taking advantage of our ability to take the carbon, the CO2, that pure stream that Greg mentioned of 95%, and they're gonna be able to sequester that in a CO2 pipeline that's nearby.
That only dramatically amplifies that business case for them in choosing Bloom to power that big important project. These are the kind of projects that we see only continuing with so much demand going into renewable fuels. We're looking forward to being active in this market. We were just at the Biogas Conference two weeks ago as a premier sponsor, and this is really a growing market. The second part of the waste-to-energy business is our ability to take biodiesel and create on-site power. The picture you see there is actually a dairy called Bar 20 in California, one of the largest dairy farms in the Western region. They're essentially taking their digested biogas and fuel and powering Bloom Energy fuel cells that's providing resilient power. They're at the end of a transmission line.
They've increased their resiliency while they've been able to take advantage of that methane and be able to do something productive with it. This is becoming a lighthouse project. I mentioned being at their biogas event. It's won 3 industry awards so far. In fact, BBC has featured this project on a very special documentary, and we revealed it pre-released it with our annual report, BBC will be launching it mid-June. We're really looking forward to being a leader in this area as well. Those are 3 business segments that kind of give you a hint of how things are going and moving and being powered in power. Let's go forward. Let's not go backwards. Let's take a step back.
When we look at the drivers for our business, we have to start here. Through the very best intentions, through the desire to do the right thing, we have to also recognize that the energy transition, even though we've brought on more renewables than we ever have, in fact, in 2022, for the first time, solar eclipsed coal in centralized generation. We're not seeing the results from the energy transition you would expect. For example, our energy costs are increasing. If you're in New York, you've seen, right here, 9+% already increase. If you're in California, you're seeing another 5%-15% is gonna increase through 2024. In addition, emissions, surprisingly, are also going up.
Not just CO2 emissions, but the NOx and SOx harmful air particles is also going up because more diesel is being used than ever in diesel-generating backup assets. That leads to this third point, resiliency. Resiliency is not getting any better. That's why those diesel gen sets are firing up. Here at Bloom, no surprise, we think there's a better answer. We're willing to step up and meet that challenge where it is and ensure our products can be an aid or an enabler into the energy transition. Our solution is a perfect bridge to get you from what you need today to what you will need tomorrow. We can meet people's energy needs, our customers' energy needs with resiliency, with sustainability, with predictability, and we can meet their power needs when they need them, not when major upgrades to the transmission or distribution grid get made.
We call this no excuses, zero excuses. Let's dig into resiliency just a little bit more. Zero outages. Imagine this. In the case of a major disaster, you get your early warning. What are you most likely to do? You're most likely, you think you might be hunkered down for a few days. Most likely, you're gonna go out and secure some groceries and go to the grocery store. What's gonna happen if that grocery store is out of power? God forbid, you're in the middle of your grocery shopping and the power goes out because you're gonna have to abandon that cart and leave. Our customer, Stop & Shop, did something about it. They partnered with us.
They have 34 micro gridded Stop & Shop stores now, and when the power goes out, their lights stay on, they're able to check out their customers, and they don't have the waste and the spoilage. We've saved them for more than 131 outages across those systems. Again, while other people are out, Stop & Shop is still there to meet their customers' needs. AT&T, not completely dissimilar. There's a large data center that helps keep their cellular lines, mobile phones up and running on the East Coast. We withhold outages with this customer time and time and time again. What would be worse than being in the middle of a disaster and your cell phone can't work for you to check on your loved ones?
This resiliency value, it's not only it, you know, sounds really good, and of course, I'm passionate that we can provide such strong solutions, but there's real demonstrable value to the business case that people are going to be willing to pay over and above the cheapest cost of power. They'll pay a premium to ensure that they have the power when they need it. Next, let's talk about zero risk. There's one thing for certain, what I can say is Bloom is absolutely has our goal to keep lowering our costs year-over-year, just like Greg talked about, 10%-15%. On the other side of the equation, we know with the investment needed in our grids, which is a good thing, it's the right thing to do, grid costs will only go up.
With Bloom costs going down and grid costs going up, if you're a customer that's highly dependent on energy as a key component of your product or your business or your profitability, being able to secure your energy and ensure you're locked in at a price and a quality that you can expect over a period of time has tremendous value. Predictability, not just in your cost, but predictability in your power quality as well. Another area driving our business is zero carbon, sustainability. There are multiple ways we help customers in sustainability goals. One, we're lower emissions than the average grid. Two, we don't use any water, so we're not wasting any water. Three, we don't emit harmful air particulates like NOx and SOx that we've talked about. Without combustion, you don't release NOx and SOx.
Four, with the beauty of having Bloom Energy Servers, you cannot use those diesel generator backups, and you don't fire them up when everyone else is firing up and producing horrible air quality. Last, we're fuel flexible. If you start with natural gas today, because it's plentiful, affordable, and accessible, you're cleaner. If you want to get to zero carbon, you can migrate or upgrade in your normal upgrade cycle to biogas or hydrogen or sequester or separate that carbon if there's a market for it or you have access to sequestration. These are the types of things that we keep adding into our product to ensure we can meet sustainability goals. We can also grab heat and take that heat and reuse it, which takes our efficiency up to 85%-90% in power and heat or a Combined Heat and Power application.
Ultimately, 0 delays. I mentioned we're working with a large customer in data centers that couldn't get access to power. This isn't a one-off. We're seeing it happen on the other side of the country. We're seeing it happen all over the world. We're working with customers to make sure they get the power when and where they need it. This is also an opening of the door for us to work with utilities. We're working with a handful of utilities today that are looking to us to help add or bolster their substations, add capacity where they might be short or at the end of lines. Instead of adding transition, they can add Bloom. 3, ultimately, using us to serve their customers' needs themselves. Any which way, Bloom's here.
We wanna aid this energy transition and be there with both our utility customers as well as our commercial customers. To sum it all up, zero compromise. We don't think anyone should have to compromise in this energy transition. Let's make the right decisions we need today. We can offer resiliency, sustainability, and predictability, as well as the power you need when and where you need it. With that, I'll maybe leave it here and have you hear from a few of my customers. When the power goes out, we lose opportunity. It's critical that we have uninterrupted power so that we can keep our production up and running at all times. Resiliency is really important for SoCalGas, and we are using Bloom Energy Servers at our two largest facilities to put them essentially off-grid
At the end of the day, we're really looking for the most reliable source at the lowest possible cost of operation.
I'm happy to say it's been up and running for 8+ years without any interruption.
We need price certainty. What's price gonna be in the next 2 to 3 to 5 years? Bloom gives us that price certainty. When they make a commitment that, "Hey, our efficiency is gonna be this over the next 4 to 5 years," I can attest that not only have you lived up to that, you exceeded our expectations.
Utility costs average over $2 million a year before our Bloom Energy project. We anticipate to cut that at least in half.
CVR Renewables Diesel project, consumes about 25 megawatts of power. By utilizing Bloom fuel cells for that power, we get a reduction in our carbon intensity score, which reduces our emissions and provides an economic benefit.
Bloom has won our sustainability award as a sustainability partner of the year.
One of the things that impressed me most about, the Bloom project was time to power.
We wanna be able to show that, "Hey, we're open for business." Having the fuel cell gives us that microgrid capability to be able to keep our buildings up and running. Being a long-term customer for over 12 years, I'm a true believer.
We are in an unprecedented time. The demand for data center capacity has never been higher. The growth of this sector has never been higher, and the adoption of technology that's driving that has never been higher. If you think about the largest data center market in the world, it is Loudoun County in Virginia, and they're out of power. That is extremely damaging to economic development. Bloom is popping up in multiple areas because there's an answer. There's a way to go back and get energy generated on-site that's gonna be able to solve the problem.
All right. Thank you. Sometimes a video just isn't enough, so I'd like to invite a special guest that was just on the video up to the stage.
Introducing Dean Nelson, Chairman and Founder of Infrastructure Masons and CEO of Cato Digital.
Hi.
Hello. Thank you for being here.
Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. Well, Dean, you are a bit of a guru in the data center industry, so maybe you need to tell everybody a little bit about what you do.
Yeah. I've been in the industry about 33 years, so started with Sun Microsystems on my 21st birthday, ironically. Over 30 years with that one, I went from Sun to eBay to PayPal to Uber and ran global operations basically for digital infrastructure for that. The last 3 years I've been doing this other fun stuff on boards as well as now with the startup company, Cato Digital.
Awesome. Well, you're not a stranger to Bloom. You've known Bloom for quite some time. Why don't you tell that story?
Kara and I were just talking earlier, it was almost 10 years ago to the day that we launched the first data center with primary power from fuel cells. Back then, that was a big deal, primarily because we said we're gonna remove fuel or generators and UPS. Okay. This is the digital infrastructure that runs the world. For eBay, that was $260 billion worth of commerce volume flowing through that engine every year. You think about that, you're building infrastructure, what if it goes out? We did a whole bunch of calculations on resiliency back in the day. We brought in UIUC.
They did an entire study on this to go back and say, "What's the probability of fault of now using fuel cells as primary power?" Ironically, in that state, this is in Salt Lake City, Utah, we had 94% coal. That was the grid. It was just the nature of the beast of where we were. It was a low-cost area for us. In the end, we put billions of dollars of infrastructure into that state. We tried to go back and change the laws, which we did. SB 12 happened, so we could get more renewable energy things, but it just wasn't fast enough. Then you start to look at the efficiency.
We backed up and looked at the entire system, and that was, if I could go back and create the energy on-site, consume it 150 feet away all the time, the efficiency goes up, and then all of a sudden I knocked 60% off my carbon footprint. This is in 2012. Just think about the opportunity within that state. That was one of those groundbreaking things that I remember the phone call. I was here in New York at a conference called Data Center Dynamics, and John Donahoe, the CEO of eBay at that point, Peter Gross and K.R. called up, and they said, "Hey, we're thinking about doing this." I'm like, "Way ahead of you.
Ready to go." It was just such an easy conversation because I'd handed this to our engineering teams and I said, "We're about to design a brand-new data center, second phase. We really should be thinking about this now. I want you to take the whiteboard, wipe it clean. You have 2 weeks. Tell me if fuel cells would actually work." At that point, they're like, "There's no way. How can we remove generators and things?" They came back 2 weeks later, and they were convincing me. That was the key, is when you get the engineering teams all excited, you allow them to engineer, they create really, really cool things. Building cut in half, cost cut in half. Like, everything just got better and more efficient and more resilient and more sustainable.
Oh, well, that's incredible. It's 10 years goes by. The industry hasn't stayed stagnant. There's been some changes inside this industry. Summarize what those key changes are.
Let me start with a little baseline first. Digital infrastructure, that's everything from when it leaves your phone or your device all the way through. I'm gonna go look at that YouTube video. It's gonna fly over the network, it's gonna hit a repeater, it's gonna go back into a distribution hub, and it's gonna go into a data center, which is gonna go to a server, which is gonna go to storage. That's the chain that happens. That system, there's 7 million data centers in the world, 7 million physically ID unique IDs. They have 105 gigawatts of capacity. They consume 594 terawatt-hours of energy every year. That represents 2.4% of the energy draw globally. That's digital infrastructure.
It's actually relatively small when you consider all the other consumers. It runs the world. We still have 2 billion people that are not online yet. Okay? We also will have 135 billion things by 2030. These are the IoT parts with 1 trillion sensors behind them. This has nothing to do even with generative AI yet. That 2.4 suddenly can become 8%-10% of the global energy draw because the entire world is basically consuming the infrastructure to operate. Doesn't matter if it's utility grids to running on your phone, everything is connected. The problem we're facing today is that we're out of power. As you saw in some of the videos there, the loudest, largest market in the world is Loudoun County, Virginia.
There's over 2,000 MW there, Dominion is unable to provide power for at least 5 years. That's transmission lines, as Kara was talking about before. It's just difficult to get it there. They can generate, but they just can't distribute. You have some of the biggest companies in the world, and I'm literally talking about all the hyperscalers, 85 colocation companies, everybody in that market trying to figure out how do we solve it. Because if they can't, economically and development-wise, they go to other places. Guess what? The other places are running out too. California, Arizona, Utah, they're all having these constraints. The ability to now say, "I can do a microgrid," bridge that gap, right? Increase resiliency is the only answer.
10 years later, we've come full circle into saying, "Can we now use this technology to hit all the different things that we're trying to accomplish?" The number one is, if I don't have power, I can't serve the world.
What do you think the forcing functions are where While you were an early pioneer and early adopter, not all data centers, we've had some success, but not all data centers have adopted as their standard architecture. What do you think forcing functions are now where you see that changing?
Yeah. There's actually a couple factors here, the first one is, if I don't have access to capacity, I have to come up with another answer. That's the first one.
Necessity being the mother of invention.
There it is. There it is. I really believe in forcing functions because that's when innovation happens. When you work under constraints, you come up with creative solutions. We've seen this time and time again in history. Where we are in the industry right now is America, Europe areas, and then Asia, right? The growth patterns are incredible.
Mm-hmm.
That's one factor. There's just not enough energy in the right place. The second one is that we have a climate crisis, as Kara outlined earlier. I think the world is woken up, and to me, this comes down to the investors because follow the money, that's where things happen, period. If you don't have the money behind it, you're not gonna be able to move something.
These guys.
Yes. From my perspective, now you've got the biggest investors in the world saying, "I am going to go focus on sustainable investments." The money is moving in that direction. Secondly, you have the biggest companies in the world focusing on climate goals. They're publicly stating net zero by a certain timeframe. They don't know how to get there yet, they're making that commitment. Between the investment dollars and those commitments from the largest companies in the world, that's the forcing function I think that's gonna cause this to happen. That innovation that will come out of it... I'll give you an example. Microsoft put out a fund that said, "We're gonna put $1 billion out there for anybody who can come up with innovative solutions to help us meet our sustainability goals.
We're gonna open up our patents. You can use them." That drives, you know, acceleration of what we're trying to actually get done. That's what gives me a lot of hope. One other thing I wanna mention is that I am the Chairman and Founder of Infrastructure Masons. This is a professional association that is uniting the builders of the digital age. Think of all the people that build that engine and operate that around the world, AWS's, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Digital Realty, all those companies. We came together last year because things were not moving fast enough from a climate standpoint. We gathered at a person's house, 40 executives and said, "Let's find one thing that we can do together to address climate change for our industry." Just one. That was one of the most difficult things to do. Simplicity is.
We got it down to it, and the iMasons Climate Accord was born. That accelerated really quickly. Within six weeks, we had 73 companies signed up for it, including AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft. Another six weeks after that launch, we were over 200 companies. 200 companies who represent over $6 trillion in market cap, all united on one goal. That is where I see real movement. You take the investment side, you take the capacity constraints, and you take the public commitments, and everybody's aligned in to say, "We're gonna go achieve that goal because we have no choice not to. We must do it.
Well, it might be obvious to some. How do you see this as an opportunity for Bloom and how does Bloom fit into this?
It's a pretty simple proposition if you think about it. Let me tell you, I'm not paid for this. I'm here because I actually have been a longtime believer in Bloom.
We did buy you dinner.
That's true. Yeah. Okay. I think the key is that there's a real... I'm trying to figure out how to put this. Our industry is extremely risk-averse. They're very conservative, they don't wanna go back and try new things. When we go back and say, "Hey, remove your generators and UPS. Put in a fuel cell, it'll be fine." Every engineer in the room goes, "Oh my god, I can't do that." Now, when you say, "I'm out of power, we have to come up with a solution," every engineer goes and puts on their hat and figures it out, and guess what? I can do on-site generation. The natural gas lines are more resilient than the electrical lines. Like, they start doing the math because they have to solve a problem.
I think from Bloom's standpoint, the fact that we've got all these constraints in existing markets that are mature, that's one opportunity. When you think of the emerging markets who do not have energy resilience, but also have capacity problems, that opens up the door across the board, whether it's Africa, India, anywhere across Europe, there's opportunities. I think it is unbound when it comes to it.
Well, thank you. We've been longtime committed to data centers. We know we have a great solution there, and it's leaders like you that are helping lead the way in the industry. Is there anything else that you'd like to add in closing?
I would say that number one thing is, we should be challenging the status quo. There's a lot of people that think conservatively of how we're gonna approach these things. We don't have time to actually wait. From the climate standpoint and the growth globally, that is really critical. Generative AI, I know you keep hearing these buzzwords. It is predicted now that infrastructure globally will triple in our industry. Remember that 2.4%? Imagine if that goes to 8% or 10%. We have supply chain constraints right now. We have capacity problems all over the place. We must come up with ways in which we're gonna serve this demand.
I don't see any other answer except microgrids within our industry to solve and bridge that gap to get both sustainability, cost, and capacity solved.
Excellent. We'll leave it there.
Great.
Thank you, Dean.
Thank you.
Please.
The world is flat. The fundamental energy needs that affect New York are the same that impact Bangalore, Maranello, Seoul, and Taoyuan. Our energy security, environmental security, economic security are threatened today. Bloom's mission is to make clean, reliable energy affordable for everyone. It's a global mission for a single world, and it matters for our customers. Companies around the world who think globally, act locally to build a better business and to make our world a better place.
Ferrari has been among the few companies in the world to disclose our numbers in terms of carbon footprint, and we share with you a clear plan how to become carbon neutral by end of this decade. Bloom Energy for us is important because we are using, first in Europe, their technology, the fuel cell, so to accompany us in this journey till the end of this decade. Today, here in Maranello, where the headquarter of Ferrari is, 5% of the energy is coming from the Bloom Energy system. This system is flexible, and is ready also for the future because it can use methane or it can use also hydrogen. This is a clear example of what Ferrari is doing on a practical point of view, on a scientific point of view, aiming to become carbon neutral by end of this decade.
We thank Bloom Energy and all the friends in this company to help us in this important transition. Thank you.
We are the, one of the biggest, BGV supplier in the world. The, the stable power is very important and also for the green power also very important in the future. We choose the Bloom Energy as a partner for this kind of a future power supply. In Taiwan, in the region with unstable energy in our industry park, if any accident, then we can use this power.
Clean, reliable, affordable energy, a universal need, a human right. Bloom 2.0 means zero borders.
Please welcome Tim Schweikert, Senior Managing Director, International Business Development.
Good afternoon. Thank you. I told K.R., I said, "I am so looking forward to this investor meeting because we have made so much progress since our last meeting a year ago in not only our international business, but in energizing transportation." I'm really excited to be here today with you. Before I jump into the international piece, I wanna just give you a little bit of background on myself. I spent 33 years at GE. Most of that time I was working in international markets, growing-
Growing, whether it be our transportation, aviation business, places like China. I spent 6 years living in China, selling locomotives, not only in China, but Indonesia, South Korea. I went and did the same thing in sub-Saharan Africa . You know, when I started the international role with Bloom, I said, "This looks a lot like GE did back when it was making its big push into international markets." We've got a great mature product with a strong base in the U.S. We've got terrific world-beating technology, and we're looking at a white space that is virtually untapped. I'm really excited today to give you an update of where we stand.
Last year when we said, "Hey, Europe is our next frontier." We said that because the need for energy security, gas is not going away. You know, a lot of change in that market because of the Ukrainian, Ukraine-Russian war. Gas is there to stay in Europe. What it means is that Europe needs to get more energy, more electricity out of every molecule of gas. When you look at what Bloom, how we've positioned from a product standpoint with our Combined Heat and Power product, we think that is gonna be a really a super attractive world-beating product in Europe.
The need for on-site power, you know, we just heard on how it's so challenging to, if you're a new large energy producer or user, like a data center, to get access to the grid. That is going on in many markets across Europe. The optionality that we bring to Europe. Europe is making a lot of investment, a lot of policies being put in place to develop hydrogen, and the fact that we can run off of natural gas today and offer that optionality that Benedetto talked about in the future, really positions us nicely for Europe. Let's talk a little bit about what we've accomplished in the last 12 months.
We got our first system, and we had told you last year at this time that we got it in Europe, but we couldn't tell you who. You now see it was with Ferrari. We couldn't have got a better customer to launch our business in Europe. Benedetto, as you saw through his testimonial, is a huge supporter of Bloom. What we find is when we get into a market with a first system, like we did with Ferrari in Italy, that quickly attracts attention. So quickly, shortly after we got the Ferrari order, we signed a 10-megawatt deal with an outfit called Cefla, that specializes in distributed power with Combined Heat and Power. K.R. and I are gonna be in Italy next week.
We are gonna be attending a data center conference there and also gonna be visiting a number of large companies, CEOs in Italy's Hydrogen Valley. We see Italy being a 100-megawatt market for us within the next 3 years. You may have seen or heard in the press that we announced our first order in Northern Europe last month. That was with a company called LUG. That is for 5 data center, a combination of data centers and industrial systems in Belgium. We expect to get our first system into Belgium by the end of this year. This is another good example of kind of our land and expand strategy in Europe.
LUG is has a large installed base of distributed power in the Benelux region. We think, like what we're doing with Cefla in Italy, we can grow very quickly in Northern Europe with LUG. This is another example of how quickly Bloom can respond to an opportunity in the marketplace. The conversation with LUG started in November of last year. We signed the contract in the end of March of this year. We'll have a first system in country by the end of this year. Spain and Portugal are another important markets in Europe for Bloom. In January, announced a partnership with Telam. Telam has got a very strong track record of doing large or energy infrastructure projects on the Iberian Peninsula.
We think that we are really well positioned in Portugal and Spain because of the large renewable base of energy there and the government policies being put in place to make Spain and Portugal large exporters of green energy. I'm gonna switch focus now away from Europe to Asia, and I wanna talk a little bit about Taiwan. Taiwan is a great example of how quickly an energy landscape can change. You know, typically, Taiwan was a market that we weren't even looking at. It had typically been, the grid had been very stable there and reliable. Over the last 18-24 months, because of a number of coal plants and nuclear plants being shut down, the grid has become much less reliable.
There's been a number of high profile outages. The government has responded, by putting tariff increases in place for heavy electricity users, 5 megawatts and above. That goes into place next month, that basically doubles their tariff above 5 megawatts if those large energy users don't invest in distributed power. We were able to get our first deal signed in Taiwan with an outfit called Unimicron. This is another great example of how quickly, we could respond. We started our discussions in July of last year with Unimicron. We signed an order in December. Those first systems will be up and running commission, next month, in Taiwan.
Again, like I talked about in Italy, we think this is gonna be a catalyst for significant growth in Taiwan, and we expect this market to be another 100 megawatt size market within the next 3 years. Then just to round out Asia, Singapore is another market that we are extremely interested in. We have a pipeline of over 400 megawatts of opportunities that we're working right now in Singapore. Singapore is a country that has a strategy of importing LNG, but is also looking for the cleanest power solutions to utilize that LNG and convert it into electricity. We think with our carbon capture technology that we are really well positioned to win in Singapore.
Okay, I'm gonna switch gears now and talk a little bit about what we've done in the marine business. Marine, I think I mentioned to all of you last year at the investor conference that that's how I initially came to Bloom. I was very intrigued by my last role at GE being in running their marine business and knowing the huge challenges that they had, the marine industry had to decarbonize the business, and knowing the capabilities of Bloom, I thought, "Wow, this could be really interesting." You know, within a very short time, we made a lot of progress. Since our meeting last year, we installed our first system on the MSC World Europa .
You may be familiar with this vessel because it had its first port of call on its maiden voyage at Doha, where it housed France's team and other guests for the World Cup. The system is performing extremely well. We're delivering on all of our objectives relative to safety, reliability, and efficiency. The system is giving us a wealth of information and learning that is gonna allow us to iterate on our initial design to really make our product even more attractive to the marine industry. We're seeing our strongest interest from the cruise sector. When you think about it, if you're in the cruise industry, you're gonna spend $1 billion plus on a single vessel.
The thing that is probably top of mind from a risk standpoint is: Where am I gonna be able to sail that vessel over the lifetime of that vessel, 25 years? Particularly with all the regulation and regional regulation that's being put into place in terms of emissions. What they like about our product is the future-proof aspect of it. We can run on LNG today, when green methanol, green ammonia or hydrogen becomes a more prolific or relevant fuel for marine, our systems are ready for those fuels. The versatility of our platform has tremendous potential to energize the transportation sector. You know, whether we're providing clean power for ocean-going vessels, whether it's for charging electric vehicles or creating Sustainable Aviation Fuel, we think that our common platform is really positioned well to revolutionize the transportation sector.
I'm gonna wrap up just by saying that, listen, I hope I've left you with some real proof points that we are moving very fast, particularly in the international markets, and with real wins in new markets and getting substantial traction and interest in what we're doing. I believe it's gonna be our biggest growth area for the company, and I can't wait to come back and talk to you next year. You're probably gonna see 2 more announcements this year in new countries. Looking forward to keeping you up to date and seeing you next year. Thank you very much.
My name is Richard Boardman. I'm a research directorate fellow at the Idaho National Laboratory. INL is leading research to develop and demonstrate advanced water-splitting, high-temperature electrolysis for hydrogen production. With support from the U.S. Department of Energy, we have established a stack and modular system testing capability to help industry demonstrate this technology is ready for commercial applications. Behind me is a module developed by Bloom Energy. This unit has been tested for over a year through a cooperative research and development agreement. The INL test engineering team has operated this unit through adverse weather conditions. It has been started and stopped several times while accumulating almost 5,000 hours of operation while efficiently converting steam into hydrogen. The testing has proven that this electrolysis system is 20%-30% more efficient than current low-temperature electrolysis options.
We helped Bloom demonstrate that it can be successfully operated under a variety of scenarios.
The Bloom Energy unit operations are monitored from this grid emulation deck. The operating conditions are relayed to Bloom Engineering in Santa Clara. INL and Bloom Energy work together to adjust the systems as they monitor its performance. So far, this test unit has achieved all of the milestones Bloom Energy set out to accomplish.
Welcome Ravi Prasher, Chief Technology Officer.
I finished my PhD almost 25 years ago. At that time I joined Intel, the chip making company. That was the era of information technology. That was the hottest thing. I joined Intel, spent almost 10 years there, more than 10 years. In 2010, I had a massive calling. I wanted to do something seriously on climate change. I quit my job at Intel, took a massive pay cut, and joined the U.S. government. Because they were just starting a brand new agency called ARPA-E, which is like a DARPA, if you may have heard of DARPA. That agency we started under Department of Energy, and I joined as a founding member of the team to fund very high risk, high reward energy technology projects.
I myself funded more than 15 companies, both large and small, on related various energy technologies. I witnessed more than 100 companies being funded by my other colleagues in different aspects of energy technologies. That experience, quite frankly, one of the best experiences of my professional life. It really gave me a panoramic view of what was happening in the energy field. After that, I got an offer to run the energy technologies division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is the oldest national lab in the country. Since we are here in Manhattan, I want to point out that lab has played instrumental role in the Manhattan Project, the first nuclear bomb project, and it has produced more than 15 Nobel Prize winners.
I'm very fortunate that I was offered this position to run the energy technology division, which has 400 scientists and engineers working on all aspects of energy that you can think of, including hydrogen and fuel cell. When we are working on fuel cell or electrolyzer, it's a national labs. It's working on solid oxide, it's working on PEM, it's working on alkaline, all technologies. I'm very fortunate to really see firsthand which technology was making more sense. Now in this decade, now we are in an era of energy technology deployment because energy transition is finally happening.
The question came to me that, "Okay, which technology is gonna dominate the hydrogen market?" Fortunately for me, this opportunity from Bloom came, and I had already seen the performance in the press about the performance of electrolyzer from Idaho National Lab. It was a no-brainer for me to jump on this opportunity and join Bloom as the CTO. The very first task that I undertook at Bloom was to show that can we repeat the performance of one box that you saw in that video on multiple boxes with multiple megawatts of electricity going in and multiple tons of hydrogen coming out. Same performance, so that we can show that we are ready for commercial deployment. That is a project I ran.
As K.R. pointed out, if from outside, you cannot differentiate between our fuel cell box and the hydrogen box. Of that modularity and all the learning that we have, we managed to finish the project start to finish within 2 months. That project is now the demonstration project is operational at our Moffett site in the Bay Area. I would like to share a video to show you that it is producing hydrogen and what the team has done there.
Earlier this month, we began producing hydrogen at the NASA Ames Research Center in California with the world's largest solid oxide electrolyzer deployment. This Bloom Electrolyzer showcase demonstrates the maturity, efficiency, and commercial readiness of our solid oxide technology for large scale clean hydrogen production. With its industry-leading efficiency, the high temperature Bloom Electrolyzer can produce 25% or more hydrogen than similarly sized low temperature electrolyzers. It's a full circle moment for Bloom Energy, honoring our past while looking to the future. The showcase is at the same site where the company began operations over 20 years ago and that has served as our technology proving ground ever since.
This project and what it's doing is it's taking clean electricity and using it to split the bond between H2 and O in the water molecule, and we're gonna trap the hydrogen and use it as a form of chemical energy as a fuel. The beauty of hydrogen as a fuel is it doesn't contain a carbon atom, so it cannot emit CO2, which is harmful to the planet.
The most exciting thing about this project was the scale of the demonstration we have. Getting these things set up and starting out within the time frame, I think the entire team has done a fabulous job.
This is the first time solid oxide electrolyzer has been running at this scale. It can be a really useful tool of decarbonization because it can fill in for other fuels that contain carbon. We can swap it and replace it, and it'll really enable us to decarbonize hard to abate industries such as fertilizers, cement, transportation.
The Bloom Electrolyzer showcase at Moffett Field was built, installed, and operationalized in a span of just two months.
It's really a testament to the technical know-how of our people, the simplicity of our design, and the agility of our operations. We leverage the experience of our people who have deployed more than 1 gigawatt of solid oxide fuel cells in the field to bring this project from an idea to reality. Our product and our people are ready for prime time.
I'd like to take this opportunity to invite all of you to visit this site yourself and take a tour and see how the system is working and the hydrogen coming out. By the way, we are using some of that hydrogen to run our fuel cell as well, the blended fuel cell. With that, thank you very much.
Business development.
Welcome Rick Beuttel, Vice President, Business Development.
Good afternoon. Thank you, everyone. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be back here speaking to you all again this year. I'm Rick Beuttel. I look after the hydrogen business here at Bloom. My Bloom journey began at the beginning of 2022 when I left a 31-year career at Air Products , the world leader in hydrogen, where I developed, you know, double-digit billions of dollars' worth of hydrogen and its derivatives like ammonia, renewable fuels, and projects. That insight of 3 decades of hydrogen business development gave me a real appreciation for Bloom's technology and its fit for these markets of fuels of the future and other decarbonization applications for hydrogen. I'm very excited to be here at Bloom. First of all, I'd like you to take that away. Second of all, let's talk about some other exciting things.
The last 12 months in hydrogen have been truly remarkable. Let's start with a lot of the changes in policy. Of course, everyone's aware of the Inflation Reduction Act here in the United States. The policy and support for clean hydrogen, however, is not just limited to here. Similar legislation in economies like Japan, of course, the EU, our neighbors to the north in Canada, and other sophisticated economies have really cemented hydrogen's place and set it as a key tool in the decarbonization toolkit. We're very excited about that. Accordingly, industry groups and pundits like the IEA, the Hydrogen Council, Bloomberg, and many other experts have raised their forecast for gigawatts of electrolysis deployment by 2030 into hundreds of gigawatts deployed. We're tremendously excited about that market here at Bloom. Now I'd like to just take a moment and talk. That was the grand scale.
Let's talk about what we've been doing. We, in the business development side, have been spending a tremendous amount of time talking to customers, whether that's oil and gas companies, project developers, industrial gas companies, et cetera, supporting their developments and supporting their efforts to put projects together. We have, as Ravi laid out, and I'd like to thank Ravi and thank our engineering and supply chain teams as well for building our 4-megawatt demonstration facility in Northern California, which is really impressive to have customers come through and visit. I'm actually leaving here this evening to go out there for later this week and next week to host customers coming through, sort of every morning and every afternoon. People are clamoring to see it and see that the technology is real, see that the efficiency is real, and see that it's operational.
Further, you'll hear a little bit more about this from Jose, we have completed expanding our manufacturing capability. We now have over 2 gigawatts per year of solid oxide electrolysis manufacturing capability. That's more than any other electrolyzer company has, irrespective of technology, solid oxide, PEM, any of the other technologies. We have a factory that is complete. It's in the ground. It's operational. Many of you were there last year. There's no space this year, and we fully intend to cram more into that building. It's a very exciting time to be here at Bloom and be leading the hydrogen business. While some of these very large complex projects, and you'll hear a little bit more about one later today that we're very excited about, are taking a little bit more time than we'd hoped to come together.
We firmly believe that we have the right product, we have the right team, we have the right manufacturing platform, and we have the right business model at the right time to be successful in the hydrogen space. I could not be more excited to be here. Let's talk for a moment about markets and in particular the markets that we're very excited about. Why I came to Bloom again, were large project opportunities that generalizing are exothermic processes. What that means is what the customer is doing with our hydrogen is going into some sort of a chemical process, a syn-synthesis process that gives off heat.
Because of Bloom's high temperature technology, we're able to integrate with the customer's process, take that excess heat, and supercharge the already market-leading efficiency of our electrolyzer by feeding that electrolyzer not with water as a liquid like that's in the glass bottle in front of you, but water as low-grade steam. What that does is give the owner, give the project developer, give the project operator a tremendous efficiency benefit and 25% to 30% more hydrogen for a given amount of renewable electricity coming in. That's tremendously powerful. The second attribute, the second market that we're very excited about are the sort of hard-to-decarbonize applications, right? Everybody's talked about them. I sold to these industries when I was in industrial gases for many years.
These are industries that use oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, of course, already. The idea is to decarbonize by changing the fuel going into these processes from natural gas and air, natural gas and oxygen, to pure hydrogen and to pure low carbon hydrogen. Here, we're talking about hot processes like steelmaking, glass making, cement making. Where the same attributes that we spoke of in terms of chemical synthesis processes, we can take the waste heat from these processes, again, make low-grade steam, integrate 1 plus 1 is 3, and we have market-leading efficiency and the right solution for the owner.
Finally, we have a video that talks to this a bit later, we are really excited about the work we've done so far with the nuclear industry, whether that's the demonstration that Ravi spoke of at INL, whether that's the facility we're building for Xcel Energy, for their Prairie Island nuclear facility right now, and much of the business development work we're doing focused on the nuclear industry. Because the nuclear industry is tremendously attractive for us as a host. Why? Because it has low carbon electricity available around the clock, and it's also a hot process, right? Somebody once said that, you know, a nuclear reactor is really you're boiling water to make electricity with the nuclear reactor.
Well, we can take advantage of that residual heat energy as well, and supercharge the efficiency and make clean hydrogen by partnering with nuclear and supply customers that are in an amenable radius of the very large number of nuclear facilities, both here in the U.S. and around the world. Why are we so excited about this? Of the hundreds of gigawatts of opportunities that all these pundits are talking about for electrolysis deployment by 2030, roughly two-thirds of the opportunities fall into one of these buckets. Make no mistake, from a cost of hydrogen perspective and driven by our efficiency, Bloom's technology is the way that any owner who's making an economic decision would preferentially decide. I'll reiterate, why did I come here? I came here because of green ammonia. There's so much more than green ammonia that this technology unlocks.
Some other interesting things. Ravi spoke about his project management of our 4-megawatt deployment. That 4-megawatt deployment is really a remarkable thing to come see. I wish you all could come see it or, you know, at least, take a look at it online because it is tremendously powerful. We're calling it sort of jokingly, internally, a tourist attraction. As I mentioned, I'll be there later this week, I'll be there next week because the whole industry, whether it's industrial gases, oil and gas, project development, pure technology organizations and influencers, want to come see this installation. I know we're in the Northeast, trust me, I'm gonna say that this really is better than the Hamptons, you have to come see it. Good. I'm glad you're all awake. I was starting to get a little concerned. It really does make a great impression.
It reinforces the technology readiness, and as people say, a picture is worth 1,000 words. Walking around and seeing this unit and seeing what people have put together in an incredible 2-month period of time, seeing, touching, believing is worth 1,000 pictures. Again, it's really an incredible thing to go see. A further point, both the demonstration at Idaho National Labs, which has been running for nearly 5,000 hours now, and this installation at our facility at Moffett Field, are producing it better than what we expected from an efficiency standpoint. I'll let that sink in for a moment. Why I'm really excited about that is that means that the lowest levelized cost of hydrogen, we already compared favorably to PEM and Alkaline with what we expected. What we're seeing in actually these deployments and these demonstrations is even better efficiency.
We're able to bring that as value to our customers and our partners, and we're able to also play that value trade-off with how much of that efficiency benefit do we wanna keep in Bloom's pocket as we go and price new opportunities, let the customer take the benefit in a better efficiency, and we can charge a little bit more. That's okay because everybody wins. This is the best technology for this application. Finally, I wanted to make the point about business model. Bloom's business model is that of we are providing equipment on a capital sale basis, and then we are providing ongoing service. To be very clear, we're not getting into the hydrogen business. I came from the hydrogen business. We don't wanna get into the hydrogen business.
As investors, you don't want us getting into the hydrogen business, and we're getting a very clear message from our customers, they don't want us doing that. They don't want us to become a potential competitor of theirs. That's not at all our aim. Instead, and using a California analogy here, if you'll indulge me for a moment, California is known for the gold rush in the 1800s. The people that got rich in the gold rush, right, certainly some of the miners got rich, not all of them. Just as I think we suspect that some of the people in this hydrogen space are gonna do tremendously well with well-thought-out, with well-backed projects. Perhaps some of them won't. The one person that did get rich for sure in the gold rush was the person that made the best shovel and sold the best shovel.
I postulate to you all that our best place in the value chain here is to have absolutely the best gosh darn shovel that we can engineer, we can design, we can for every, you know, bit of effort in lifting that shovel up, we get more dirt out of the way to get to those gold bars. That's what we're gonna help our customers do. Very exciting. Even more exciting, we're on track. Despite the fact that some of these projects are taking a little bit longer than we all thought they would, and that I think mankind hoped we would, and that to try and hold our global climate increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we really need them to, we're on track with what we've told you. We developed our product, we launched our product before I even got to Bloom.
That's the nice thing. We know what it is, we know how it's gonna perform, we know what it's gonna cost. We've done our small scale demonstrations, be that in Korea, be that here in the US or other places. Last year, right before Investor Day, we talked about LSB. The LSB project is going well. It's on schedule. It'll be running in the first half of next year. As a refresher, that's green ammonia. We didn't wanna wait that long. We wanted to show customers today that this solution is real and ready to go. That's why we invested the money in building a 4-megawatt facility that's world scale, the world's largest solid oxide electrolyzer running at Moffett. The 10-megawatt project is gonna be complete first half of next year.
Large orders, what we said to you 12 months ago, what I think we've been saying for some time, 2024, 2025 and beyond. We have some exciting news and we fully expect that we'll see some traction before then, and we'll speak about that a little bit later today when we invite a valued customer and partner up to have a bit of a fireside chat, as Sharelynn and Dean did earlier. Just really excited to leave you with, we are on track, we are walking the talk. I'll just take a moment. We talked about nuclear earlier as an ideal host for solid oxide. I'd like to show a short video on the nuclear industry perspective on solid oxide, please.
Our path to a clean energy future lies in the simplest of elements, hydrogen. This abundant element can replace our dependence on dirty fossil fuels, offering better solutions for energy generation, storage, and transportation. While hydrogen has the potential to revolutionize how we power our world, the truth is, the majority of the hydrogen we produce today is still made from fossil fuels that release significant amounts of carbon dioxide. In fact, low-emission hydrogen production in 2021 accounted for less than 1% of global hydrogen production. This has to change. There's lots of talk about green hydrogen produced from renewable energy sources like solar or wind, but the lesser-known and equally clean pink hydrogen made using nuclear power has been gaining attention lately. Because nuclear power plants produce large quantities of steam and waste heat, they pair perfectly with high-temperature solid oxide electrolyzers.
These high-temperature electrolyzers can operate at more than twice the efficiency of their low-temperature counterparts. This supercharged efficiency produces significantly more hydrogen from the same amount of electricity and water at a lower overall cost per kilogram. That's a big win for the climate and for the industries that need a cleaner source of energy. That makes pink hydrogen a game changer.
At SK ecoplant, we've been partnered with Bloom Energy since 2017, driving the clean energy transition in Korea. We are becoming leaders in the clean hydrogen market in Korea and other global markets with the competitive advantage of the Bloom Electrolyzer. More recently, we have taken our partnership to the next level. We've signed an MOU with Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation and Hyundai Engineering to build a hydrogen micro hub here in Seoul, powered by a micro nuclear reactor and Bloom Energy's solid oxide electrolyzer. This project enables us to produce clean hydrogen using nuclear power and Bloom Energy's solid oxide electrolyzer. We believe this partnership will bring abundant clean energy to the region, we are proud to work with Bloom Energy toward that goal.
A single nuclear plant can produce more than 200,000 metric tons of clean hydrogen annually due to its size and consistent power generation. This large-scale production can help to decarbonize hydrogen-hungry industries such as oil refining, fertilizer production, and steel making. Westinghouse designed reactors and the clean steam and electricity generated are ideal for pairing with Bloom's high-temperature Electrolyzer. When a highly efficient Electrolyzer like Bloom's splits steam into pure hydrogen and oxygen, it can greatly reduce emissions and air pollution related to industrial operations, thereby helping to achieve our climate goals with zero carbon hydrogen. Together, we will deliver an economical and clean hydrogen solution benefiting society today and generations to follow.
With over 20 years of development, testing, and manufacturing on the Bloom platform, Bloom's solid oxide electrolyzer paired with nuclear power makes large scale hydrogen production cleaner and more affordable than ever. Bloom 2.0 means zero waste.
Okay, really neat video. There's a common misperception though, and look, I may be fueling it up here as I talk about these exothermic applications and people that have steam and nuclear power plants. There's a misperception, perhaps, that we only work when the customer has steam. I'd like to show just one more snippet, one more testimonial video for Heliogen. Heliogen is a CSP, a concentrated solar provider, one of our very early deployments of our electrolysis technology, with which we've done a demonstration, and actually we're doing some more work with them to scale up and do some larger projects. in the Southwest of the United States in the future. Here's another testimonial where the technology just pairs so well with CSP as the steam source to make low carbon intensity clean hydrogen.
Hello, my name is Christie Obiaya, and I'm the CEO of Heliogen. We are on a mission to decarbonize industry with solutions using concentrated sunlight and thermal energy storage to generate steam, power, and when paired with an electrolyzer, green hydrogen fuel. Heliogen's solar energy system plus Bloom Energy's solid oxide electrolyzer together can produce green hydrogen significantly more efficiently than could be achieved with alkaline and PEM electrolyzers. This complementary approach can drive down costs and accelerate adoption of clean, renewable energy. Bloom Energy shares our mission to help industries reduce their carbon emissions. We look forward to working with Bloom Energy for a brighter, cleaner future.
Okay. Finally, one more short video is an introduction on a project that we're extremely excited about and have been working on since last summer. We'll have the video play, and then we'll bring a special guest up onto the stage for a discussion, please.
The whole world is moving toward clean, renewable energy. One of the clean fuels in demand today is green hydrogen. It's used to power manufacturing, transportation, and more with zero emissions. We simply separate the hydrogen from water using electricity that's generated renewably with the power of wind. Newfoundland and Labrador is one of the windiest places on Earth, and with all that wind comes great opportunity. Our province is ideally positioned to be a global leader in wind energy for the production of green hydrogen. Project Nujio'qonik will harness our wind power to produce the renewable electricity required for a green hydrogen plant to be located in the town of Stephenville on the existing industrial site of the former paper mill, using the same water supply and electrical grid connection.
We will also build 3 wind farm sites together, producing 250,000 metric tons of green hydrogen or 1.1 million metric tons of green ammonia annually, all to be shipped to global markets where this clean fuel is in high demand. This project, with a budget of $10 billion-$12 billion, will be Canada's first commercial green hydrogen plant and the first project of its kind in North America. Project Nujio'qonik will be instrumental in helping Newfoundland and Labrador and Canada develop the green, renewable energy the world so badly needs. Why our West Coast? Our studies indicate it's one of the best wind resource regions in the world. It has the ideal conditions for hydrogen production, including a harbor and deepwater marine facilities. Behind Project Nujio'qonik is a strong team of global experts, regional investors, and local companies.
We are leveraging local expertise in renewable resource development and collaborating with leaders in Canada's wind energy industry. We are all ready to proceed with confidence and with care. We are ever mindful of the land and the people who live here. We are working closely with the Qalipu First Nation and building relationships with local band councils. We are thinking ahead. To help transition our province's workforce to a green economy, we will build North America's first wind industry training institute. With our partners, DOB- Academy in the Netherlands, First Nations, and College of the North Atlantic, we will attract students far and wide to exciting careers in the wind industry. We estimate Project Nujio'qonik will create 1,800 direct construction jobs, 300 jobs in operations, and 3,500 indirect jobs.
It will rejuvenate the port of Stephenville, inspire long-term careers, transform our economy, and bring Newfoundlanders and Labradorians home. Imagine, we can produce a clean, zero emissions fuel at a plant operated by our local people and powered renewably by something we have in spades: wind. What an ideal opportunity for Newfoundland and Labrador to be a world leader in clean, renewable energy. The winds of change are blowing. World Energy GH2 will take us to new heights. Introducing Gene Gebolys, President and CEO of World Energy.
Hi, friend. Thank you.
That was pretty cool. I've never seen it before, actually.
It's pretty impressive. You gotta be a little bit crazy to be pulling this off, huh?
I think that's true.
Yeah. Maybe just by way of introduction for the audience, could you share a little bit about World Energy's background and maybe just tack on to the very end a little bit more sub-sub-substinence, easy for me to say, around the project in Newfoundland and Labrador?
Sure. As you know, Rick, we're a 25-year-old biofuels business, starting out in biodiesel a long time ago, then going to renewable diesel. We were the first producers of Sustainable Aviation Fuel in the world. We're in the midst of a $2.5 billion Sustainable Aviation Fuel expansion that you're very familiar with from your previous career. We are a big short for hydrogen, where as a user of hydrogen, that kind of puts us in the mindset of how can we source hydrogen more effectively. We've also triggered a second facility in the Houston Ship Channel, also to produce Sustainable Aviation Fuel.
As part of our journey, we were trying to figure out how we could source green hydrogen from wherever it's best going to be produced in the world. That led us into a project to try to figure out, well, maybe we need to produce it ourselves. With Kara last night, we were talking about the journey, and I think we share a lot of DNA. The journey is don't be afraid of where you need to go, just go there and figure it out. The reason we've been working so closely with Bloom is we really share the DNA of learning together. It been a.
I didn't know the first thing about producing hydrogen a year and a half ago, and I'm really pleased to say just last week, in large part from the introductions made by Bloom, we secured a $50 million investment on a $250 million valuation from SK ecoplant, who's played very prominently in this discussion. Anyway, I'll stop with the soliloquy and turn it back over to you.
No, it's a great soliloquy. It's a great story. You know, just the journey of World Energy is so inspiring to identify the need to decarbonize transportation 25 years ago. I mean, you must have been, well, probably one at the time.
I think I heard a similar story earlier at the, at the beginning of the day.
Crowd of two. Yeah.
All right.
I guess, so why are you here today? I guess really what I'm asking is, like, why do you see Bloom's solid oxide technology, like a good fit and adding value for your Stephenville project?
I think you. First of all, by the way, I'm a miner, and you're a shovel seller, and I was sitting here thinking, "Why, why don't I go on the shovel selling side?" I'm the fool that's going panning for gold. The reason I am here and is because of the relationship that we've got with Bloom. This is a relationship that's really been built over the last year, and it's a relationship that's built for the long haul. We can't possibly do. This video showed almost our first generation of ambition in the west coast of Newfoundland. The reason that site is so fantastic is it's pretty much a binary situation there. This project goes at 3 gigs.
It wants to go at four and five and six. It's an extremely sparsely populated area. This is not three years or five years or eight years. We need to partner with the most promising electrolyzer technology in the world. Obviously, you have to get these things built, and you have to get them financed, and that's gonna require a diversified strategy as it relates to technology. There's just so much promise and so much fit with solid oxide as a technology and so much promise and so much fit with Bloom as a company.
We appreciate that. Thank you for your confidence. I guess what I'd ask next is, you know, as we're all well aware, some of these very large green projects, whether it's ammonia or any other derivative, are taking some time to get to that point of FID and squeezing the trigger. Y ou know, off to the races, and we gotta get to the on-stream date and commission. Any particular lessons that you've learned on this one so far you'd share? I'm sure the audience would find that interesting.
Well, it's weird. You have to. The lesson I would say, I haven't prepped these answers, but is a combination of intense commitment and patience at the same time. The IRA produced a lot of probably the law of unintended consequences. It shook everything, and I think we all know that. One of the things it did was put every other developed country on notice in the world that if you want to be a part of this hydrogen transition, you better compete with the United States.
We're an American-based company, based in Boston, of big operations in Texas and in California. Well, Canada is choosing to compete. They can read. We were with the Chancellor of Germany, and as you know, 'cause you were there, the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Canada last summer, just a couple weeks after the IRA was passed. We talked with both of them quite a bit about competing as a decision, and your countries are gonna have to make a decision if they're gonna compete. Obviously, Europe is gonna be massively short hydrogen for as far out on the horizon as you can see. They're not in a position to produce it the best for themselves. Canada is incredibly well-positioned for it.
The reason these projects are taking so long, ironically, is because buyers want to see the rules before they commit. That's not an unreasonable thing to have happen. We haven't had the final rules issued on the IRA here in the States.
The Canadians are going crazy to catch up, and I think actually may well pass the States in terms of speed. The Europeans are very much on their heels trying to figure out what to do with all of this. It's clear that there's a societal benefit to the use of hydrogen. Society's gonna participate in the economics. If you're a large industrial in Europe and you're trying to make sense of all of this, you wanna get it right. You don't wanna get it right now. Just like the relationship that I think we've established and are building, those are happening on the offtake side as well. These aren't going to be arm's length transactions.
These are gonna be highly embedded relationships, not only at the company to company levels, but at the nation to nation levels. There are gonna be bilateral agreements that get these big projects off the ground. These are massive projects that are going to establish who's most competitive in the world, and I think the fact that it's taking a little longer shouldn't be read as a negative. I actually think it's probably for companies like yours, it's probably a positive over the long haul. This is... The front end of this is gonna take a bit.
The roots of competitive advantage are being established now.
Fascinating. You said earlier, and we've discussed this, that this is a generational project. One of the ways I really like that you've portrayed that it's a generational project is, I think we had a discussion around never stop building.
Yeah.
Right? The ability to just keep scaling the wind resource. Can you just say a little bit about what you see as the end game in Stephenville? Is there an end game? I mean.
Yeah, there's not a person in this room that's ever heard of Stephenville, and I hadn't either about 18 months ago. The reason you haven't heard of it is 'cause with all due respect to whoever might be listening to this in Newfoundland, it's in the middle of nowhere. It is a very sparsely populated area. The people that do live there are extremely connected to the land and are very committed to generations of sustainable growth there. The real attractiveness is the massive potential for growth and expansion there.
If the first gig works, the second gig works, the third gig works, there's almost, my partner, John Risley, and I were flying over this area probably six months ago, and we're looking down and we both fish up there at his fishing camp as well. There is endless expansion capacity. In many ways, what this looks like over time is we've got this very large site in Stephenville. It's got at a port that was established by the U.S. military in World War II. It becomes a like a utility offtake.
The destination, the product will go wherever it needs to go in the world. It'll go to the best markets in the world. You know, as you know, molecules move pretty well by water. As that market grows, we can continue to bring more and more renewable resource to making more and more green hydrogen into more and more green ammonia. There's really no. Obviously, there's some limit, but there's among the best expansion capacity in the world. These are very land-intensive endeavors. Anything that's this land intensive, you need buy-in from the local community, and we've got that, and we're working very close with the community to be able to continue to make this really one of the great centers of green ammonia in the world.
Outstanding. Very cool. Really neat stuff. Maybe one more quick question, and then we'll move on to the next phase. At Bloom, we've made a lot of moves in the last 12 months to be ready for this sort of project, whether it's augmenting manufacturing, you know, hiring some more professional resources in certain areas for this type of project, strengthening our balance sheet, very recently, et cetera. Maybe if you could just react to that from a customer perspective for a moment. You know, what do these moves say to you on Bloom's readiness to take on projects like this and execute?
Yeah. It's interesting. If you just Google electrolyzers for green hydrogen, first of all, it's an industry that doesn't exist, so it's all kind of speculative at this point. Solid oxide doesn't really show up very often in the debate. You see PEM and Alkaline and then PEM and Alkaline, and there's all these comparisons and why. Certainly the handful of projects that have been moving forward so far are largely PEM and Alkaline projects. That's largely because these projects have so much other risk base in them that going, you know, taking an early stage, raise your hand first mover on your electrolyzer technology isn't a particularly attractive thing when you're trying to get the things financed.
Having them be a component of the growth strategy because of the efficiencies b ecause of the close integration with steam, I think it's a competitive disadvantage if you don't have that. If you're marrying yourself to, pardon me, kinda today's technology or even yesterday's technology w ithout a foot in tomorrow's technology, I don't know how you catch up. Once this clicks, a lot of, I think, you know, Bloom should be credited for this. Once this becomes obvious, it's too late.
Exactly.
You're preparing for the what's obvious to you and what's obvious to me before it's obvious to the world.
Sure.
The work that you've been doing, over the last 12 months to get ready for that, I think is going to serve you very well over time.
Well, thank you, Gene. We're here to support your incredible efforts and the project going forward. Thank you very much for the time.
Happy to be here.
At Bloom Energy, our values define who we are and shape our corporate culture. Our employees are bold, challenging the status quo and developing innovative solutions, and they're inspired with a commitment to do the right thing, delivering excellence across our products we build and customers we serve. Here's what powers us.
Our mission of making clean energy affordable for everyone in the world, and all the great people that I work with who are all committed to achieving this great mission.
Bloom, as a company, is on the ground doing real projects, making real transformation happen. That's a really special thing to be a part of.
I get to work in this brand new beautiful facility with this amazing product.
The opportunity and platform that Bloom provides me to explore my new ideas. What powers me is the fascinating technology that we've got and the incredible team that I work with.
Bloom's innovative company. I'm helping work cross-functionally with really smart and talented people, not only on, you know, launching new products, but advancing our manufacturing capability.
This amazing product that we have that is not only good for the environment, but highly reliable and is always on.
My kids. I built a career. I go to work every day with the desire to make them proud. I'm working on technology. I'm working in an industry that has the ability to change the world.
I get to work with such passionate people here who work towards developing technology to produce clean energy.
I have always wanted to leave a positive impact on the planet. With climate change being one of the most pressing issues of our generation, the opportunity to contribute towards improving the situation for us and to a world where our children can breathe better is what powers me.
Please welcome Greg Cameron back to the stage with Satish Chitoori, Senior Vice President, Global Procurement and Supply Chain. Carl Cottuli, Senior Vice President, Global Engineering. Jose Hernandez Lopez, Senior Vice President, Manufacturing. Cornelia Poole, Chief Information Officer.
Thank you all. Thanks for coming up to stage here and we've talked a lot about growth today and a lot about scale, and this is whose teams that's really gonna be part, a big part of that solution for Bloom going forward. I thought it'd be worth having just a few minutes to get their insights on how they see us operationally performing. Before I do that, Satish, I wanna start with you. A year ago, we talked about a challenged supply chain. I thought we'd start with getting an update from you on how it looks today versus a year ago.
I think a lot changed. Supply chain has become more stable. My happy fat is back. I'm happy, I'm eating. I think the lead times have reduced quite significantly. We also have pricing coming down. The semiconductor supply has improved, though the pricing is not where we would like it to be. Logistics is the biggest price driver. Logistics costs have come down almost by 20%, and also the lead times for shipping parts out of Asia has reduced quite significantly. Granted, the new geopolitical situation has taken center stage, be it Taiwan-China conflict or the Ukraine war. What we notice is it's a new opportunity to get into new countries, which will align very well with Tim's international plan, and also an opportunity to do near shore.
We are working on all the activities in parallel.
Great. Thanks, Satish.
In summary, it's actually it's in a very good place, and we intend to take advantage of this better situation.
Good. Good. Hey, Carl, I wanna go to you. We've talked a lot about technology and growth today. Company for 15 plus years has had the fuel cell. Talked a lot about electrolyzer and marine today. What's unique about the platform? More importantly, what's unique about the Bloom engineering team that we should know about?
Yeah, great question, Greg. A couple of things. You know, the 15 years of operational data for the fuel cell really helps us provide the foundation for where we can, where we can go. The uplift into the electrolyzer is pretty straightforward, mainly because it uses a lot of the same components and manufacturing processes to be able to produce the product. I take that and I look at the team. As I look at my team overall for Bloom, it's globally based. It has an average tenure of over 14 years for the key contributors. What that allows me to do is take them and directly put that team on the optimization efforts.
What those optimization efforts lead to is the high performance electrolyzer that Rick has talked about, and you saw Ravi talk about earlier today. Again, that team, very focused on the Bloom mission as well for decarbonization, and it keeps them very much aligned to our mission. Are constantly in dealing with new innovation that they're bringing to the table.
You know, very diverse in new breakthroughs, and very proud to be working with that team and leading that team into the future.
Great. Thanks, Carl. Jose, you're the newest to the team.
Yeah.
Why don't we start and just give you a chance to share your background and what brought you to Bloom?
Yeah. First, thank you for having me. I joined Bloom almost a year ago after 27 years in semiconductor industry. I was in global manufacturing, supply chain, all across different functions. Came to Bloom why? Before moving to Silicon Valley last year, I spent almost a decade in Asia. While I was there, I witnessed firsthand the dichotomy of the global environmental challenge. On one hand, I got to see choking air pollution in China, live through wildfires in the Indonesian rainforest that pollutes the entire region. Got to see thousands of square miles of coral reef in the ocean washed bleached away because of increasing temperatures. On the other hand, I got to suffer firsthand the consequences of the limitations of power availability in the region.
We had business plans of massive expansions of our factories in the region that were dwarfed because of lack of power. Local utilities will take 5 years plus to deliver incremental power. When I learned about Bloom, and I familiarized myself with the mission statement of the clean, affordable power, I was sold. I could immediately see the potential. When I understood the value proposition of time to power and the value proposition of green hydrogen, there was no doubt in my mind that this company was bound to take off, and I just couldn't miss out.
Great. Well, thank you for joining. We've made it a pretty interesting year for you. We had you back last year, really focused on increasing capacity, especially in stack manufacturing in California, but as well as in Delaware, and very focused on cost. I talked about how key that is to our margins going forward. I know you're doing a lot with automation and driving efficiencies. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Yeah, sure. Some of you guys were in California last year. Today, I decided to bring the factory to you. It's been a wild and exciting ride for the first year. We spent the second half of last year very aggressively expanding our capacity. We pretty much built out double our stack manufacturing capacity in 6 months. That position does very, very well for this year. As Greg mentioned earlier in the session, we had an exit capacity of 660 megawatts already installed by December last year. That pretty much gave us enough capacity to support the business plan for this year, plus some additional potential upsides. 2023 is all about operational excellence and efficiency.
We're back to focusing on the, all the core elements. We have very aggressive industrial automation plan. With that, we intend to achieve, labor productivity, yield, quality, overall operational efficiency. We are also very focused on, harvesting the economy of the scale efficiencies that are the result of all the expansion that, we put in place last year. On the human resources side, last year, we were very, very busy hiring all our team members. We have reached that level, and, now we can focus on, doing the skill development and, preparing our workforce for what is next. Overall, we're getting ready for what is gonna be the next level of expansion.
One of the key elements for us is developing a scalable and highly efficient platform that we can replicate wherever we go in the world. When you look at the reasoning, it is very simple. We just talked about some of these massive scale projects. We cannot afford to just wildly bet on when or how this is going to happen. If we can develop a very efficient expansion model that we can pretty much execute within the same lead time that it takes our customers to prepare their sites to receive our product, the economics and the risk of the decision.
It becomes very, very simple because we have very good clarity on what we need to do and where we need to do it. That's what we're doing. The economics and the financial ROI models indicate that future expansions pay for themselves in a matter of months once you ramp to capacity. We're ready, we're excited, and looking forward to the expansion.
Thanks, Jose. Satish, Jose setting the bar high there. Automation, increasing, capacity, driving down costs. You have a similar task with the supply chain. How do you get your supply chain to invest in growth at the same time focusing on driving costs down?
First of all, I'm extremely proud and thankful to my team who actually demonstrate the two critical attributes that Bloom has, the power of and also resiliency. I think the cost and scaling go together. We are working with our supply base to invest smartly. Our critical supply base is very common. If you look at our critical supply base, it is common to the automobile sector, the core processes like compaction, brazing. When our supply base sees that the electric cars are taking over and the internal combustion engine is going to be extinct pretty soon, we tend to use that as an advantage to motivate them to invest and use that additional capacity for resiliency. Secondly, on the cost, you heard K.R. said zero excuses, and you don't even work for Bloom.
Imagine my situation. It is, we have all the systems and processes in place. Cost is an outcome. It is an outcome of material, process, and design, two of which we control. Design and material is 100% within our control. We work with Carl's team constantly, to figure out how we can perform better. We actually use the best-in-class processes that Jose uses in the factories and take it back to the supply chain, and kind of work to partner with our supply base to reduce cost. Overall, I think we are very, very well positioned to take advantage of the situation we are in. Back half is going to be great, and next year is going to be even greater for us on cost and supply.
Great. Thanks, Satish. Cornelia, to you. How are we leveraging technology both in the operations but as well as on the front end to make sure we can scale effectively?
Greg, we use three levers right now that position us really, really well for scale. The first one is we have an amazingly tenured technology team that is also now upskilled. We have really feature-rich software that we now use to accelerate our business, and then we have data and lots more data like you actually showed in your slide. You know, data is the fundamental building block for innovation and digitization. An example of that is our engineers will do a digital model of everything they do before we produce anything physically. That allows them to really do rapid innovation. It also works with our modular approach.
We take all of that years and years of data of our energy service, the telemetry data and the IoT data that comes back to the organization, and we load that into our digital twin. The engineers can iterate through that for key learnings to see what they can optimize, how they can optimize. You use that same digital twin to manage our fleet very, very efficiently. I also partner with Jose and with Satish in all their automation endeavors. We have to work together. Satish as, you know, he relies on a lot of data. Jose on his automation is all integrated, you know, systems that we have.
lastly, we build very deep partnerships to make sure that we have access to skilled or specialized skills, and that we have the platforms and tools available for the company when they need it. Let it be for financial reporting, let it be for operations or innovation, we do have the platform now to scale the company.
Great. Thanks, Cornelia. I wanna thank the participants in this roundtable just not for the time here today, but your teams are key for our ability to scale. It's the one of the very key components of what makes Bloom so special and gives us such confidence as we look forward into our growth. I wanna thank you for your leadership and your team's commitment to do that. Thank you.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you, Greg. Please welcome K.R. Sridhar back to the stage.
All right. I think it's, questions is answer time with me and Greg.
We have some microphones in the room. I'm happy to take any questions here. Time for a few questions before we break. Sure, Peter. Wait, just get to the mic.
Let's get you a mic.
With regard to cost, the supply chain issues were difficult. Satish did an incredible job. He always praises his team, but obviously he was instrumental in all that. Last year, he was talking about being able to create these pockets whereby we could create great efficiencies with acquisition and price for people that believed we were gonna be real and bigger, so therefore, they would have trust us enough to establish their own centers all around the world, so we wouldn't have to circumvent everything and spend a winding trail to get something done. Has that, in fact, proved to be true? Are we feeling good about our future acquisition or our costs and prices relative to our materials and goods?
Yeah. Let me be very clear, right? We are acquiring parts. We're not, you know, it's not acquisition. We are not acquiring our suppliers. Right? Yeah, from an acquiring perspective, you're absolutely right. You know.
Our thought process is very similar to our products, very similar to our own internal operations. We want to build resiliency and diversity in our supply chain. That's geographic diversity. That's also diversity in terms of when you look at, we may have a couple vendors who are extremely sophisticated and quickly doing you know, like, later development. We may have a couple who are really cost leaders on taking something that's mature and making it better. Satish's team really uses that strategy. Us all having seen what happened with COVID and the long tail, they're very conscious about nearshoring what we need to have. At the same time, geographically separating things out and making sure business continuity is very important to us. That's a very big metric for them. All that said, it's about cost down, cost down, cost down.
It is an and. That is the power of Bloom.
Great. Thanks, Peter. Colin, there's a question in the back.
Thanks so much, guys. Colin Rusch from Oppenheimer. Can you talk a little bit about the customer education process, both for the hydrogen product and in Europe? I'm curious about the cycle time around your ability to engage with the customers and then move all the way to closing of a purchase order.
You wanna take the first part?
Listen, you know, In the markets we've traditionally participated in, our name recognition's been fairly high. In markets where we have not participated in, we generally have more work to do when we engage those customers. What we're finding is, as our sale has moved from, "Hey, how much can I save you on your electricity bill, and oh, by the way, give you these other attributes?" To, "Let me, let me value price these attributes to you, and oh, by the way, we may or may not be able to save you money off your electric bill, but we will create value above where our pricing is," that's pulled us into a lot new places. I would say it has actually decreased the amount of cycle time that we've had.
It is a much harder sale to try to get somebody to make a long-term commitment off of a savings versus getting someone to make a medium term, maybe long-term, commitment, where they need that power right away. That's the time to power example. I would say it's very similar in the hydrogen space. People can do the math very quickly and see our efficiency advantages, the decision-making process is exactly what Gene laid out, which is, how do you bring together the whole economics of that project? How do you bring together the financing for that project? How do you drive certainty around that technology, which is generally one of the later decisions to be made in order to get there? There's a big education process up front around our technical advantage.
I'll add something to that, and I'll ask Tim to talk about when we go to Europe, for example, where, you know, we just entered the market last year. What does it take and how do we, you know, how do we acquire the customer and learn about it? Fundamentally, the way you gotta think about it is we are moving from the phase when we were trying to sell vitamins to our customers, to selling painkillers. You know, it'll take you a lot longer to get convinced that somewhere down the line you'll have better health if you take vitamins, but if you have a root canal, it's really easy for me to sell you painkillers, okay. That's, that's really where the electricity market is going right now. I'd rather be selling painkillers. With that, now let me give it to Tim. Yeah.
No, no, you're going.
How's that?
Great.
Yeah. It's really an important question, because, you know, to be completely transparent, we are not that well known in these new markets we're going to. If you can use Europe as an example, look how quickly we've moved in 12 months. I mentioned Unimicron as an example. Those discussions didn't even start until November of last year. And in the case of LUG, excuse me. LUG started November of last year, the Belgium project that I mentioned. They knew about fuel cells, and they had used some other fuel cell providers, so When that provider was not serving them well anymore, they learned of Bloom, they came to us, they loved the product, and we quickly signed a deal.
You know, one of the challenges we have is, one, the education that you pointed out. We have to continually work that. The other thing that we're trying to do is identify customers that are already more knowledgeable and already have a disposition to move to the newer technologies, as Gene was talking about. Because they think that by being a first mover, they're gonna have a competitive advantage. That's exactly what Schaeffler, what their strategy is, who I mentioned in Italy. The last thing I would tell you is that we are collecting data in our sales process and continually looking at cycle time, and we're using data to understand, you know, what allows us to move more quickly and what's the problem on deals that are moving more slowly.
It may be the educational issue. It may be some product alignment issues. It may be some internal bureaucracy that we have to solve. We're very focused on cycle time and moving very quickly.
Great. Thanks, Colin.
Let's see. If you can put your hands up, somebody will bring a mic and-
I just wanna take a quick follow-up. The digital twin work that you guys are doing in the feedback loop on the data is incredibly interesting, and I wanted to understand how long that formal process has been in place and the refinement to accelerate learning cycles.
Oh, that's a great question. From day 1, our very first unit that went out had all that instrumentation done. For us, our strategy all along was every unit that we put out, we're gonna learn from. That's why while other companies have barely been able to make this technology work, we are on our fifth generation technology. It's just Bloom is a learning organization. It's a living, learning organism. That's the way I'd say it, and that digital twin is a key to that fundamental architecture we put together. Thanks for asking that question upfront out here. Let's just go back and forth.
Hi, just Biju Perincheril. Just following up on that previous question, can you sort of talk about on the electrolyzer side, maybe what's been you know, some of the pushbacks or concerns you have seen from or heard from your potential customers and how the demonstration projects you have underway now answering some of those concerns or questions?
Yeah. I'll start.
Do you want me to take it?
No, yeah, let's give it to Rick.
Okay. Sort of just set that. Listen, I think one of the things that we've dealt with early on is a perception risk or a perception of our technology versus others. Perception being maybe that alkaline and PEM has been out in longer and is more robust, and while solid oxide is newer and in some cases, we've gone to places where we've been talking about our technology and it's news to that particular group. One of the main reasons we wanna make sure we went and did the demonstration at Moffett Field was to prove out that technology exists. We have the capacity to make it. It's sitting there, and very quickly, we can bring together a 4-plus megawatt demonstration for there.
Sorry, Rick, you were just talking about push-
And, uh-
Yeah.
I'm gonna add two more, and I'm gonna give it to Rick so you can follow the thread of what was asked. The common misconceptions in the marketplace was you guys claim it's a platform, it'll work. Will it really work? How long is it gonna take for you to make it? Do you have the capacity to make it? Check, check. You know, we have dealt with those. Other big misperception that was spread around was unlike the low-temperature technologies, this technology cannot handle renewable intermittence.
Okay? We always said that's baloney, our systems have proven that that's baloney. You heard from INL that our systems operate really well. Having taken those missteps, you know, like misconceptions away, now the efficiency, the only metric for the miner who's looking for the gold is the cost of that power. What that shovel looks like doesn't matter, it's how much energy does it take to get that stuff out, and that's where we're winning. What would you add?
Speak up, yeah.
He's got a mic.
I've got a mic.
Yeah.
Anyway, I'm loud. My wife tells me that all the time, now it's working. I think the third misperception, just to pile one on, 'cause this is like what I deal with every day, is that we've been doing this for 15 or 20 years. You know, if K.R. held out his hands, you'd see the metaphorical scars of all the learnings, and we're on our 5th, 6th generation of the technology right now.
We built and deployed 1 gigawatt of this material and we know how to make them, we know what to do to make them live, we know how to make them flexible. Our competitors that are all now rushing to get into solid oxide electrolysis because I think the hydrogen world knows that this is the holy grail of how to make hydrogen with an electrolyzer. They're rushing into it. They're in year one. They're in year two of the journey, and they're experiencing a lot of the infant mortalities that, you know, thankfully, I wasn't here to deal with, but this gentleman and a lot of his coworkers that are still here, dealt with and learned from.
I think the rest of the world is still dealing with, well, you know, company X and company Y, they're still very, very early along in the journey, and despite the fact that they're talking about it, they're not even offering it for sale. Therefore, it must not be ready. That's another one of the misconceptions I think we deal with. When we take people to show them the factory, when we show them the data, when we take people to INL, and INL was a really compelling sales tool because it's a third party, it's a national lab, it's got more credibility than just about anybody else. Now with this 4-megawatt deployment, I mean, you're just taking you're either check, check, or you're eliminating potential arguments of.
Sure.
Of why this isn't ready.
Great. You know, it's not, we're late to the game, late to the market, nothing. I mean, compared to the billions of dollars people are talking about, I mean, nobody has yet made any money, any profits out of this entire industry. If you believe in this industry, it's beginning to be an industry. It's not an industry.
That's absolutely fair. I think Gene's not in the room anymore, but a lot of things he said echoed that and built on that same sentiment. You know, this is a marathon.
Yeah.
you know, the start line is a couple hundred meters behind us.
Yeah.
This is a long race, and I think we're gonna win because we've got the best shoes, we've had the best training.
You know, no one else is gonna be in the picture when we cross the line a long time from now.
Thank you.
Thank you. Another question. Sure. Just wait one second. Let's give you a mic so the people online can hear you.
We keep getting this question from investors. Can you talk a little bit about the performance payments? Was this an isolated issue? Is it completely behind you?
Yeah. listen, last year, as we were going through the capacity increases that Jose talked about, we were prioritizing where our power modules went to. In most cases, we prioritized them for revenue versus service. What that did is that created less power output in our fleet because we weren't replacing those power modules. We're now making those payments, and if you look at the money, the gross margin that we lost in that business in the first quarter, it was about equal to the performance payments that we accrued that quarter. I would tell you that the second quarter versus the first will probably have a larger gross margin loss, and that would continue into at least the next quarter. As we exit this year, we should be down significantly on our performance payments.
We should have increasing revenue, and we should have lower cost. That's why we're so confident as we look out towards 2025 that we'll be able to get to our 20% non-GAAP. We will be experiencing this over the next few quarters. It's an operational issue that we're just gonna have to work our way through. Remember, right, service, while $7 billion in our backlog, in any given year is between 15%-17% of our revenues for the business. Product's performing really well. Without service this quarter, our gross margins would've been over 28%. When we get this issue behind us, we will be positioned very well to get to our targets. Just gonna take us a couple quarters.
Quick follow-up here is, your electrolyzer is way more efficient, maybe even 30% more efficient.
Yeah.
Are you even trying to compete with alkaline and some of the pricing that is out there? You think you don't even have to compete because break-even period could be, like, 2 years, and then you make too much more profit, like?
We would always value price our product for what value we command. That is just what any good business will do with any good product. We have a very good product, and there's no reason for us not to value price.
Yeah. We said we're making the best shovels, not the cheapest shovels.
Yeah. Mark. Go ahead.
There's some hands out there. Oh, Mark's got it. Yeah. Yeah, you got the mic. You're going to one mic.
Apologies for my voice.
No problem.
Mark Strouse from J.P. Morgan . want to, want to talk about data centers today. I think it was Dean that mentioned 7 million globally. If we just look at the core market within the U.S., can you talk about what that number looks like? What the percentage of those data centers that are using Bloom today, and then even digging down deeper, if you look at your top five, top 10, you name it, customers, how much of their energy use at their data centers is coming from Bloom today? I'm just trying to think about how much white space you have with the people that have-
Sure.
already been convinced.
That's a great question. Let me address it in the following way. If you break it down, and, you know, like, Billy is here, I would, you know, like, want him to add some, you know, like, information on this. If you think about where data center was and where data center is going to be, and the reason I'm saying that is 2.4% of the entire global electricity use is for both the networks and the data centers. Very large number. The entire 15 years of our deployed fleet of a gigawatt is a drop in the bucket. White space is very large. Five years ago, we could have never competed with a hyperscaler who will build a large data center in Iowa, and the government will give them money and give them power. That's not our business.
We would only compete in the edge data centers, where in a city where you cannot have latency and where you cannot get clean power and where you're not allowed to put dirty diesel, we can go and compete. That is completely changing because as you're seeing in Virginia, they don't have the power. Now it's not a question of the cost of power for those utilities, for those data centers, it's the price of not having power of that business lost. Completely different economics. The hyperscalers don't have the choice of taking a $0.02 hydro from Bonneville. That's not available anymore, right? That changes. Add to that AI, that changes everything. Add to that more of the intelligence is coming to the edge because you don't want the latency, and you want the security. You put all that together, that's creating another opportunity.
The white space is enormous in this space. These are the people who will also move faster and faster to net zero and be willing to pay a premium and adopt some of these newer technologies. Billy, you wanna add to that? Yeah.
Just to, what I would add to what K.R. just said is it's first of all, it's an enormous white space for us. What have we done to pursue that? We've put a dedicated team in place. We've got a couple of folks that have joined recently from the data center industry, so they really, truly understand the ecosystem as well as you heard from Dean Nelson earlier today, those types of individuals that really, truly grew up in the data center industry, understand the direction of where that industry is going today and into the future. That's allowed us to be a lot more precise about what opportunities we chase. To K.R.'s point, it's there's a whole ecosystem around edge data centers and colocation and hyperscalers.
Our penetration to date has been very limited. Now we're pursuing that entire playing field, and we are pursuing projects that are a little more complex in terms of the scope, and are in these places where time to power is the main driving factor because the utility just cannot provide power on the kind of timeframe that they require to expand. Again, hired a new team, experts from the industry, and now we're able to pursue larger projects with more complexity that in the past we would not have been able to pursue.
This is not just the U.S. That's the story in Ireland, that's the story in Singapore, that's the story in Frankfurt, that's the story on and on.
Yeah. Great. We probably have time for two more questions. I wanna be respectful of people's time, but.
There's somebody in the back.
I have the leadership team way back.
Are there?
Happy to answer any questions at the end of it.
Thank you.
Hey, guys. Sam Burwell from Jefferies. I wanted to ask about the rationale for the recent capital raise. In reference to the slide that you guys had at the outset where the free cash flow for the rest of the year is greater than the debt repayment, and you're gonna end the year with $900 million of cash on the balance sheet. Assuming that you deliver on the revenue growth and the margin expansion, you're gonna be generating free cash flow in 2024 and 2025. What's all that cash for?
You know, one of the things that the board asks me to do quite often is to make sure we're benchmarking where we are relative to our peers. One thing that became very clear as we came out of last year and began looking at not necessarily around manufacturing capacity, which had been our focus before, but looking at the capital required to compete some of these large-scale projects that we want to go do, both in the electrolyzer space as well as the fuel cell space. We saw that there would be movements in our working capital that would challenge our levels at certain points given time. When we sit back and look at where we expect to end the year relative to our peers, I'd say we're right within the peer group of where we would expect to be.
We are very committed to being cash flow for operations positive this year, even if it's $1. We will add that back in. Absent the project, absent the capital raise, we would have been far below where we thought we needed to be going forward. We saw an opportunity at very attractive terms, raise money at a less than a 3% interest rate. We were able to get the stock price above $26 a share to go do that. We feel like we have the right amount of capital now to go execute the growth plans that we feel very bullish about.
You know, the very first question we got asked was about our vendors and our suppliers. For them to know that we have a strong bank balance as the future is trying to expand factories, super important.
Great. Thanks, Sam. One more question. Val, over here. Val, right.
All right.
Pavel Molchanov from Raymond James. A year ago, you talked about 20% market share as the eventual target in electrolyzers. Given how many electrolyzer companies are out there with, you know, multi-gigawatt capacity targets, including venture-backed startups, how realistic do you still think that 20% market share is?
Let's recall, what I said was I took the currently announced projects that would deliver a decade from now and said, of those projects, we'll win 20% of those, with the expectation of 2 things. One is the number of projects 10 years from now that we see today versus what will actually get delivered will be much larger. We think that there is opportunity in our estimates to, as that market grows, to win more share. Now, that said, we will look to hold the team and Rick and everybody else, we should win an outsized share of that market given our efficiency benefits. We will be very focused if we get something different. I know, Sharelynn, if you wanna add to that something additional?
The solid oxide again, just the advantage. The advantage on solid oxide is something no startup is gonna be able to do in the time. We've got such a time-to-market advantage on solid oxide that that's what gives us the confidence.
Great.
If you just add to that, right? If wishes could be horses, right? There are gonna be a lot of tourists joining this hydrogen bandwagon, like batteries, like everything else. Solid oxide, Rick just told you, if you look at the three categories that he painted, two-thirds of the hydrogen needs as projected is in that area. Solid oxide is clearly there for that. We are the only company today. Let me repeat, we are the only company today that does solid oxide at the scale we do. This is our fourth decade. That's why it's our decade. For somebody to just jump in and believe that they can, within five years, six years, get to that level of scale and complexity, if it were only that simple. All right?
With that, I think we are past our time, and we really appreciate you all coming in, paying attention, focusing on what you did. We couldn't be standing here as leaders of this company and talking if we didn't have an amazing, dedicated employee workplace and our people. Thank you all.