Here & Now

A closer look at the latest “must-read” fuel cell stories, complete with analysis and commentary from the staff of Fuel Cells 2000.

The Story

An announcement last week by online auction giant eBay that six megawatts (MW) of Bloom Energy fuel cells will soon power a data center in Utah now makes the company not only a repeat customer of fuel cells, but the potential title holder for largest non-utility fuel cell installation in the U.S.  When completed in mid-2013, this massive fuel cell system (30 Bloom Energy servers total, each at 200 kW) will take eBay’s data center in South Jordan, Utah, completely off the electric grid, maintaining a connection only for backup power purposes.  As with several other Bloom Energy installations, the data center plans to utilize “directed biogas”, which means that eBay will pay a premium for biogas generated at another location to be fed into a natural gas pipeline, offsetting the natural gas used by eBay in their fuel cell system.

The Trends

This latest installation from eBay reflects a growing trend in the U.S. and around the world of larger fuel cell systems being installed to meet stationary power needs.  Earlier this year, Apple announced that its data center in Maiden, North Carolina, would utilize a 4.8 MW fuel cell system alongside 20 MW of solar PV to generate clean electricity and achieve grid independence.  In addition, Delmarva Power – Delaware’s largest power provider – recently announced that they will soon be installing 30 MW of fuel cells to provide cleaner electricity to ratepayers for a period of over 21 years.  When completed, it will be the largest ever fuel cell installation in North America.

Larger systems also mean larger individual fuel cell units that comprise them.  Last year, Bloom Energy introduced the ES-5700 Energy Server, a 200-kilowatt (kW) fuel cell with twice the power of their previous model.  Years ago, UTC Power’s PureCell unit was upgraded from 200 kW to 400 kW, and FuelCell Energy has scaled up their systems from 300 kW to 2.8 MW in recent years, reflecting the growing need for sizeable, continuous power across a multitude of applications.

Another emerging trend appears to be Bloom Energy’s expansion into the data center market.  The company’s recent launch of a dedicated data center division and subsequent hiring of Peter Gross – co-founder of EYP Mission Critical Facilities (now owned by Hewlett-Packard) – would seem to indicate that this market is ripe for fuel cells.  Bloom has already sold fuel cells to NTT America and AT&T for their data centers, and will have a very impressive customer portfolio once Apple and eBay complete their installations.

Read more:

• Fuel cells for data centers are not a new application.  In fact, one of the longest-running fuel cell systems is located at the First National Bank of Omaha Data Center in Nebraska.
• Fujitsu’s data center in Sunnyvale, California  uses a fuel cell system that paid for itself in three years, and saved the company 780 tons of CO₂ a year in the process.
• When completed, the World Trade Center complex in New York will be powered by 12 fuel cells totaling 4.8 MW.