“On the day Bloom Energy officially opened shop on the East Coast, the company’s CEO confirmed Bloom will supply fuel cells to Apple’s North Carolina data center,” Martin LaMonica reports for CNET. “Bloom Energy today is breaking ground on a factory in Newark, Delaware to build its Bloom Energy Servers, or Bloom Boxes, which produce electricity from natural gas or biogas.”
“The facility, which was a former Chrysler plant, will have the capacity to turn out 1,000 Bloom Boxes a year, Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar said in an interview with CNET. Each fuel cell, which is the size of few refrigerators, can generate 100 kilowatts of electric power,” LaMonica reports. “Sridhar also confirmed that Apple’s Maiden, North Carolina data center will use Bloom’s fuel cells. The data center, now under construction, will have 4.8 megawatts worth of fuel cells powered by biogas. It is expected to be the largest corporate fuel cell installation.”
LaMonica reports, “A fuel cell converts the energy in natural gas or biogas into electricity in a chemical reaction that gives off almost no air pollutants. Biogas contains methane from the decomposing organic matter. It can be captured from landfills and dairy or pig farms. Generating power from a natural gas fuel cell reduces carbon emissions by about 40 percent to 50 percent compared to the U.S. grid, according to Bloom. It converts about 60 percent of the fuel’s energy into electricity and no energy is lost over transmission lines as happens with the grid, Sridhar said.”
Read more in the full article here.