What contributes to global warming gases?

• Generating electricity
• Fueling vehicles
• Heating and cooling buildings
• Producing food and goods

For greenhouse gases and to meet decarbonization goals, emissions must be cut by a staggering 45% within the next 8 years. While electricity production is unavoidable and necessary, there are many ways to produce cleaner electricity. Rather than a binary of net zero, which could take decades to achieve, a shift from high to low carbon-intensity production methods is just as valuable.

What is Decarbonization?

In the face of escalating climate change, deep decarbonization has emerged as a critical strategy for ensuring a sustainable future. But what is decarbonization, and why is it so crucial?

“Deep decarbonization refers to removing the amount of global warming gases emitted to the atmosphere throughout our economic activity.”  – Stephen Lamm, Sr. Director of Sustainability

It is not only minor adjustments or incremental changes; deep decarbonization calls for a transformation of how energy is produced and consumed.

Why Does Deep Decarbonization Matter?

• Climate Stability: Global warming significantly influences extreme weather patterns, and reducing carbon emissions through decarbonization is imperative for stabilizing the climate.
• Public Health: Reducing fossil fuel combustion directly addresses the public health crisis.
• Clean Energy & Electricity: Increasing renewable energy can reduce reliance on fossil fuel markets and greenhouse gas emissions.

What is the Role of Clean Electricity in Decarbonization?

As the economy moves towards a more electrified infrastructure, we are in a situation of increasing demand for energy but not enough clean energy supply. The rapid demand creates an issue of creating a challenge for sustainable power. Clean energy plays a vital role in lowering carbon emission efforts because it can power several aspects of the economy. Through cleaner decarbonization technology usage like electrolyzers, carbon capture, or hydrogen gas, the shift from heavy reliance on fossil fuels will significantly decrease carbon emissions.

How Decarbonization Technology and Strategies Reduce Carbon Emissions

Carbon capture utilization and sequestration (CCUS) separate CO₂ from other gases emitted from a facility and capture it before entering the atmosphere. It is then permanently sequestered underground or utilized for various products such as concrete. This process is a significant part of reducing global warming and climate change.

Electrolyzers are devices that use electricity to split water and other components through electrolysis. It is mostly used to produce hydrogen gas—a critical alternative to decarbonizing the energy economy.

Renewable energy transition shifts away from fossil fuels and towards low-emission energy carriers such as hydrogen, which will help build a cleaner economy. Strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, and policy alignment are three key governance approaches that are vital to accelerating the shift to clean energy.

Real-World Examples of Successful Decarbonization Goals:

Sweden has been an environmental pioneer since 1967, the first country to pass an environmental protection act. Since then, Sweden has not looked back and managed to grow a sustainable economy while reducing carbon emissions and having 60% of their national energy supply come from renewables.

• Goals:
  • 2030: Transport sector be fossil-free.
  • 2045: Carbon neutrality and 100% renewable energy.
• Achieved:
  • Since 2022, more than 60% of Sweden’s electricity has come from renewable sources, and by 2023, Sweden ranked second in the Global Innovation Index.
  • Implemented sustainable policies with their carbon tax, introduced in 1991, providing a strong economic incentive for reducing emissions

Why Collaboration is Key: Working with Decarbonization Partners

• Policy Influence
  • Industry alliances need to collaborate with governments to establish a partnership in shaping policies to hasten decarbonization. The exchange of knowledge will ensure that implemented regulations accurately address decarbonization goals.
• Supply Chain Decarbonization
  • Influences across all sectors must collaborate to increase market demand for low-carbon solutions across the industrial value chain. This is important to push businesses to implement low-carbon performance into traditional criteria checklists such as cost, safety, durability, and resilience.

Achieving Decarbonization Goals

The Paris Agreement spearheads initiatives to decarbonize the planet with over 98% of greenhouse gas emitters onboard. This is promised to work towards staying under the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold and are bound by this treaty. To date, many companies have established low-carbon and even zero-carbon solutions. By 2030, sectors contributing to 70% of global emissions could have numerous zero-carbon solutions.

Within the next decade, much of our economy will be electrified as countries take on a more sustainable perspective. One of today’s biggest challenges is bringing clean energy sources online in a short period of time.

Current predictions for the future of decarbonization are headed towards more aggressive policy action to incentivize infrastructure build-out, increased use of hydrogen fuel cells, decarbonization technology, and clean energy sources.

Bloom’s fuel cell technology extracts and recycles hydrogen and water from fuel cell exhaust while separating water vapor and CO₂ emissions. The captured CO₂ can be stored or repurposed for new applications. Our Bloom Energy Servers operate on hydrogen, biogas, or natural gas to generate decarbonization goals or clean electricity.

Bloom provides companies access to the most efficient system for current fuel sources, with adaptable technology equipped for advanced decarbonization with zero-carbon hydrogen.

Decarbonization FAQs

Q1 – What is Decarbonization?

Decarbonization is the term used for the removal or reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) output into the atmosphere. This process is achieved by switching to the usage of low-carbon energy sources.

Q2 –Why is Decarbonization important?

Decarbonization is crucial for mitigating the consequences of climate change, including rising sea levels and extreme weather events. Decreasing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere will benefit human health and is a leading step towards a sustainable future.

The post What is Decarbonization? Strategies and Technologies for Clean Electricity appeared first on Bloom Energy.

“Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid,” the Washington Post reported earlier this month.

The story continues:

• In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently.
• Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.
• Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are becoming routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.

Barber says Bloom’s ability to deliver power 24/7 within a few months to support customer needs will help fill the gaps. With more than 1 gigawatt of deployment, Bloom is a market leader for distributed baseload, always-on power generation with its proven solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology and groundbreaking Energy Server® platform.

Barber highlights the recent offering unveiled by Bloom, the Be Flexible™ Energy Server, a new flexible load following solution designed specifically for customers like data centers, EV chargers and commercial industries. This solution rapidly handles fluctuations in supply and demand for heavy power consumers, ensuring them power certainty and quality while delivering significant cost savings.

Added Aman Joshi, Bloom’s chief commercial officer: “I have been in the power generation business for more than a decade and selling gas turbines for the past six years. Providing utilities with a significantly cleaner dispatchable source of electricity with Be Flexible, which ramps up and down significantly more than turbines, reciprocating engines and other alternatives, will enable them to add more renewable electricity in the mix.”

In cities around the world, variable load, power-intensive applications, such as AI data centers, EV charging stations and commercial developments are rapidly coming online. Intermittent electricity sources are struggling to meet this demand, leaving substantial shortages in power.

The new “Be Flexible” offering can operate on either side of the meter, providing both utilities and end customers with an on-demand solution. With the “Be Flexible” offering utilities are better able to deal with disparities between their peak and non-peak demands due to its dispatchable nature. Customers behind the meter are better able to accommodate the variability of their loads.

“We are already working with many data center clients across the U.S. and we are poised to do more,” Barber said. “With Be Flexible, our new load following capability, Bloom has now extended its value to new applications where the ability to ramp power output up or down quickly is required to address a customer’s variable load and demand throughout the day.”

“The rapid response time of ‘Be Flexible,’ due to its solid state architecture, is immensely important when we consider the intense energy fluctuating demands like those from AI data centers, which we are increasingly dependent on,” said Peter Gross, a leading expert on data centers and advisor to Bloom Energy. “Data center power demands can nowadays easily jump from 50 percent to 100 percent in a matter of seconds. A power source that can’t deliver in such a short time will trip the entire site’s power, causing costly disruptions.”

Bloom executives attended Nvidia’s GTC 24 for the first time to discuss its energy technology and the flexibility and reliability the energy servers provide, specifically to AI data centers:

• Quick Ramp-to-Power: The Bloom Energy Server generates electricity through the direct conversion of fuels like natural gas, biogas or hydrogen, eliminating multiple energy conversion processes and the mechanical inertia of combustion-based solutions such as turbines. This enables them to reach the target power more than five times faster than other power generation technology.
• Cost Advantages: Compared to gas turbines where the efficiency dramatically reduces at lower loads compared to full load, load fluctuation has minimal impact on the efficiency of Bloom’s Energy Server. This provides as much as a 50 percent cost advantage depending on the application.
• Sustainability: CO2 emissions from Bloom’s Energy Server are significantly lower (up to 50 percent at part load) and minimally impacted by load fluctuation compared to gas turbines. They require practically no water during operation and emit no NOx or SOx particulates because they operate through electrochemical, non-combustion processes.

The post Bloom’s Energy Server® platform solves major challenges facing AI data center power needs appeared first on Bloom Energy.

“It is a historic milestone for the hydrogen industry in the United States that the DOE has selected centerpiece hydrogen hubs for development,” said Rick Beuttel, Head of Business Development at San Jose-based Bloom Energy Inc. (NYSE:BE). “Our solid oxide electrolyzer technology, with its record efficiency producing hydrogen, can play a larger and larger role in the production of green and pink hydrogen. We are poised with a Gigafactory to support industrial decarbonization, production of derivatives such as ammonia, renewable diesel, or clean hydrogen for mobility applications like heavy truck and bus fleets.”

The DOE announced on October 13, 2023, a $7 billion, nationwide investment designed to launch seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) across the country. This vital funding will support efforts to power public transportation, heavy duty trucks, port operations, and other important undertakings that support the commercializing of a clean hydrogen market across the country.

The H2Hubs, including California’s, were conceived by the Biden-Harris administration to accelerate and support the country’s commercial market for affordable and clean, renewable hydrogen, an immensely valuable energy product that facilitates a myriad of carbon emissions reduction strategies around the world.

“We were honored that our products and technologies were included in four of the proposals submitted to DOE and we thank Gov. Newsom for his leadership for securing nearly one-fifth of available funding for projects in California,” Beuttel added. “Our manufacturing and technology teams in Fremont, Ca., and Newark, De, are ready to help advance this program and deliver on its promise.”

The Bloom Electrolyzer can produce clean hydrogen from renewable sources such as nuclear, wind and solar energy. SK ecoplant, Bloom’s partner in many fuel cell projects around the world, said in May that it would be joining World Energy GH2’s $4.5 billion Nujio’qonik project in eastern Canada and will use the Bloom Electrolyzer to produce clean hydrogen from the wind energy there. Bloom has also produced clean hydrogen from Heliogen Inc.’s concentrated solar energy system.

The DOE’s financial support of the California Hydrogen Hub reflects a continued commitment to clean energy technology. Supported by innovative state tax incentives intended to spur investments in alternative energy manufacturing, Bloom Energy expanded its footprint in California with a new, state-of-the-art, 164,000 square foot factory in Fremont in June 2022 to produce components in its solid oxide technology.

Coupled with a dedicated production line at its Newark plant that has the capacity to produce 1 gigawatt of electrolyzers, Bloom Energy is proud to be on the forefront of our country’s push for a sustainable and commercialized market for clean hydrogen.

The post Bloom Energy Congratulates Gov. Newsom on H2Hubs Announcement appeared first on Bloom Energy.

The EU will need to scale reliable sources of renewable fuel sources over the next decade to meet the increasing demand for clean and secure energy. Fuel cells can help meet their needs. Bloom Energy’s solid oxide platform is fuel-agnostic, meaning they can pair with natural gas, but also hydrogen, renewables or waste energy to generate low- or zero-emission electricity.

What is CE certification

Manufacturers seeking to sell products in the EU must have CE certification, which assures that a product has met EU health, safety, and environmental requirements.

There is a similar certification process in the United States known as Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory (NRTL) certification. NRTL certification is overseen by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The purpose is to ensure products meet the specifications of applicable product safety standards, including those from Underwriters Laboratories (UL) and other standards-writing bodies. Bloom Energy maintains UL certification.

What CE certification means for Bloom Energy

In 2021, Europe had a capacity of 190 megawatts of deployed fuel cells, up over 450 percent from their 41-megawatt capacity in 2018. The market for solid oxide fuel cells in Europe continues to grow. Some countries outside of the European Union accept CE marked imports, including Turkey and the countries of the European Free Trade Association: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

In addition, the countries of Albania, North Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro have applied for full EU membership and are adopting EU standards. The CE mark can be used until January 1, 2023 in the United Kingdom, where Bloom Energy has already sold its solid oxide platform to Conrad Energy and Electricity North West (Construction and Maintenance) Limited (ENWCML).

Being CE certified means Bloom Energy can immediately provide its fuel-flexible, resilient energy solution to EU customers, including our most cutting-edge solid oxide fuel cell platform. It is the natural next phase in our continued growth, and brings a step closer to providing clean, reliable and affordable energy to people across the world. Bloom Energy will ship the first CE-marked product to the EU this year.

Learn more about Bloom Energy’s entry into the European Market as we chart a course to decarbonize the marine industry.

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