Drawing on locally sourced, flexible American manufacturing, Bloom is able to bring its supply chain closer to its world-class manufacturing hubs in Delaware and California, helping enhance Bloom’s ability to meet the demands of its growing global customer base and bringing the world closer to a net-zero energy future.

A number of local dignitaries and Vital executives were present at the Vital/FHR open house at the new facility, including Bowling Green Mayor Mike Aspacher, as well as Michael Xiong, Managing Director of the Americas, Vital & FHR North America, and Mark Zhu, President of Vital Thin Film Materials. Satish Chitoori, Bloom Energy’s Senior Vice President, Head of Global Procurement and Supply Chain, also attended, as well as representatives from government, universities, and contractors. After the ribbon cutting, all were invited to tour the Vital/FHR Bowling Green office and production areas.

The company, a subsidiary of Vital Materials, makes materials and vacuum coating systems for a wide range of uses, including solar, display, automotive, MEMS, sensors, photonics, and wearable/decorative products, and it will use that expertise to provide manufacturing services to Bloom. Vital’s investment at Bowling Green is designed to reduce its inventory costs, shorten lead times, and secure critical supply chains for key customers like Bloom. The new facility will also serve as an engineering center of excellence for next-generation medical imaging devices.

“The grand opening of the Vital/FHR Bowling Green site is a key milestone for Vital Group’s expansion into North America,” said Xiong. “We will continue to invest heavily in our global manufacturing footprint and R&D, enabling Bloom Energy to achieve tomorrow’s clean energy platforms, with a reliable and cost competitive supply chain.”

As Bloom has repeatedly noted in its regulatory filings, its supply chain has grown to include high-quality suppliers that support automotive, semiconductor and other traditional manufacturing organizations in the United States, Asia, Europe and India. Its operations require raw materials and, sometimes, services that require special manufacturing processes.

Although shocks to supply chains were common during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bloom’s supplier base and supply chain remained strong, resulting in no significant supplier disruptions and no impact on manufacturing or delivering its American made goods to its customers. As head of Global Procurement and Supply Chain at Bloom Energy, Chitoori works to strengthen and enhance supply chains, preventing disruptions and limiting impact on operations and costs. He was pleased to welcome Vital/FHR to the ranks of Bloom suppliers on June 28.

“Bloom is constantly working to expand and improve its supply chain, both in the U.S. and abroad,” Chitoori said. “Adding Vital/FHR will support the growth in demand that we are seeing for the Bloom Energy Server, our fuel cell platform, and prepare us to meet the building interest in the Bloom Electrolyzer.”

The post Bloom Enhances Supply Chain by Adding Vital & FHR North America as Supplier appeared first on Bloom Energy.

Biotechnology and pharmaceutical manufacturers are increasingly susceptible to costly power disruptions.

In 2018, Hurricane Florence devastated the Carolinas, causing record flooding, wind gusts exceeding 100 mph, and over $16 billion in damages in North Carolina alone. The extreme winds felled trees, downed power lines, and forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate. But they also impacted manufacturing operations in the state.

Pfizer, a multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation, was forced to halt production at a key injectable drugs facility in North Carolina. Merck & Co. and Novartis also suspended operations in the state due to the storm.

Extreme weather events like Hurricane Florence have become increasingly common. And it’s not just regional areas where hurricanes, snowstorms or wildfires are more likely. Across the nation, outages caused by extreme weather events increased 70 percent between 2010-2019 over the previous decade.

Biotechnology and pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities are extremely vulnerable to interruptions in power. These types of buildings are vast, complex and resource-intensive, requiring critical elements such as around-the-clock temperature and air quality control to protect the highly sensitive nature of their products. Such structures are costly to build, operate, and maintain even before factoring in the cost of any unplanned downtime.

Grid-related power disruptions are one of the most pressing challenges threatening manufacturers today. Worse, these power events often lead to expensive delays in production, and costly setbacks to research, storage, or warehousing. Shutting off and turning back on a production line is a significant cost, that’s often difficult to calculate.

Quick Stats

• Pharmaceutical manufacturers experience an average of 6-8 disruptions per year, often caused by voltage sags.
• Industry experts estimate 30-70 percent of disruptions are caused by poor power quality (Source: Rockwell Automation).
• Disruption to production in a pharmaceutical facility can cost up to $500,000 per hour of downtime, according to industry experts.

Eliminating Tradeoffs

As pharma and biotech companies look to address their critical resiliency needs, the growing ambitions of a net-zero future and the impacts of rising energy costs have elevated the importance of choice when it comes to power. Distributed generation is becoming critical to the energy transition, providing a clear path forward for those seeking to gain more control of their electricity supply.

Most distributed energy resources (DER) are self-sufficient, but they are not one size fits all. Technologies like wind and solar are great for their renewable profile but due to their inherent intermittencies, cannot practically solve resiliency challenges. Diesel generators have been the status quo back-up solution for decades. However, they are monolithic machines without inherent redundancy and produce over 40 toxic air contaminants, including a variety of carcinogenic compounds, during operation. Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) are also used to alleviate the effects of unexpected power disruption—for a short term, stop-gap solution. But UPS are expensive and often run on a limited supply of battery power. Resiliency decisions should not be made at the expense of environmental concerns and sustainability decisions should not ignore the importance of reliable energy supply.

What’s more, financial predictability has increasingly become top-of-mind, especially in recent months, where supply change shortages and sharply rising inflation have led to immediate and massive price surges on utility bills. These notable short-term increases have raised the stakes within an already complex purchasing environment and companies are actively looking for solutions that insulate them from this risk.

Meanwhile, many biotech and pharma companies are taking steps to implement renewable power by creating wind and solar farms.

Renewable power farms are often created in one of two ways: a company seeks to maximize sustainability with a cost-effective solar project that generates some power on-site for their operations, and is a cleaner option than the utility grid. But these projects often only power a fraction of a facility’s total kilowatt hours behind the meter.

The second option is to install a large-scale solar or wind farm off-site in a rural area, where it may send the power it generates into the grid creating Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). These RECs can be retired against electrons still being purchased by facilities from their local utilities because there isn’t enough space onsite to remove the utility load with solar/wind. The farm generates clean energy, but the company’s facilities may still run on grid electricity.

Fuel Cell Microgrids

Fuel cells are an ideal solution for those seeking to gain more control over their electricity supply.

Fuel cells provide a critical foundation for building microgrids of varying complexity and can provide significant benefits to the communities, businesses, and utilities they are part of. This type of technology targets a customer’s 24/7 energy usage whereas technologies like solar or battery storage are intermittent.

Since fuel cells often generate power right where energy is being consumed, they can be deployed anywhere and are not dependent on the weather or encumbered by densely populated geography. Customers can tie their critical loads directly onto the fuel cells to provide UPS-quality power to avoid power quality issues as well as carry critical loads through long duration outages. For instance, Bloom’s microgrid platform powered one manufacturing center through a 5.5 day outage in California.

Moreover, our fuel-flexible platform addresses both the causes and consequences of climate change by using natural gas at the highest efficiency today, reducing water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions while improving local air quality. Plus, we are ready to advance decarbonization as renewables come online at scale.

The Solid Oxide Advantage

Solid oxide fuel cell technology, at the heart of the Bloom Energy Server, is uniquely effective in eliminating tradeoffs, providing an unparalleled combination of resiliency, sustainability, and cost predictability. It avoids the vulnerabilities of conventional transmission and distribution lines by generating power on-site, where the electricity is consumed.

Resiliency

As a critical, always-on microgrid solution, Bloom Energy Servers can operate alongside a main grid, but independently of it during a power outage. They stay online even when peak hours cause grid overload, or when distribution infrastructure is damaged—such as during Hurricane Florence. Because they receive fuel through the underground pipeline system, they are less susceptible to the impacts of extreme weather, enabling safe, continuous operation and avoiding costly consequences of unplanned downtime.

Sustainability

By converting natural gas, biogas, or hydrogen into electricity using an electrochemical reaction without combustion, we’re able to achieve an industry-leading 60 percent+ electrical efficiency while virtually eliminating NOx, SOx, and other harmful criteria pollutants from the environment.

Predictability

With the recent volatility in utility rates, low cost and predictable power are important factors for manufacturers facing cost scrutiny. Bloom Energy’s solid oxide platform not only protects against outage-related costs that can reach into the millions of dollars, but also enables customers to hedge against rate volatility and price escalation by fixing a large portion of their electricity cost, providing multiple financing options and flexible term length.

Conclusion

As biotech and pharma companies consider their future energy decisions, decarbonization commitments and resiliency needs will drive next steps.

Maintaining an environment that is productive, compliant, and ensures product integrity means taking every opportunity to mitigate business continuity risks and avoid production disruptions.

Bloom Energy is a trusted partner providing power generation solutions that enable energy security. Our unique onsite solid oxide platform produces power where it’s consumed, so customers avoid the threat of power disruptions and benefit from clean and affordable electricity.

Follow Bloom Energy on LinkedIn to learn more about ongoing projects, collaborations, and announcements.

The post Equipping Pharmaceutical Manufacturers with Resilience and Energy Security appeared first on Bloom Energy.

Power costs were certainly a factor, but the reliability and quality of our power supply became of greater importance as we became more reliant on digital systems and sophisticated operational technology.

In my current role, running operations at Bloom Energy, the digitalization of manufacturing has continued at an exponential pace. We have made great strides in operational efficiency, but these technologies demand more power.

Unfortunately, as shop floors have increased their reliance on electric power, beyond maintaining critical and costly production equipment and processes, like paint shops and stamping presses that should not be disrupted by power outages, the machine learning tech revolution has added an even higher power load than existed before. This puts more stress on an aging grid that has struggled to support the traditional load.

Consider this: in 2017, the US grid experienced more than 3,500 outages, up 62% from a decade ago. Worse, the duration of power outages has doubled in recent years, largely as a result of extreme weather events such as wildfires, floods, winter storms, hurricanes and tornadoes.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, the average electric customer now experiences power outages of an average of 7.8 hours, compared with just over 4 hours a few years ago.

I suspect I know what you’re thinking: “I have back-up power for that.”

I had back-up power in all of my prior jobs as well: uninterruptible power supplies, batteries and noisy diesel generators. But the truth is those solutions are expensive and prone to failure, requiring rapid, accurate switching to engage. They are also typically set up to operate for hours at a time, or a day or two at most. And diesel fuel runs out quickly, and is often difficult to get during a crisis.

These days, I’m increasingly asking other heads of manufacturing this question: How confident do you feel in your ability to withstand an eight-hour power outage? How about a two-day outage? Now tell me, what will each one of those hours cost you in lost productivity?

With average outage duration trending towards the length of a manufacturing shift, doesn’t it seem like it’s time to think differently about power reliability?

It Might Be Time to Protect your Manufacturing Operations with a Microgrid

Here’s a surprising fact for you: North America has now deployed more microgrids than any other part of the world and, according to research firm Navigant, manufacturers are leading adopters of the technology.

So what is a microgrid, and why might it makes sense to support your manufacturing operations?

A microgrid is a smaller, on-site version of the centralized electric grid, typically comprised of solar arrays, fuel cells and energy storage solutions. They enable factories and other facilities to operate independently of, or in parallel with, the larger grid.

Many microgrids can operate and switch between grid-connected and grid-islanded modes, but it is their ability to be ‘islanded’ from the main electrical grid which is of compelling value to the manufacturing sector.

When running in ‘island’ mode, microgrids can insulate your operations from grid power failures or power quality fluctuations. They can also offer improved cost predictability and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by drawing power from cleaner energy resources such as solar arrays or fuel cells.

Additionally, because microgrids can be configured to use the grid for back-up, you’ll gain the option to eliminate all of that other expensive back-up power gear.

Protect your manufacturing business from costly power outages.

Who’s Adopting Microgrids Today?

The manufacturing sector is rapidly finding applications for microgrids.

Take II-VI Inc (“two six”), for example. The company is a global leader in engineered materials and optoelectronic components. Facing booming demand for its 3D sensing technology, the company needed to expand manufacturing operations. However, its local electric utility was unable to meet its growing demand for electricity in a reasonable time frame, so the company decided to deploy on-site power in a microgrid at its Warren, New Jersey facility.

While the primary goal of deploying the 2.5 megawatt fuel cell-powered microgrid was to support growth, in the process the company also reduced its annual CO₂ emissions by 15 million pounds by displacing dirtier grid power. About 50% of the power generated on the New Jersey grid still comes from combusting fossil fuels.

In Silicon Valley, JSR Micro develops materials for the semiconductor industry using their precision manufacturing operations.  In manufacturing operations, even seemingly small power flickers can cause significant impacts. Confronted by increased power outages and reduced grid dependability in California, the company decided to operate independent of the grid by installing their own on-site microgrid.

The microgrid’s 1.1 megawatt of mission critical electric power shields manufacturing, test, and measurement operations from the vulnerabilities of conventional grid transmission and distribution.  Beyond improved continuity, the company also expects the microgrid to lead to reduced electricity costs and carbon footprint.

What You Need to Know Before you consider a Microgrid

As the two case studies above show, microgrids can deliver multifaceted benefits. However, there are still important question to consider before you plunge in.

First, what will an outage really cost you? Reviewing data on the frequency and length of outages in your area will help you with that calculation. Then ask how another outage of a typical duration would affect your WIP, your team’s productivity and safety? What would a delay mean for a product launch, customer order or meeting other critical milestones?

Second, you need to prioritize what is most important to protect. There is likely no need to invest in a microgrid to power all of your operations. Microgrids deliver the most value when they protect mission critical capabilities and services, so make sure to eliminate non-essential facilities from your assessment phase.

At the end of the day, an investment in a microgrid is an insurance policy for continued growth, success and innovation.  When the power is off, you can lose much more than time and money.

When the power is always on, your business breakthroughs will continue unabated.

Learn how AlwaysON Microgrids can serve your manufacturing facility.

This article originally appeared at Manufacturing.net.

The post Distributed Generation: A New Paradigm for Reliable Power appeared first on Bloom Energy.