Bloom Energy, a company in fuel-cell electricity production, has released a new flexible load-following solution for its Energy Server platform. This solution rapidly handles fluctuations in supply and demand for heavy power consumers, ensuring them power certainty and quality while delivering significant cost savings.
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 and customers behind the meter are better able to accommodate the variability of their loads.
In a whitepaper released in conjunction with the announcement, the new Be Flexible Energy Server is shown to follow an electricity load increase from 40 to 100% — almost instantaneously. The Energy Servers can be configured in standalone microgrids or support grid operators during times of unstable supply and high demand. As the demand for flexible, responsive, and sustainable power generation solutions grows, SOFC technology has the capacity to meet electricity demands for customers such as utilities, electric vehicle (EV) chargers, and more.
As discussed in the white paper, the key advantages of the Be Flexible offering for the Energy Server compared to legacy standalone power generation solutions include the following:
- 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, load fluctuation has minimal impact on the efficiency of Bloom’s Energy Server. This provides as much as a 50% cost advantage depending on the application.
- Sustainability: CO2 emissions from Bloom’s Energy Server are significantly lower (up to 50% 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.
With more than one gigawatt of deployment, Bloom offers a distributed baseload and always-on power generation with its solid-oxide fuel-cell (SOFC) technology and Energy Server platform. With this 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.
=
Filed Under: Technology News