Interview with Fuel Cell Energy President & CEO Chip Bottone

Chip Bottone joined FuelCell Energy, Inc., in February 2010 as Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, and was promoted to President and Chief Executive Officer in February 2011. Before joining FuelCell Energy, he was President of the energy systems business at Ingersoll-Rand Plc. Mr. Bottone's focus is to accelerate revenue growth and profitability by capitalizing on heightened demand by the world's industrialized and emerging nations for clean and renewable energy.

He is responsible for developing and implementing strategies to further expand the company's...

market opportunities and growth potential. Mr. Bottone's qualifications include 25 years of experience at Ingersoll-Rand, a diversified global industrial concern. He received an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1983, and received a Certificate of Professional Development from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. Mr. Bottone has extensive experience in global commercialization activities that deliver profitable growth.

TWST: Please start with a brief history of FuelCell Energy as well as an overview of your current products and operations today.

Mr. Bottone: We are a fully integrated fuel cell company providing ultraclean and efficient baseload power plants. What that means is we design the core technology, manufacture the fuel cells, provide applications support, do installation work in some cases, and then we have long-term service agreements for our megawatt-class stationary power plants globally. And we actually operate these plants for our clients. They don't actually control the plants. Here in Danbury we have a control center that's manned 24/7 that runs these plants around the world. We have plants in Korea, in the U.S., etc., and we run these plants, load them up, turn them down, whatever. We are pretty unique in that regard. The reasons customers purchase the fuel cell power plants that we make is, number one, they are efficient. The idea there is if you have limited resources, whether it's clean natural gas or renewable biogas, it's best to get the most out of what you have.

Our fuel cell power plants are ultraclean, so you can basically put them anywhere. This is especially valued by customers in regions with strict air permitting regulations as there are virtually no pollutants at all and areas of high population density. You put your head over the stack because that's hot, but that's about the only issue there. What that also translates to is, if you see our plants on a city street, the noise from the taxi cabs that you hear in New York would be louder than the fuel cell. Our focus is the megawatt-class including 1.4 MW and 2.8 MW power plants that are scalable. The largest fuel cell project in the world is 11.2 MW using four of our largest plants. One fuel cell as big as 1.5 megawatts would be able to power about probably 800 homes, give or take, depending on where you are. A lot of people ask what kind of power generation process is used by a fuel cell. It's an electrochemical process instead of combustion, which is how we can deliver the ultraclean emissions.

Our basic premise is real simple. We do base load and we do distributed energy. If you remember back in the 1980s when everybody went from mainframes to distributed computing, that's kind of us. We work complementary, if you will, to baseload power plants that might be centralized, but we put these where the power is used for two reasons. One, you can avoid transmission and distribution costs and permitting issues, and two, we actually use the heat as well, so it takes our 47% electrical efficiency, which in itself is high, and raises it up to maybe 85%, 90% total thermal efficiency.

We just continue to amplify the efficiency gains. So that's the story behind what we do. The company itself started as a research company over 40 years ago to focus on batteries and storage. Interestingly enough, as that technology evolved, we got to what our current fuel cell technology is in about 2003, which is the commercialization of the business. Today we have 180 megawatts of ultraclean power generation either installed or in our backlog, including more than 80 plants in approximately 50 locations around the world. We are listed on the Nasdaq and that happened in 1992.

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Source: The Wall Street Transcript