New fuel cell service to dwarf Caltech’s solar installation

PASADENA – The California Institute of Technology on Thursday announced its participation in a new power purchase program with Bloom Energy, a Silicon Valley company specializing in clean fuel-cell technology.

In its 10-year contract with Bloom, Caltech will pay for electricity generated from colonies of on-site “energy servers” that the energy company installs, operates and maintains.

“What the Bloom technology allows us to do is create more on-site generation … at less cost than the grid,” said Caltech’s vice president for facilities, Jim Cowell. “We also don’t have to invest our own capital.”

Caltech is among the first clients – others include corporate behemoths Coca Cola, Walmart and Kaiser Permanente – to use the “Bloom Electrons” power purchase program.

The installation, which Bloom representatives described as one of their largest to date, is part of a larger sustainability initiative at Caltech that also includes 1.3 megawatts of recently installed solar capacity.

But compared to Caltech’s photovoltaic panels, the Bloom system, which is partially installed and will be completed in the next six months, will provide 2.0 megawatts of capacity.

“Solar only works when the sun shines, (but) the Bloom boxes run seven days a week, 24-hours a day,” said Dean Currie, Caltech’s vice president for business and finance.

“So in terms of the percentages…17 percent of our total energy will be from Bloom and about

3 percent will be from solar.”According to John Onderdonk, manager of Caltech’s sustainability programs, the new system will be about 88 percent cleaner than energy purchased from the grid, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by about 11,200 metric tons each year.

Asim Hussain, director of product marketing for Bloom, said he expects customers to experience an immediate 5 to 20 percent savings off their energy bill – a rate that should extend through the 10-year contract.

While actual prices are confidential, Currie noted that Caltech will pay “several cents below what we pay for energy from the grid – from Pasadena Water and Power.”

Bloom technology, which grew out of research for NASA mars missions, replaces the high-cost materials typically associated with fuel cells with a “common, sand-like powder,” according to the company’s website.

The result is a device that uses a clean electro-chemical process, without combustion, to produce electricity from air and fuel, and vice versa.

Citing the institute’s own work at the forefront of fuel cell technology, Currie said he is confident that the new installation will prove reliable.

“We have a faculty that understands fuel cell technology – some have their own fuel cell start-ups,” he said. “It’s not a particularly complex technology itself, so we’ve been through the factory and the labs and have an enormous confidence the technology will be very reliable.”

If for some reason the devices were to fall short of production, Currie summed up the apparent benefits of the new program, saying, “that’s not our problem.”

More fuel cell energy at Caltech is likely, he said, but not it’s likely to replace the grid.

“We’ll run these for a while and we can expand them. There’s a space constraint… So it will never be a complete replacement for our cogeneration system’s 12 megawatts, and we’ll always be buying some energy from Pasadena Water and Power. You have to have back-up.”