K.R. Sridhar
Hello, everyone. It was so great to see so many of you in person at the New York Stock Exchange for our Investor Day. And again, we really appreciate you all joining us today for this call. At Bloom, we are continuing to make great progress. We grew our revenues, reduced our costs, and strengthened our balance sheet in the second quarter. We are dedicated as ever, and we're trying to build a great company that can meet the energy needs, not just today. But for the future also. Like me, probably all of you are watching the news and reading the headlines. The messages on energy and climate are extremely clear. We just exited the month of July. And it was the hottest month on the planet in recorded history. And we are looking at deadly heatwaves, electrification of everything, digital transformation, all of them, raising the demand for electricity. And the growing demand for power is far outstripping the growth in supply in most places. And what is that doing? It's just creating the power shortages and for people that want to grow their business, it is creating a time to power issue for them. The electric grid here has just stretched to the limit and it's being run to fail. And we believe it or not in this century, are living with the constant threat of power outages. And, to add insult to injury, the power prices are rising really steeply. Business leaders really are taking note of all this, and they are becoming anxious. They are becoming anxious about energy security and the spiking energy costs. And in addition to that, they're getting very concerned about their decarbonization goals and how they're going to meet it. So energy strategy now has become a real boardroom issue of great concern for companies. And many CEOs and boardrooms are finally realizing that this is not a short-term crisis, they can somehow ignore and expect it to go away very soon. It's here to be with us for a while. And they have to look for alternative solutions; solutions for energy that actually are more predictable and reliable. In other words, they're asking for proven and reliable alternatives to the grid. And very simply be able to find that solution that is easy to transact, with no hidden costs hassles. And they don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what that alternative is. Listen, our message to the market is very clear. The Bloom Energy servers, you can say two things about them, their resilience tested, and their market proven. It'll allow you the businesses to take control of your power, and protect your companies as a viable alternative, and a real enhancement to the grid. And this solution we have for you. We have scaled it, it is scalable, we have proven that it's affordable. And most importantly, it's available today, it's not some future technology. So not only can you operate these boxes, we'll ship now with net-zero hydrogen right away, if it is available to you. But until it's available to you, you can use natural gas. And when we listen to the customers, you, what we heard, is you want an alternative and you want control. You tell us that you're worried about switching to a solution that doesn't have a track record. That's not a problem at Bloom, You say that you do not want to make big capital investments, or lock yourself up in long term contracts. Because while you want the reliability, you also want the flexibility. You want the flexibility, five years from now if there's a better solution, you want to switch to that. And if five years from now, the location where you're operating is not where you want to continue operating, you want to be able to free to move. In other words, you're asking for a proven option that's reliable and flexible, at the same time, it's very simple to transact. And it doesn't have hidden costs or hassles. We responded to these customer concerns and needs by launching a brand new offering last week, the series 10. It's a power buying model. That's the first of its kind in the U.S. power industry. What did we try to do with this offering to make it extremely simple for companies to take control of their power needs? If they're a substantial user of electricity, 10 megawatts and higher. Let me just explain how simple this is by addressing six salient points about the Series 10 And how the needs and concerns of the customers are met by the Series 10 offering. Number one, there's concern about unpredictable and rising power costs, right? Well, we'll give you a flat power price for five years, fixed flat, right? In many places, it can be as low as $0.099 a kilowatt hour. So cost concern checked. Number two, worried about growing your business because of power availability or time to power the issues you talked about supply demand mismatch, we guarantee to ship our units within 50 days from the signing of a contract. How's that proceed? Number three, capital investments. And long-term contracts are a deal breaker for you, right? There is no upfront investments with our Series 10 offer. And we offer the shortest contract in the market for baseload always on power. Five years, yes, you heard me right, five years, check that concern. Number four, you're worried about installing, maintaining, or operating the energy servers. It's all handled by bloom for you at no additional cost. Number five, can it run on hydrogen or biogas, when they become available, and it could be anytime soon or a little bit later, depending on where you live. But in the meantime, you need to keep your business operating and you want to run on natural gas until that hydrogen becomes available. Yes, yes and yes, we can meet all your sustainability goals. You can run it on hydrogen today, you can run it later, you can run it on biogas today, you can run it later. But until all those things come, you can run on natural gas today. Number six, can customers ask for a solution through their power company? And can they not get it directly from us? Absolutely, yes. We would love to partner with independently-owned utilities, municipalities utilities and community coops to provide the solution to them. And they in turn can serve you the customer. And we really want to hear from them. And this offering makes it easy for everybody and a win-win. In other words, Series 10 is both in front of the mirror, or the behind the mirror solution. Okay, then all six concerns addressed. Now, let me highlight similarly, another launch that we just had. And it's also very reflective of our innovative products and offerings. But before I do that, let me take a minute to explain why this is significant. And just use three points to be able to explain to you. Number one, about half of all the energy that industrial customers use globally, is for steam generation. Yes, 50%, for steam generation. This is the sector of the economy that's currently the most challenging to decarbonize. And they're struggling the most with rising energy prices. Number two, our digital transformation relies heavily on these big data centers and network operating centers that just send information traffic back and forth between all our devices, and where that information needs to go. They are very large consumers of power. And up to 40% of that power sometimes goes towards providing cooling for those data centers. So the computers can operate. Number three, conventionally, all that cooling is provided by electricity as a source of energy. That's how we do air conditioning and refrigeration today. And that air conditioning and refrigeration predominantly uses hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs as the refrigerant, the cooling medium, and HFCs are hundreds of times more harmful to the environment than CO2 is. At Bloom, we look at the scenario and what did we see, we see an opportunity to innovate. Two days ago, we launched an enhanced combined heat and power solution. Let's me explain what this is to you. Our Bloom Energy servers operate at high temperature. And that high temperature operation is the secret sauce that enables us to provide the highest electrical efficiencies in the industry, to our customers. When it comes to the electricity we provide them. Here's another thing, when those servers are operating at that -- operating and producing that electricity, they also produce high temperature heat. Our enhanced CHP offering simply taps into that high temperature heat as a byproduct, and it delivers it to our customers, our customers can use it for steam generation. The steam is widely used by industrial customers for process heat, as I said, and it's about 50% of their energy needs if you're an industrial customer. The steam generator has another major use. It can be used for cooling, the air conditioning and refrigeration that we talked about to absorption chillers that don't use hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs. These value streams are significant to our customers because they get this added benefit without incurring any additional fuel or operating costs, zero. They save money and they lower their carbon emissions. It's a win for their company, and it's a win for the environment. This solution will impact industries, from chemicals to petroleum to refining, Pulp and Paper food processing primary metals you have. We look forward to working with industrial customers and partnering with them, as well as people that are in the business today of providing HVAC solutions to these industrial customers. It has global application and global markets. Historically, Europe has had great incentives for people to do CHP, and it's very prevalent. And now, thanks to the IRA, the bill that U.S. passed, U.S. customers, how attractive ITC benefits if they do the CHP projects, and if they commence construction before January of 2025. I expect the industrial segment to react very favorably to this new product offering. with those two examples. I'll pause here, and I'll be back with you to answer questions. For now, let me hand it over to Greg Cameron. Greg?