Bloom Energy will install fuel cells under an agreement with Massachusetts-based Partners HealthCare.
Partners was founded by Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital,
Bloom noted that Massachusetts suffered more than 100 outages to its electric power grid in 2017, lasting 55 hours in total, according to the Eaton Blackout Tracker. More than 630,000 people were affected by the outages, more than a third of which were caused by bad weather and falling trees.
Following a recent review of the vulnerability of its facilities, Partners made the decision to continue increasing reliability at its facilities’ by adding 4.1 megawatts of fuel cell-based energy systems from Bloom Energy at locations throughout Massachusetts.
Boom fuel cells provide constant power, but can be configured to enable critical operations to continue even if the electrical grid fails.
Bloom Energy Servers generate electricity without combustion and provide lower emissions than diesel or the back-up systems.
Bloom says its systems will also reduce CO2 emissions by more than 20 percent when compared to the average for local grid power. The systems use virtually no water in normal operation. Fossil-based power plants consume 150 million gallons of water more than Bloom Energy Servers to produce one megawatt for a year. Bloom fuel cells are largely powered by natural gas.
Bloom further noted that its systems take up far less space than solar panels at sites with little open space.
“Our hospitals and medical centers care for more than 1.5 million patients each year. Many of our facilities are open 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, so reliable electricity is both crucial to our operations, and one of our largest utility costs,” said Dennis Villanueva, senior manager of Energy & Sustainability at Partners. “With the Bloom systems, we can save money, improve our resiliency to outages, and virtually eliminate particulate pollutants, responsible for cardiovascular, and respiratory diseases in our community.”
“Bloom Energy offers tailored solutions that help our customers meet their individual power needs, whether that is for more sustainable, lower cost, or more resilient electric power,” said KR Sridhar, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Bloom Energy. “We’re proud to be providing clean, reliable, affordable electricity to Partners so that its incredible staff and researchers can focus on doing what they do best: deliver world-class healthcare to the residents of Massachusetts,”
