Deia Bayoumi is the Vice President of Global Product Management at Bloom Energy, a San Jose-based company whose mission is to make clean, reliable, and affordable energy for everyone globally. In this episode, Deia, a global innovation executive with more than three decades of experience, discusses Bloom’s unique fuel cell and clean hydrogen solutions and the role these technologies play in addressing climate change. Bloom is changing the future of energy with its leading solid oxide platform for distributed generation of electricity and hydrogen. Its customers include many Fortune 100 companies and leaders in manufacturing, data centers, healthcare, retail, higher education, utilities, and other industries.
Deia Bayoumi is the Vice President of Global Product Management at Bloom Energy, a San Jose-based company whose mission is to make clean, reliable, and affordable energy for everyone globally. In this episode, Deia, a global innovation executive with more than three decades of experience, discusses Bloom’s unique fuel cell and clean hydrogen solutions and the role these technologies play in addressing climate change. Bloom is changing the future of energy with its leading solid oxide platform for distributed generation of electricity and hydrogen. Its customers include many Fortune 100 companies and leaders in manufacturing, data centers, healthcare, retail, higher education, utilities, and other industries.
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Episode recorded August 23, 2022
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Chad Reed: This is Climate Positive – a show featuring candid conversations with the leaders, innovators, and changemakers driving our climate positive future. I’m Chad Reed
Hilary Langer: I’m Hilary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I’m Gil Jenkins.
Deia Bayoumi: We're choosing different mixes of fuels right now to generate electricity on planet Earth. We're going back to the same initial concept and really the key chemical process and re-formation of fuel cell generating electricity is the same for generating hydrogen.
Gil: For this week’s episode, I spoke with the Deia Bayoumi, the Vice President, Global Product Management at Bloom Energy, a San Jose-headquartered company with mission is to make clean, reliable, and affordable energy for everyone in the world.Deia and I had a lively and in-depth conversation on fuel cell technology and green hydrogen technology and the role these technologies will play in addressing climate change
Hilary: Climate Positive is produced by Hannon Armstrong, a leading investor in climate solutions for over 30 years. To learn more about our climate positive journey, please visit HannonArmstrong.com.
Gil: Deia, welcome to Climate Positive.
Deia: Thank you, Gil. I really appreciate the opportunity and looking forward to the conversation.
Gil: I followed Bloom Energy for a number of years. I sort of think of you guys as the original clean teach darlings, and maybe that's because I lived in the Bay Area several years ago. I'll never forget this 60-minutes clip that was about 12 years old. It's one of the most amazing pieces on any company or industry. Could you explain for those who don't know Bloom Energy as well? Give us the elevator pitch in terms of what you're doing today, and then I'm going to ask you some questions about your specific role.
Deia: Bloom Energy is an innovative company with a mission to make clean, reliable, and affordable energy for everyone in the world. Bloom transforms the way business and communities take a charge of their energy needs by providing resilient, predictable, and zero carbon solutions.
Gil: Great. You've been with the company about two years?
Deia: Almost two years now, yes.
Gil: Before that, you were at Wolfspeed which I'm a little bit familiar with. I did a little work for three years ago and learned about the amazing technology there. It looks like the bulk of your career was at ABB. What brought you to Bloom, and what did you do at ABB, and briefly at Wolfspeed?
Deia: Almost by now, I'm 30 years in the power and infrastructure industry. With ABB, I enjoy it really driving new, clean, green, sustainable, and smart solutions. Upgrading the infrastructure for a better world. With ABB, I had several roles in product management, technology management, and strategic development.
Wolfspeed was also another very sustainable solution where Wolfspeed is working to transition the semiconductor industry from silicon to silicon carbide where they can offer more energy-efficient solutions. My role there was really how can we find application for the technology in the power and infrastructure industry, whether it's wind forms, or microgrids, or even trains and mobility.
Gil: What brought you to Bloom?
Deia: Bloom actually falls exactly where my heart lies. In ABB, we always derive solutions around sustainable green smart solution, how we really make the solution cleaner, how we make it more sustainable and empower and enable the circular economy, how we get the smarts to really make the energy most efficient and really improve human lives through all the technology and offering we had at ABB.
There was two Hs always I was passionate about. H as hydro and H as hydrogen. With ABB, we always drove the H as hydro, where the hydropower plants are far from where people live, and how we bring the most efficient solutions, and product, and equipment to produce energy to the world.
With Bloom, I saw that the team here is innovative, purpose-driven with the mission that they have developed a very sustainable, scalable, mature solution with solid oxide fuel cell we have. I couldn't be happier to be part of the journey to derive growth and scalability so we can make the solution available everywhere and affordable to everyone.
Gil: Let's jump into the technology that I assume as an engineer by training is pretty exciting to you. We're going to talk a lot about hydrogen, but explain if you could, and maybe I'll challenge you to explain this as if you were telling a five-year-old. I don't know if you have kids, but solid oxide fuel cell technology, explain how fuel cells work.
Deia: Solid oxide fuel cell is a chemical interaction where we take different mixes of fuels in here and where really with a small footprint, no combustion, we have high output of energy there. The most efficient energy solution we can produce. There is no NOx or SOx which are pollutants that really harm humans. With the smallest footprint possible, with the highest efficiency possible with no combustion, we can generate clean energy from responsible sources of fuel, and also from different kind of waste enabling really the most sustainable solution ever. That's how the fuel cells work.
With Bloom, we have two key platforms. One focus on power generation where we really have distributed always on non-combustion generation of clean electricity. That's where we reduce the emission to promote sustainable resilient communities. We have also another platform where we produce the most efficient hydrogen. With that, we're enabling clean most efficient production of hydrogen for different processes and also for electricity generation using hydrogen.
Gil: Yes, I'll just stay on that point. I think like you, we're excited about the potential for green hydrogen as a climate solution and you launched your- as I understand it, Bloom's green electrolyzer product commercially maybe about a year ago. Maybe you're going to have to explain an electrolyzer, how that's used to produce clean hydrogen fuel, which is an input for fuel cells. Explain that exciting product launch. Then we've had some very encouraging news on the policy support needed to further bring those green hydrogen costs down. Talk about electrolyzers. I think you said in the press release they may be shipping very soon.
Deia: Electrolyzer actually is the key ingredients of Bloom. When our founder, CEO, and chairman of the board, KR Sridhar started the company, it was part of the NASA mission where we were actually on planet Mars trying to really get human to live there. We're taking solar where we're taking actually the water there and generating oxygen for people to breathe and hydrogen power all the vehicles and living there. That's one of the key ingredients. When that mission was paused, they took it and they really developed the fuel cell using the same concept.
We're choosing different mixes of fuels right now to generate electricity on planet Earth. We're going back to the same initial concept and really the key chemical process and re-formation of fuel cell generating electricity is the same for generating hydrogen. If you go back to chemistry classes, water or steam is H2O. Two molecules of hydrogen, one molecule of oxygen, and we use any source of electricity focusing on renewable sources, clean sources like wind, like solar, and nuclear, and we're actually separating these two molecules of hydrogen and the oxygen.
We're letting the oxygen for now released to the air, which is clean. Sometimes we use it for other processing based on the use case or the customer processing plant. Then this way, we're generating the hydrogen that have multiple uses in the world. It can be used to generate green ammonia. It can be used for processing many other products we use. It can be used for generating electricity with zero carbon in the future as well.
Gil: What can you tell me about the customer feedback early on the electrolyzer product? You're historically known for the server's products, which provides the stationary power. Now, you're taking orders for electrolyzers. Tell me about the feedback and reception in the early days.
Deia: The product is performing very well as intended. We had it in several application. We had it in traditional application sitting actually operating in South Korea. We have it with solar application and demonstrated where a solar concentrator can come and then coupled with water or steam, we can produce really very clean hydrogen in the most efficient way. Recently, we had a publication with INL, Idaho National Lab, part of the US Department of Energy Lab where they showed that we get the highest efficiency possible.
Looking at an energy crisis in most of the parts of the world and looking at renewable sources of solar or wind, which is not available all the time, efficiency of generating this hydrogen was going to be a key driver for enabling that economy. Having the most efficient technology that uses or maximize the use of conversion of this electricity with water or steam to hydrogen is really key in driving this force forward.
All our customer really see is the continuation we have of driving the efficiency harder, of really making sure that we get a full circular economy, enabling this green hydrogen and clean hydrogen with the lowest if not zero carbon index is really a key and really getting a lot of excitement and driving this economy further and faster. We also have the solution if there is heat as a byproduct, like some of the steel factories or some of the heaters development process, we can use it as well to derive further efficiency.
Really, you can see the whole innovation around Bloom is how can we maximize the output and how can we create abundance of energy. Same thing like you mentioned on the electricity generation. We're actually generating the highest efficient electricity using renewable or responsibly sourced natural gas. We enable the biogas, we take animal waste or any source of waste, and we're able to convert it to electricity. We enable the hydrogen to be a source of electricity, which you have zero carbon and we continue to integrate some of the byproducts that comes out as heat generated or carbon that we can repurpose it and capture it for other purposes as well. That mission continued to drive the highest efficiency, the most circular economy, and the best really output for abundant clean, resilient energy.
Gil: Certainly, there's efficiency advantages in your solid oxide model, both for the electrolyzer and the energy server fuel cell stationary power themselves. What about the materials in the fuel cells? So many industries are challenged by supply chain and minerals. What is it about Bloom's solution that gives you confidence you're going to be able to manage potentially long-term supply chain, bottlenecks, and constraints?
Deia: The real magic sauce is coming in the formulation of the fuel cell itself. We don't have any rare material or earth material that's not available. I think that was one of the key success that it took 20 years of trials and scars of the team, brain power here to come up with this formula that we use for both the fuel cell and the electrolyzer. I think not relying on any rare material or limited material is really a key for us that really we continue to scale.
Another thing Bloom is doing for the other balance of the system around, so we have power electronics to convert AC to DC and vice versa. We have blowers, we have heaters, we have filters. You can see the supply chain have been really proactive in securing multiple supplies and making sure they're coming from also responsible suppliers that really have the same objective, same sustainability missions we have, and make sure that all the supply chain values is really also available.
Right now, we're scaling our factory to the 2.4 gigawatt of electrolyzers and it's really up and running. We inaugurated earlier this year in Fremont, California, and we continue to expand. We really have been preparing for that expansion on both power generation fuel cell or hydrogen production with the electrolyzer.
Gil: I saw it was just a few weeks ago, you announced an additional facility, a factory in San Jose capable of producing one gigawatt of fuel cells.
Deia: That was around May timeframe when we have our big investor day. You're more welcome to come and see it and see it in operation. I think one of the big, also key advantage that the team also thought through in the beginning is we build everything based on the platform. There's a platform for power generation, very similar concept for the electrolyzer production. Our tools are very interchangeable, so the same tools, manufacturing processes that we use for creating and developing manufacturing the fuel cell with minor change, they can be modified to start producing electrolyzer. One gig fuel cell factory is equivalent to 2.4-gigawatt electrolyzer.
Gil: Wow.
Deia: That's how we enabled the scalability. This is where actually the material supply chain, training the manufacturing team members we have is really all maximized between both of them. This is how we're really able to serve both key parts of the energy industry. What we call it on the power generation electrons and what we call it on the hydrogen side molecules.
Gil: Have you had a chance to study the various green hydrogen or broader hydrogen incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act? Any commentary on-- You were making these investments before that, what seems like a very helpful policy tailwind, but have you had any reaction to those particular incentives and what that might do for the green hydrogen market in the US?
Deia: Yes. We have a very active team in the policy helping with the congresswomen and men. We have to really show them the value of how the fuel cell can play a role in energy transition and energy security as well. Definitely, we have anticipated that some of this tax credit and incentive will help building the momentum and accelerate customer value add to really start investing faster in this.
We see it as definitely a tailwind. We believed in that energy and you can see from the mission from the beginning, as I told you, it's very clear on around make clean, reliable, and affordable energy for everyone in the world. We continue with our investment, knowing that it's a matter of time that we need to really contribute to this climate change. We see all different technologies contributing, we see the fuel cell on the power generation and also in the hydrogen production as a key driver for that, and we continue investing, driving in that direction and we continue building value and momentum for the industry, for our customer, for the planet in general.
Then the tailwind is coming to really help speeding it up, so we really welcome it for sure. We see lots of more momentum about cases where the customer economics now are more intriguing. They want to place the order faster. They want to accelerate their investment faster. There is really more of that and that's where we anticipated and we talk really the extra step of investing ahead of that wave.
Gil: Let's come back to this concept of fuel flexibility. We talked about many of these services today are powered by responsibly sourced natural gas. You've got biogas, renewable natural gas there, green hydrogen increasingly. Does the technology of the server today without many modifications, does it have that fuel flexibility out of the box or do you have to make tweaks to the system depending on the fuel input?
Deia: No, it's absolutely ready right now.
Gil: Wow.
Deia: We have our old fleet now converted to responsible natural gas, and that's where we're really running all our fleet that's almost going to be one gigawatt by end of this year with 150 microgrids, which is an additional layer of resiliency and reliability we add based on the customer application and need for resilient power. We enabled already the biogas and we have really up and running a big farm where there is almost 5,000 cows.
We're taking the animal waste and manure and convert it to really clean electricity, powering one megawatt, to be expended to another megawatt powering this whole farm. We have a landfill side that's up and running also where we are taking the landfill and convert it to clean electricity. We have signed some contracting in the process of installation and execution for waste treatment plant with swine gas. There's some discussion about actually pistachio and almond waste, that they can convert it as well.
We are really taking advantage of any waste and really convert it to something very useful as clean sustainable energy. That's enabled already right now. We actually launched also last year our hydrogen-run fuel sell. When hydrogen is available and more of commodity price than a premium price right now, and certain customers have access to hydrogen right now, they can power this fuel cell with hydrogen.
Large projects around the globe is planning to really reduce hydrogen on a larger scale and either compress it and shuffle it around. That's what they call it, like energy storage kind of system, or both in a pipeline and push it in pipeline. Knowing that hydrogen is not widely available yet, we enable even blending in our current systems right now.
Gil: Interesting.
Deia: For a customer that have a responsibility in natural gas and then will produce natural gas and hydrogen, they can blend. Then this way, they're really taking advantage of lower emissions, higher efficiency, and then this way they enable really the transition. You can see our decarbonization roadmap is moving from responsible natural gas, biogas when it is available, blending with hydrogen.
We start actually working now even in ammonia as another source of fuel that should be available in another couple of years or less. We're really enabling everything, not just to get to zero carbon. If we can go to negative carbon, that's our target and we keep pushing that. We're really moving ahead of the market and the industry and trying to really say climate change is very important. We know that 1.5C degree is very important. We know we have brain power and technology that can contribute and help in here. We really drive to make this happen. Having tax credit, having really good use cases, building momentum in the market is a really key driver for us to really bring this positive climate change.
Gil: You've got about 700+ sites and counting right now.
Deia: Yes, that's the installation that in power wise is going to be towards one gigawatt by the end of the year of install base around the globe. It's roughly also out of that mix, 150 of them are microgrid based that we fully monitor and control and able to really serve as well.
Gil: Tell me about the profile of that installed base. A lot of business in California, right? It's the, what, seventh largest economy by itself. Very out there on climate targets, low carbon fuel standard with respect to the R&G adoption and certainly, dealing with lots of grid resiliency challenges in part driven by climate change already. Certainly, California continues to be a growing market. Where else do you see growth in North America? Whether it be all the angles we talked about; resiliency, fuel flexibility, falling costs. What other markets?
Deia: California definitely being headquartered in California and our base here in California and California being also one of the leading states in sustainability and driving that, that was our main base. We have lots of installations, the northeast, which similar values of sustainability was a driver, tax credit was a driver as we keep bringing the cost down. Now, we're expanding to the 50 states. In the last few months, we added several additional states of installation. We expanded globally. In addition to Korea and Japan, now we build a team in Europe and our first installation was with Italy in Ferrari with the Ferrari actually, sports cars.
Gil: That's a pretty fun first insulation.
Deia: Exactly.
Gil: A little bit of glamor there. Did you get a factory tour or get to test drive the Ferraris?
Deia: Some of our team members did actually get the factory tour and got it. The rest is still looking forward to really expand-
Gil: I bet.
Deia: -the business there and also the whole sports segment, Lamborghini and others to be added later. Definitely, we expanding around the globe because the values we bring, the affordability have been part of our DNA. If you look at our year-over-year cost down, it's bringing it down by 12%. That enable us to really go across all the states and across the globe as well, not in competition with the grid, in complementation with the grid.
As more countries and more states retire coal fire plants, and they retire some of the cases even nuclear and the demand is increasing, that creates a need for gigawatts of power. California, of course, with the whole fire, there was this rolling plaque out that we call it Public Safety Power Shutoff, or known as PSP. That rolling blackout to really prevent the fires from happening created really a restrain on some manufacturing, some data center, some customer that need power, even healthcare in hospitals. Having onsite distributed power, that's always on that provide this clean sustainable energy was a key.
That use case exists across the states. Now, we have Louisiana, you have Texas, you have many other weather events that continue to magnify itself. If I look at 2021 statistics here, we have 600 outages totaling 1,000 hours where our Bloom System carried actually the power and minimize the disruption for these customers.
Gil: Wow.
Deia: If you look at the hurricanes around, they keep increasing in intensity. If you look at storms, if you look at wildfire season, that's all happening actually across the globe. Europe now and Southern Europe have also fires that haven't been the case before. One case definitely is all the storms and outages. One case where time to power is very critical as we expand manufacturing after COVID now, as we expand some of the services, the utilities on some other power provider, it takes them longer time than Bloom to deploy. Time to power is much faster case for us, but affordability and bringing the cost down to make it this, something that every customer can enjoy, of course, all the market segmentation is also another key part of our mission and our DNA here at Bloom.
Gil: You mentioned those, it was 1,000 hours saved on the resiliency, but give me a story of a customer installation. Maybe it's a hospital where they can't go down or a grocer where they need that 24/7 base load energy. What specific customers' installations do you like to highlight when you talk about the resiliency benefits?
Deia: Data center is one key one because we have cases here in California where the PSP extended for 5.5 days. That was really critical for the data center to operate. Data center, as you know, is really crucial for all our operation right now. Running a podcast like this, running healthcare systems, running even emergency services. The data center is becoming a crucial infrastructure backbone for us. It's not just transactional as it used to be in the past. Having an outage extended like that is really crippling. We're able to support them for the 5.5 days without any interruption like other neighboring parts they had.
Storm Sandy, for example, when it hit the Northeast, we were able to support a community there with our microgrid enabling them to continue having the power and enjoy. Some of it were grocery stores where they were able to keep their produce. They didn't have food waste. They were able to keep the parking lot lights and keep it safe. The heat as well with the storm at the time is really crucial and important.
Majority of our customer right now falls in this category in the market, we call it commercial and industrial, C&I. They are the Home Depot store. They are the Walmart store. They are the healthcare hospital like Kaiser. They are their data centers like Equinox and others. This is really crucial operation that's not nice to have. It's really must now of our daily life for us to operate and rely on. Power is everywhere. Without power, you'll see everything shutting down, including gas pumps, including grocery stores, banking, and everything else.
We really continue to really serve across that. Also, with the expansion, we're doing geographically. As you ask if we're going out side California, Northeast and expanding to the 50 states and globally with the team we have in Europe and Asia now as well, is we expand in course market segments. We're really looking at utility, to partner with utility. How can we support them in the generation void and gap? We have an infrastructure that enable clean, sustainable energy next to solar, next to wind next to better storage.
How can we integrate with this technology and enable faster, cleaner, more resilient energy solutions, and really improve our great performance in general? How can we expand the industrial and steel factories and ammonia green factories and energy generation in general? So you can see our scale is getting bigger, and really going across market segments to say, we are here to support energy transition and energy security, and resilience as well. It all adds up together towards this climate-positive change.
Gil: It's beautiful to hear your passion and enthusiasm for that. I want to ask you about the global lens and in your career, largely at ABB, you must have had countless cross-cultural experiences in building engineering teams and product teams and worked on so many projects globally. As this company goes global, what lessons are you bringing to the team there having done this work in the power sector?
Deia: You're touching in one of my key privileges, actually, an educational part was really the global experience working with brain power across the globe in different countries, in different cultures with different perspectives, but they all in the same objective of as humans, we need to make our life better. We need to save the planet. We need to really improve and create sustainable circular economy.
That's a key part of what we drove around ABB. I saw it with clients, with partners, with force colleagues, and customers. As we scale up Bloom, Bloom have a very-- I always say Bloom Energy is full of positive energy. There is a lot of positive energy here about making good and really how we really continuously raising the bar to really improve the efficiency, to improve the sustainability, to really take any byproduct and repurpose it. How can we come up with the next thing that we really have a purpose? How can we get the cost down to make it affordable to everyone?
All these ingredients and all this comes with really high energy in the speed, large corporation, like ABB in a hundred countries with 120,000 employees require more processes and infrastructure to be able to function and communicate and to scale. We're trying to marry the both. How can we bring more structure, more processes, more scalability in Bloom? One, we're keeping this agility, we're keeping this innovation, we're keeping this breakthrough. Really using the toolbox rather than a blade book per se, and how we can accelerate our growth.
I mean, the whole purpose of me joining the team and the whole team here is, how can we scale and how can we accelerate that scaling? There is a value here that we all see of bringing the solution out of getting the people to enjoy it, of getting our customer to really enjoy it. That's what we're driving around. Very similar purpose to ABB, different structure and different speed, and we're trying to find that- what is the optimal intersection point to really keep agility innovation, but to scale with some structure and processes as well.
Gil: Staying on the philosophical, I saw on your LinkedIn profile that you- and you've alluded to this, but you've talked about your purpose in life as energy innovation in communities. I sense that purpose coming through in some of your statements back to me, but what was it about that phrase? How did you arrive personally at that statement?
Deia: Actually, that was in a class in Harvard business. That's actually a book named True North with Bill actually the author and they give you more of reflection time. You look around and write what impact you have made, what you're looking for. I encourage you really, and the audience to really read that book. It really helped me a lot to really look at what's really my true north. I found that I'm always energized by innovation. I'm energized by people and communities, and I'm energized by the intersection of how we get this innovation to help communities.
For me, innovation goes beyond technology, product solution is definitely key. Processes is one, how we communicate with each other is one, how we build even organizational structure and together is one. I found that that phrase really represents what get me excited, what powers me up, what get me excited every day that I'm energized. That even that podcast is helping to energize innovation in communities and people might pick up an idea or something else and drive in the same direction or driving of making human life better and better.
Gil: Thank you for sharing that. We're going to turn to the hot seat portion of our interview. The goal is rapid-fire, the first thing that comes to your mind. What's the best part about living in the great area that you live in, the research triangle on Raleigh-Durham?
Deia: Diversity and innovation, there is lots of people over there.
Gil: Duke or North Carolina basketball, or should I really ask you NC state sports? Do you have an allegiance?
Deia: UNC. I used to be--
Gil: UNC, okay.
Deia: UNC. I used to be a Duke fan until my daughter went to UNC. I cannot really support Duke anymore.
Gil: I'm glad you saw the light. My grandfather was a Tar Heel and nobody likes it.
Deia: I know you went there.
Gil: The best piece of advice you've ever received.
Deia: Be who you are, stay true to yourself.
Gil: What keeps you inspired? What gets your fire lit?
Deia: Improving people life, even if it's just one person one at a time, positive impact in any way or shape or form that I can do, that get me energized and get me up every day.
Gil: Okay. Last one, finish the phrase, "To me, climate positive means--"
Deia: It's everything we have to do to make it happen. It's crucial for us, for the planet, and for our human life.
Gil: Excellent, thanks for joining us today, Deia
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I'm Gil Jenkins.
And this is Climate Positive.