Bloom Energy Corporation (NYSE:BE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Greg Cameron: Yeah. Hey Ben, it’s Greg. So on Fremont, it is going very smoothly. So we are moving what tooling needs to get moved out of Sunnyvale and over to Fremont. And we do not expect it to have any impact on our capacity this quarter or next quarter. We’ve pre-built where we’ve needed to and it’s moving quite seamlessly. As you know, those are — those two facilities are a quick drive apart and bringing that tooling offline for a short period of time isn’t going to impact it. So we’re excited to get that all together. That lease was ending in Sunnyvale anyways, and we’ll just have everything together in a much more efficient place and pay one rent versus two and have a consolidated inventory and indirect labor force on that.

So we’re really excited about it. On the repowering, the PPA V is very similar to the repowering that we did last year with III A and IV. So from a structure standpoint, you remember we spent a lot of time talking about how we brought back in those VIs and then went through a purpose and sold those VIs to a financial investor. And then that financial investor bought units from us that we delivered against — within the quarter. The particular numbers of it, Ben, I’m going to point you to the Q. I think the team did an amazing job of breaking out the individual components of it. So look on pages 28 through 30, they describe each of the steps and what the financial numbers are, and from there you should be able to pull apart what was the revenue and associated with each of those transactions.

Operator: The next question comes from the line of Manav Gupta with UBS. Your line is open.

Manav Gupta: Congrats on a very strong quarter. Good to see a hydrogen company not cut guidance and go towards the top end of the guidance. My question here is, sir, last quarter you talked about the C 10 — new Series 10 solution and some combined heat and power solutions. Can you give us an update on those two offerings? Thank you.

KR Sridhar: Manav, thank you. And so the first question on Series 10, look, Series 10 is one of many opportunities that we are offering our customers. And what is really interesting about that opportunity is it’s a five-year commitment for people who believe that the grid problem is going to get solved in five years. We don’t want to pass judgment, we just want to give them a five-year solution. And that’s a fantastic solution. So for people who are in that category who believe that, it’s an opportunity that works very well. And obviously, we do that at a certain size and scale. There is a lot of early funnel movement in that, but these are long cycles, like I said. So we are seeing interest in that area, like we would expect to, but we wouldn’t expect to close anything in a month or two.

These are tens of millions of dollars deals and they take time. So we would expect to see results coming out of that next year, and that was our projection. So that’s on track. Your second question on CHP, I think it’s extremely important. CHP is not just for the steam and the heat and the process industry. I just talked about data centers to you and AI data centers. The AI data centers not only consume a lot more electricity, guess what? The cooling load goes up enormously, proportionally because these chips put out a lot of heat inside the data center. So more than 20% of the cooling of that data center has to happen and that’s where the electricity is going to go. Here’s the good news. When Bloom powers that data center, we can use that excess heat and create cooling with the heat.

That’s called a vapor absorption system. Unlike the vapor absorption system, this is a heat driven cooling system absorption, chilling, and we are able to provide that cooling and it is net zero cooling for them because they’re putting no additional fuel. We are seeing tremendous interest from the data center industry on this particular offering.

Operator: The next question comes from the line of [indiscernible] with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Unidentified Analyst: Hi. Just one quick question on the Prairie Island test, any kind of updates there?

KR Sridhar: It is still in the early stages with our Xcel customer and so, no, we don’t have anything as of now, but expect something in the next few months as this does go.

Operator: The next question comes from the line of Jordan Levy with Truist Securities. Your line is open.

Jordan Levy: Afternoon, all. Appreciate all the comments. Maybe if you can just talk to and remind us kind of what remains to be done on sort of the restructuring and the OpEx cause downs, and where you’re at on that.

Greg Cameron: Yeah. Thanks Levy. It’s Greg. So this quarter we — this quarter being the third and the fourth quarter, we took actions both in our manufacturing facilities. We consolidated the teams together. Those are have all been completed. And then on the OpEx side, we went through a process here, very targeted to make sure that given the investments in the growth that we had over the last couple years, that’s still where we prioritize those dollars. And took some small targeted actions over the last few weeks in different areas. As of right now, we’ve completed all the plans that we have in front of us. We’ll always continue to make sure that we’re getting the highest return on your investment dollars. But right now we’re really comfortable with the team that we’ve had and the actions we’ve taken and think it positions us very well to be down into next year on a cost year-over-year basis, which is — which was really excited about that as we drive towards profitability.