Chief Marketing Officer Sharelynn Moore speaks about what Bloom Energy can do in the short-term, mid-term and long-term to go after new markets and fuel growth.
Video Synopsis
Market Growth & Strategy | Bloom Energy 2022 Investor Conference
Chief Marketing Officer Sharelynn Moore speaks about what Bloom Energy can do in the short-term, mid-term and long-term to go after new markets and fuel growth.
- Environmental capitalism
- The Platform
- Waste-to-Energy
- Value-Driven
- Market Leadership
- Competitive Advantage with Technology
- Three Key Business Segments
- Power Generation
- Hydrogen Carbon Capture
- Marine
- Milestones
- A Deeper Look at Power Generation
- A Deeper Look at Waste-to-Energy
Speakers
Sharelynn Moore, Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer: Sharelynn Moore has more than 20 years of experience in the energy and technology sectors. Sharelynn was brought to Bloom to lead the company’s growth efforts. Her responsibilities include market strategy, new business development, product management, and all marketing and communications. She also oversees Bloom’s Korea business and serves on Bloom Energy Korea’s Board of Directors. Prior to joining Bloom, Sharelynn served as Senior Vice President of Networked Solutions at Itron, where she had responsibility for the company’s largest business segment and its Industrial IoT technology and smart city strategy. Throughout her tenure at Itron, she held leadership roles with increasing levels of responsibility across marketing, communications, public affairs, and product management functions. Previously, Sharelynn held marketing and product management roles at Avista Corporation, and Micron Technology. She holds a BS in business from the University of Idaho and an MBA from Gonzaga University.
Transcript
Intro
Sharelynn Moore: Hello. Well, this is really fun. I almost feel like I just completed a really big remodel, cleaned the entire house, sent out invitations, and I’ll be damned, everyone showed up. This is awesome. No, truly, thank you for being here.
Environmental capitalism
It’s really fun for us to spend time with our investor community. KR opened with the talk about the existential threat of climate. You can’t go anywhere right now without feeling the threats of climate risk. We open the papers, we see articles, we’re experiencing extreme weather, and unfortunately, the past is not the predictor of our future from an extreme weather standpoint. While none of us want the planet to continue to warm, I don’t see it as doom and gloom because from our standpoint at Bloom, we’re working with customers every day in the private sector that are looking for ways to do better for the environment, while at the same time, doing right by their shareholders.
In fact, I was listening this morning to the CEO of Salesforce, who’s at Davos, and he was talking about environmental capitalism, and that is exactly Bloom’s sweet spot because what we do is practical, it’s pragmatic, it’s right for the environment, it’s right for our customers, it’s right for the communities, and that’s what powers me and why I’m so excited. We put together a ground up-plan, our team of product experts, strategic business developers, and marketers, and took a look at our three businesses and what we can do in the short-term, the medium-term, and the long-term. How are we going to go after these markets? How are we going to grow? How are we going to operate in a way that captures profitable growth in the right way?
How do we prioritize? Prioritization is key for us. With everything that’s going on in the world, we could be spread a million different ways because there’s so many opportunities, so we’ve put a plan together, looking across all of this, both from an operational standpoint as well as a market standpoint, so for us, it’s really nice to be able to share it with you because we are very confident and we actually feel, if anything, it’s very conservative. There are more upsides or accelerators that could happen, policies that we’d all love to see. Unfortunately, even worse, climate risk impact out in the world will drive our business, but at the same time, there’s way more fewer risks than there are those increased opportunities, so again, very confident.
The Platform
With that, one of the common themes that you’re going to see across these business plans is the concept of the platform. You heard it from Greg, you heard it from KR. This company was built on this platform. Our corporate strategy of everything we’re doing around the platform is clearly important, but so is our market strategy, and there’s three key ways that the platform plays an important role across all three of our businesses. First, the platform allows us to tailor unique solutions. A really good example of that is in waste-to-energy.
Waste-to-Energy
We took our same core platform, made a minor modification so that we could input biomethane, and we can turn that biomethane into electricity. What did that mean for us? It provided a whole new unlock. We sell now to municipalities. We sell now to markets in Europe potentially, that we wouldn’t have sold into prior, so with the slight tailor modification of the platform and unlock new markets, that’s a key concept of what we’re going to talk to you about in our market plan.
Value Driven
The other key element of this is value-driven. You’ve heard already about our three key value drivers, resiliency, predictability, and sustainability. Think of a moment of a safe, a safe that has three dials, three combinations. One dial is resiliency, one dial is predictability, and one dial is sustainability. It’s the magic of all three of these that create a unique combination that unlocks that safe to the gold or the value.
Every customer has their own unique combination, every market, every segment, every geography, and that is what we will be really good at doing, is knowing exactly how to unlock the right, most profitable markets, key consideration.
Expand with Partners
Third, we will expand with partners. Greg said it as well, partners are key. First, we unlock new markets like South Korea with SK through a partner. In less than three years, we went from a nobody to the market leader, providing utility-scale power plants all across South Korea. We also will use partners to unlock those new markets. You’ll hear from Rick about carbon capture. Carbon capture will be made possible with the power of our technology, teamed up with the right partner that can provide CO2 utilization and/or sequestration better together.
Last, how do we cover the world that can value our solutions? We do that through partners. Partners will increase our sales presence, it’ll open new channels, and it’ll give us the reach in the areas that we already earned. So partners become a key enabler in a critical ecosystem and something we will invest in.
Market Leadership
Another important consideration as you look at our plans is the fact that we are starting from such a strong position of market leadership. Worldwide, we have more than a third of the stationary power fuel cell market. In the U.S., KR said it, we have 80% of that market and we have a very similar market share in South Korea. This is our intention. This is how we will look at new markets like Europe, which Tim will talk about. We will lead, we will win.
Competitive Advantage with Technology
Second, we have such a strong, competitive advantage with our technology. We’re going to use that competitive advantage everywhere we can to drive profitable growth.
Our energy conversion platform essentially does really two things really, really well. It converts molecules or fuels into electrons, and it takes electrons, clean electrons, and converts it into clean hydrogen molecules. No one else can bridge the gap between electrons and molecules in both directions the way Bloom can in the most efficient way possible. As we look at that energy transition, that is a key requirement. So much of our energy needs are right now powered by dirty fuels. This ability to think about that hyper-interchange between electrons and molecules becomes extraordinarily important, and again, no one does it better than us.
Last, there’s inherent advantages in our business and what we can provide to customers. As we look to larger industrial customers and we’re behind their fence, they don’t need manpower to manage their systems. There is no downtime to factor in. We’re at five-nines availability. For larger, critical customers and key infrastructure, these benefits matter.
And last, future-forward fuel flexibility. For customers that are hesitant about investing in a 15-year natural gas asset, they’re not doing that with Bloom. We may start with natural gas, but immediately, our entire fleet is already converted to responsibly sourced gas or low-leak methane gas. Second, they can transition to a cleaner fuel as the business drives them as affordable fuels become available. They can blend their fuels, and they can do it now or they can do it tomorrow. Customers will not have stranded assets.
These are just some of the core inherent competitive advantages that not only are strong and increasing with what’s going on in the world around us. They’re really, really defensible. It’s a very sustained competitive advantage. It’s the 20 years of maturing and building down and cost down and building this amazing team that is poising us for the growth for tomorrow, and it’s incredibly exciting for all of us.
Three Key Business Segments
Power Generation
We have organized our business into three key business segments. I talked about the simplicity of what we do. Our first business is power generation, molecules into electrons. In this business, we provide microgrids, we provide primary power, we provide waste-to-energy solutions, which I’ll talk about in a moment, and we provide utility-scale power. That’s what we have in South Korea, many power plants deployed on power towers, as you would’ve seen over at the technology showcase.
This is a monster market. It’s over a trillion-dollar market, and when we put our plans together, we’re going after a very small sliver of that market, and we’re going to do it in a way that we are very selective to best utilize our resource and our partner resources.
Hydrogen Carbon Capture
Our next business hydrogen carbon capture. These are our net-zero businesses now. We have extraordinary competitive advantage to exploit both in our high-efficient electrolyzer, as well as in our carbon capture capability with partners. No one can really beat us on either of those fronts when you look at the sheer economics, and we are at the ground floor as the world starts adopting these net-zero technologies. We are right there.
Marine
Last, our Marine business. This is a business-driven by the IMO or International Maritime Organization ambitious goals for decarbonization. Through partnerships like with Chantiers de l’Atlantique, we are at the forefront of the marine industry showcasing, “Here’s how you can decarbonize. Here’s the way.” As Tim will tell you, it’s not the fastest-moving industry, but it’s a great industry for us to help make a market.
Milestones
With that, I wanted to share a little bit of going back in time. Greg mentioned our last analyst day was December 20th, 2020. I shared a roadmap, which you’re seeing here, exactly like this, no changes. In this roadmap, we just wanted to share with you a few milestones, both from a market and a product standpoint to let you know here’s how we’re going to define success, and what I want to share with you is we are well on our way.
In many of these categories, what I’m most excited about is not only have we built this extraordinarily solid plan, but we built an absolute team of rockstars, and there’s a few with us that are here today and many more that you didn’t get to see today and may have been over at the technology showcase. The only change that I would acknowledge from last year is a change in strategy in U.S., CNI or in the U.S. state approach. We’ve used to look at the market a little bit more transactionally. We said the easiest place to sell is when we’re way cheaper than the grid, so we’re going to keep unlocking those states and making life easy and sell that way, and we’ve really changed our approach.
We now have a very focused vertical sales approach. We have teams that are leading semiconductors, teams that lead healthcare, teams that are leading vets manufacturing, teams that would lead data centers. We have a team leading oil and gas. The reason for this is value selling. Greg mentioned it. We are moving from a transactional environment to value.
You need to move to value selling when we’re selling the three combinations of resiliency, sustainability, and predictability. You need to be able to speak with everyone at a more executive level, and we need to land and expand, and you land and expand by being customer intimate and knowing your customer. The people in Billy Brooks organization that’s with us today, their job is to know that customer, know their vertical, build a strong customer base, and build upon that, and cultivate that over time. Partners will augment what they do, and that’s how we’ll win. Naturally, we’ll go into more states.
In our waste-to-energy segment, which I’ll talk about next, we are naturally being pulled into different states. Many of our customers in the segments that I just referenced, they’re multi-jurisdictional, so they will naturally have us go through the whole portfolio. If you hear nothing else, we’re very vertically-focused, we’re going after the cream of the crop, we’re relying on partners, and we’re value selling.
A Deeper Look at Power Generation
Okay, let’s take a look and look at power generation a little bit deeper, again, this monster trillion-dollar market. You heard a little bit about how we’re going after it in the United States. We see very much replicating that similar playbook in Europe, which Tim will talk about.
This market is absolutely driven by major tailwinds in electrification, increasing capacity, and the need for predictability. We’re estimating that in the state of New York, if you look at the filings that are already filed and will file, New York City or state of New York customers will be paying over 25 cents a kilowatt-hour by 2031. Electricity rates are going to far outpace any form of natural gas increases that Greg talked about. One of the more immediate benefits that’s really driving our business that’s worth my spending a little bit of time is this time-to-power concept, which is in our predictability category.
We have customers, and I have one case study that already had a deployment with us in the state of California. They wanted to expand their operation, their business was dependent upon it, and they came to Bloom because their utility wasn’t able to deliver power in any reasonable sort of time. It would’ve been over two years, so by working with Bloom, from the moment we had that order, we converted that to power on in nine months, and it was a significant size installation. This is happening to us every day right now. There’s a lot of potential U.S. increase in manufacturing if you look at what’s going on in policy.
The reality is there’s a big business boom of a lot of capacity and places in the world and the country that aren’t as obvious, so it’s forcing us to really think about our business model a little bit differently. How can we be really quick to adapt and meet the market needs of customers that need power now, this time to power, number one. Number two, how can we ensure our systems are super easy to just drop in? If you’ve missed it, Joe Tavi was talking about our packaged energy servers. Essentially, how do we bundle our servers with as much of the piping and the wiring as possible so you literally forklift it in, drop it in, hook it up and go? Of course, nothing’s quite that easy, but essentially, you get the idea.
It limits the permitting needs that are required when you’re not pouring concrete and allows us to really accelerate the time to power. Again, a big business driver, and it’s just important to note that with our value proposition at any moment in time, the wins of policy or the needs of the market are poising us to be really responsive, and that’s the resiliency inside Bloom that we’re driving and that we’re leading so that this factory can meet the needs of all of our customers.
A Deeper Look at Waste-to-Energy
With that, I will also turn to one more segment of power generation before we leave this market, and it’s waste-to-energy. Chuck Moesta, who’s not here today, heads this business for us. He has over 30 years of experience in environmental and wastewater markets.
He’s actually at the Biogas America Show, and I hope he’s booking some orders. We’ll check in later, but in this business, it’s really unlocking a selling motion into the municipals, into landfills, wastewaters. If you’ve seen a recent announcement with Fayetteville Public Works, this is an interesting one. They’re actually taking swine gas along with landfill, along with wastewater in North Carolina, by the way, it’s Fayetteville, North Carolina, and creating resilient electricity.
This kills more than a few birds with one stone. They meet a regulatory constraint of flaring biomethane, so they eliminate that need. They’re also able then to provide critical electricity in the city that they need it, so for them, it’s a great way to eliminate methane in the environment, not flare the methane as well, and provide resilient electricity. What we love about this is it’s a very replicable solution, and one wastewater organization or one landfill organization or one municipal, they follow what each other do for best practices, so it’s our job to continue to make each one of these kinds of customers a showcase, and where one is, many will follow.
The other side of waste-to-energy is in renewable fuels. Think sustainable air-fuel or renewable natural gas. We all know there’s a shortage of these renewable fuels in many markets, and certainly in the U.S.. Developers are scrambling to put new plants together. It’s a very energy-intensive process, and the name of the game for a renewable fuel is its carbon intensity. On average, we have 18% less emissions than on average anywhere on the grid.
By our being able to use our servers in those greenfield developments, we lower the carbon intensity score. They have a more competitive product, so we’re working with developers across the country, and again, there is no state-based constraint on these kinds of developments, so we’re very excited about that.
Conclusion
As I leave this power generation topic, I just want to leave you with a few points. It’s a trillion-dollar market. There are way more tailwinds than there are headwinds in the future. We have an opportunity to take our competitive advantage and a very smart market strategy and more than exploit the market, and again, we’re really excited about it. With that, I will leave you. Thank you.