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Bloom Energy is helping Partners HealthCare, founded by Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to boost its readiness for future winter storms with new on-site, fuel cell-based electric power systems.
Massachusetts suffered more than 100 outages to its electric power grid in 2017, lasting 55 hours in total, according to the Eaton Blackout Tracker. In excess of 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 to storms, floods and other outages, Partners made the decision to continue increasing reliability at its facilities’ by deploying 4.1 megawatts of fuel cell-based energy systems from Bloom Energy at locations throughout Massachusetts.
Bloom Energy Servers deliver highly-reliable, constant electric power. The Servers can be configured to enable critical operations to continue even if the electrical grid fails in the event of a storm or an accidental outage. They will provide cheaper electricity 24 hours per day, seven days per week, thereby more than paying for themselves, helping Partners keep its electricity cost low and predictable over a 15-year period.
Unlike traditional sources of on-site power generation, Bloom Energy Servers generate electricity without combustion, and therefore without sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide or particulate emissions that cause smog and respiratory diseases. Removing these pollutants from the air helps underpin Partners’ commitment to improving the health and wellbeing of its local community.
The Bloom systems will also reduce CO2 emissions by more than 20% relative to the average for local grid power. The systems use virtually no water in normal operation. By comparison, fossil-based power plants consume 150 million gallons of water more than Bloom Energy Servers to produce one megawatt for a year.
Partners intends to deploy the new systems at its corporate headquarters in Somerville where more than 4,500 employees from administrative departments are based. They will also be deployed at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, North Shore Medical Center, and at its 65,000 square foot Marlborough data center. Bloom Energy Servers proved a good fit for Partners’ urban and space-constrained locations, as they are 125 times more space-efficient than solar panels per kilowatt generated.
“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.”
