Bloom Energy Corporation

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for attending Bloom Energy's Q1 2023 earnings conference call. My name is Frances, and I'll be the moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. Once you ask a question, please mute your line. If you have a follow-up question, please queue up again. I will now pass the conference over to your host, Ed Vallejo, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Thank you and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us for Bloom Energy's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. To supplement this conference call, we furnished our first quarter 2023 earnings press release with the SEC on Form 8K and have posted it along with supplemental financial information that we will reference throughout this call to our investor relations website. During this conference call, both in our prepared remarks and in answers to your questions, we may make forward-looking statements that represent our expectations regarding future events and our future financial performance. These include statements about the company's business results, products, new markets, strategy, financial position, liquidity, and full year outlook for 2023. These statements are predictions based upon our expectations estimates, and assumptions. However, as these statements deal with future events, they are subject to numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties as discussed in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, including our most recently filed forms 10-K and 10-Q. We assume no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements made on today's call. During this call and in our first quarter 2023 earnings press release, we refer to GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. The non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with the U.S. generally accepted accounting principles and are in addition to and not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between the GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our first quarter 2023 earnings press release available on our investor relations website. Joining me on the call today are KR Schroeder, Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, and Greg Cameron, our President and Chief Financial Officer. KR will begin with an overview of our business, then Greg will review the operating and financial highlights of the quarter, as well as the outlook for the year. And after our prepared remarks, we will have time to take your questions. With that, I will now turn the call over to KR.

Good day, everyone. Bloom Energy is off to a very strong start in 2023. Our company is operating well and delivering on our goals. We are making great strides in developing products that serve the needs of our customers today. We'll position them well for the future and, importantly, create revenue growth for us. On May 23rd, we will be getting together in New York for our investor day and you will hear more about our strategy and roadmap then. For today, let me provide you with six examples of how in addition to executing on our plans, we are opportunistically investing in products that have the potential to enable revenue growth and improve margin. We had record product and service revenue in fourth quarter of 2022. On the back of that strong year-end finish, we achieved record revenue for product this quarter. We did this because we made the investments to expand factory capacity and executed on bringing that capacity online without any delay. In our call last quarter, we talked about our renewed commitment and increased investment in our cost down program. an enabler for both growth and profitability. We were confident in making those investments because we knew that we would deliver strong returns. I'm happy to report that we have started reaping the benefits of this program as evidenced in our first quarter results. We are on track and expect to see a double digit product cost down this year. We told you about our investments in top line growth and focus on international growth to open up new markets. In Q4 of last year, we signed a 10 megawatt order in Taiwan. In Q1, we manufactured and shipped those products. The Bloom servers will be installed and delivering clean, reliable power in the coming months to our Taiwanese customer. We take great pride in not only the speed with which we can execute, but also the urgency with which we can meet the critical needs of our customer. During our last earnings call, we told you about releasing a new combined heat and power, or CHP, product with a total efficiency of 85%. We now have 20 megawatts of orders for CHP energy servers, 10 each from Italy and Belgium. we will start shipping CHP-enabled energy servers in the second half of this year. This is a clear example of the ease with which we can adapt our platform technology and tweak our servers to meet specific customer needs. Let me now switch to hydrogen and our high-efficiency electrolyzers for the fifth example. We have reported in the past about our 100 kilowatt electrolyzer innovation project at the Department of Energy's Idaho National Lab using a simulation of steam and electric inputs from a nuclear power plant. The DOE lab has to date completed over 4500 hours of full load operations with the bloom electrolyzer and found it to produce hydrogen more efficiently than any other process. over 25% more efficiently than low temperature electrolyzers. In addition, dynamic load testing at INL showed that the Bloom electrolyzer handled ramping down power from 100% load to 5% load in less than 10 minutes with no adverse impact. In fact, even at 5% load, our electrolyzer operated at an efficiency that was equal to or better than low temperature PEM and alkaline electrolyzers operating at 100% load. INL will present these results at the DOE annual meeting in Washington, DC on June 7. And of course, I'm super excited to share with you a major milestone we achieved in hydrogen production by standing up the world's largest solid oxide electrolyzer demonstration that's also the world's most efficient commercial scale electrolyzer in operation. By investing and demonstrating this electrolyzer deployment, we are able to showcase the maturity, efficiency, and commercial readiness of bloom solid oxide technology for large scale clean hydrogen production. The four megawatt bloom electrolyzer is delivering the equivalent of over 2.4 metric tons per day of hydrogen output. It was built, installed, and operationalized in a span of two months to demonstrate the speed and ease of deployment. Given that large scale projects are predominantly in the planning and early design stages, this timely bloom demonstration should provide potential customers with the confidence they need to make the right technology choice rather than rely on less efficient legacy technologies. These examples illustrate how we make judicious and timely investments when we see opportunities to grow revenue and margin and then execute diligently to deliver strong returns on those investments. Let me finish now with a mega trend we are seeing globally on the time-to-power issue for commercial and industrial customers. The delays in permitting, interconnections, and bringing new capacity online, coupled with the early retirements of baseload power plants, have contributed to severe generation capacity issues. Transmission and distribution gridlock and delays in adding to T&D capacity have further severely restricted the ability of utilities to keep up with customers' growing electricity needs. Industrial expansion, onshoring, electrification of everything including transportation, digitization, and artificial intelligence are all placing significant new demand for electricity. In many places globally, customers are told to wait five to 10 years to get additional power. Such huge shortfalls of delivered electricity is unprecedented in the modern age and places utilities, customers, regulators, and policymakers in uncharted territory. I see this time to power problem growing and being an issue that will be with us for the next two decades. For data centers and factories that need additional capacity, waiting for multiple years to get power is not an option. For Bloom, this issue represents a real opportunity. Bloom Energy has a unique offering that is a perfect solution for such situations. Bloom servers can be deployed in front of the meter with the utility as a customer or behind the meter with the end user as a customer. Our solutions can be interconnected to the grid or standalone in an islanded mode to provide always on clean electricity onsite. As such, we can be deployed where transmission and distribution are lacking. Our low carbon footprint solution is virtually air pollution free, can be deployed rapidly, has proven resilience and reliability, and is future proof to accept green fuels as they become viable and available. As we march forward in this unprecedented scenario, our focus is on ensuring that the policies and regulations enable ease of deployment of our servers. We will also focus on who will be our ideal partner. Will the partners be utilities, end-use customers, or both? Will that vary from geography to geography and be different for an investor-owned utility versus a municipal utility? These questions will get answered in time, but irrespective of that, I expect this to be a big driver of growth for Bloom this decade. I will now turn it over to Greg, who will discuss our financial performance, and then we'll take your questions. Greg?