Good expert call on Bloom Energy $BE with a former VP at Plug Power - pretty bullish Hyperscalers did not evaluate Bloom against gas turbines and select Bloom. They selected turbines, discovered they could not get them, and Bloom was the alternative that checked enough boxes. Gas turbines from Mitsubishi, GE Vernova, Siemens and Hitachi remain the incumbent workhorse, but his read is that if the order is not already placed, you are not energizing before 2030. Reciprocating engines sit in the same position: Caterpillar, Jenbacher, Generac, Wärtsilä, all effectively sold out. Transformers, switchgear and substation equipment carry 60 month lead times. What Bloom offered was availability plus modularity. A claimed 90 day time to power on smaller blocks, which he believes is credible at modest scale and unlikely at large scale, plus a build-as-you-go capital profile. Turbines want a single large plant. Behind-the-meter deployment wants building blocks you can add to as long as you have secured the land and the gas tap. > Why the Turbine OEMs Will Not Simply Close the Window Turbine and engine OEMs are deliberately not expanding capacity. They suspect the order book is double and triple booked, and they fear being left with stranded factory capacity when projects fail to reach FID. His analogy is the semiconductor capacity cycle, where consecutive quarters of poor absorption caused structural damage. Their posture, as he characterizes the consensus from trade shows and industry conversation: you cannot buy it from me, you cannot buy it from my competitor, you will wait. If that discipline holds, Bloom's window is measured in years rather than quarters, which is materially longer than the market appears to assume. Bloom's product is closer to a solid state electrochemical device than a precision machined turbine, drawing on an entirely separate supply chain that can be ramped faster. > Levelized Cost: A Premium, But Not a Prohibitive One He built his own LCOE model rather than relying on published work, which he found rested on unexamined assumptions. His output: Gas turbine: roughly 4.5 to 7 cents per kWh Bloom: just over 7 cents unsubsidized, below that with federal incentives Reciprocating gas engine: roughly 8 to 10 cents Diesel: high teens to mid 20s The critical observation is that this is not a 3x premium for speed. That pattern collapses the moment supply normalizes, because buyers drop the expensive option as soon as the cheap one is obtainable. A single digit cent premium does not collapse, because the hyperscaler business case still clears at that price. The offset to Bloom's higher capital cost is efficiency: 60 to 65 percent, against roughly 55 percent for a gas turbine and roughly 45 percent for a reciprocating engine. Bring capex down and the LCOE gap narrows or inverts. > Where Bloom Ranks Today Asked to stack rank for a hyperscaler buyer, he puts Bloom third, behind turbines and engines, purely on track record rather than physics. His analogy: you know exactly what you get from a Caterpillar engine or a GE Vernova turbine the way a Toyota buyer knows what he is getting. No buyer has that reflex for a Bloom box yet. The open questions the buying community has not resolved: real world availability, whether maintenance cadence matches or beats turbine schedules, and the roughly 10 year stack replacement cycle. On that last point he offers a mild positive read-across, noting that in the PEM industry stack rebuild intervals came in longer than originally modeled. The path to second or first place requires two things running together: two to four years of collective industry uptime data, and capex reduction. Oracle, Nebius, Brookfield and AEP are the proof points that will settle it. On whether they will work, he says "the jury is still out," while noting early evidence reads favorably. > Non-Combustion as an Unpriced Permitting Asset The Bloom box does not combust natural gas. It runs an electrochemical reaction. The consequences stack up in a specific and useful way: NOx, SOx and particulate emissions at or very near zero, leaving local air quality unaffected Roughly 65 dBA at three feet, which he compares to a lawnmower at fifty feet, meaning nearby highway noise dominates Zero net water consumption, with startup water recycled as steam Materially easier local permitting Each of those neutralizes a specific community objection, and the pushback is accelerating. New York State's one year moratorium is the marker he points to, alongside complaints in other jurisdictions about power draw, water use and air quality. His honest caveat: to date these attributes have played essentially zero role in purchase decisions. Availability and cost drove everything, and he assumes very little of Bloom's performance so far reflects environmental considerations. If pushback becomes electoral, and he says he is watching whether candidates start running on it, then zero emission on-site generation stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the only permittable option across large parts of the country. He expects this to bite first at the 20, 50 and 100 MW sites going into actual neighborhoods rather than at the West Texas mega-campuses. > Market Share Trajectory Data center demand forecasts he is working from run 40 to 60 GW per year. Bloom's share today sits in single digits. His trajectory: Five years: 15 to 18 percent Ten years: 25 to 28 percent Upside case, if emissions constraints become binding in enough jurisdictions: 40 to 50 percent The constraint that drives the upside case is geographic. Not everyone can replicate what Microsoft and Chevron are doing on the West Texas gas fields. Once data centers have to disperse into places that care about permitting, the zero emissions conversation becomes unavoidable. > The Bear Case He Actually Respects Execution, not demand. He flags this above everything else. Bloom has roughly 1.5 GW deployed against a backlog he characterizes as roughly 20 GW. On Sridhar's own description of the factories, that a visitor will see build activity and factory expansion activity running simultaneously, the expert's reaction is blunt. To an industrial engineer, expanding while still trying to build is a very risky proposition. Doable, but it is the precise point at which fast-scaling companies break, and he notes this is the classic failure mode for startups that find themselves in this position. Q1 was clean. The Q2 print, due around the 28th, is the next checkpoint on whether execution is holding. The secondary risks are demand-side and none of Bloom's own making: hyperscale capex circularity, bubble risk, and whether community pushback genuinely slows the build or simply reroutes it to Texas. > Scandium: Directionally Fair, Materially Overblown On the short thesis that Bloom cannot secure enough scandium, he says the report has some points but overstates them. His rebuttal runs on three tracks. Cost sensitivity. Scandium is a dopant in the zirconium ceramic electrolyte, used at very low concentration, valued because it tolerates the 800 to 900 degree operating temperature. Even if it were 2 percent of materials cost, which he considers extraordinarily high for a dopant, a doubling in price takes it to 4 percent. Bloom likely has the pricing power to pass that through, and a half point efficiency gain would offset it in LCOE terms. His conclusion: more price risk than supply risk over the next couple of years. Supply structure. Scandium is almost never mined primarily. It sits in the tailings of titanium, cobalt, aluminum, iron and lithium operations and is generally left behind. The binding constraint is processing capability, not geological availability, and that processing capacity is being built with national security tailwinds behind it. Scandium-aluminum alloys matter for 3D printing, fighter aircraft skins and missiles, which places it squarely in the critical minerals policy agenda. Company mitigations. Bloom has spent 20 years reducing scandium loading per gigawatt. He located a patent application substituting cerium and yttrium, both more available, and Bloom holds IP on recovering scandium from mine tailings. He reads Bloom's willingness to address the topic directly, rather than deflect, as evidence they take it seriously rather than evidence of vulnerability. Non-Chinese supply exists: he points to Sumitomo's Philippines cobalt operation, which publicly identifies Bloom as a customer. Bloom does not disclose suppliers, and the short report's supply map traces its merchants back toward China. > The Competitive Set FuelCell Energy. Molten carbonate rather than solid oxide, but functionally similar: high temperature, slow start, direct natural gas, suited to stationary baseload. Why they never scaled into this comes down to inertia and strategic drift. Their historical focus was a trigeneration box producing hydrogen, power and heat, deployed for applications like Toyota Mirai fueling at the Port of LA. When hyperscale demand arrived they had nothing to show. His read on the pivot: they saw the multiple Bloom trades at and asked why not us. Ceres Power. UK based, probably second globally in solid oxide IP. Pure licensing model, which means most licensees stay invisible. The disclosed one is Weichai, moving from small C&I units up to hyperscale scale. He doubts Weichai exports into the US successfully but expects success in China. Microturbines and aeroderivatives. TurboCell in the BorgWarner orbit, plus aero engine derivatives repurposed as stationary generators. Everything gets a look right now because buyers are desperate for speed to power. Stealth entrants. He assumes several exist that have not been announced, precisely because Ceres-style licensing deals do not get publicized. Asked whether Bloom owns the US market today, his answer: "Pretty much now they do." > Why Hydrogen Never Worked, and the Read-Through to Plug Useful because he lived it from the inside. Delivered liquid hydrogen bottoms out near $8 per kilogram. Run that through the efficiency stack and fuel cost alone lands around 54 cents per kWh, before equipment, labor, warranty or service. He stopped modeling at that point. Even at a hypothetical $4 per kilogram you land near 25 cents, still a non-starter against a 7 cent Bloom box. Plug built a 3 MW unit at its Latham campus that passed Microsoft's full backup generator protocol, the first non-diesel, non-gas system ever to do so. Microsoft publicized it as a breakthrough and then walked away inside six months once the cost picture clarified. Plug's INVISTA facility was outfitted to build stationary modules for the data center market and effectively none of it shipped. Three sites total, including Calistoga in PG&E territory for public safety shutoff backup, and an EV charging site that existed only because a grid connection was unavailable. Both are showpieces that draw tours. Neither is repeatable. source: Tegus

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Hussie🌴Pass Has Done It Again! Today's Release - BTS - CHERRY BLOSSOM GETS POUNDED INTO FULL BLOOM! - Features @BrianOmally @djsakuraaa Doing All Kinds Of Perverted Stuff 😲 Wanna See? 👀 🔗

Good call on Bloom Energy $BE with a director on Crusoe's energy team TLDR: Constructive on $BE through the speed-to-power window: everything they can build gets sold, the regulatory-constraint use case is expanding, and the edge market is a genuine second leg. The bear case is not execution risk, it is terminal value—an unsubsidized, unconstrained power market where Bloom's cost curve has not moved enough. Key insights: Behind-the-meter adoption is not a technology preference, it is a hedge against binary regulatory risk. Moratoriums, temporary pauses and Governor Abbott's ERCOT announcements do not degrade a project's economics—they kill it outright, and approved power becomes worthless if a data center moratorium lands on top of it. He has seen two separate tenants elect to proceed with behind-the-meter projects alongside their grid portfolio, explicitly as diversification against that risk. Crusoe deliberately sites behind-the-meter gas away from rural communities to strip out both grid-connected regulatory exposure and community sentiment risk. Texas is the tell. It has historically been the easiest place in the US to get grid power because ERCOT is deregulated—no capacity market booking, no requirement to point specific generation at a specific load, with scarcity pricing left to incentivize the build-out. The fact that delays and regulatory uncertainty are showing up there is what has shifted tenant behavior. Working from a 100 GW / five-year data center demand frame, which he treats as aggressive but attainable: Six months ago: roughly 70 GW served by grid, assuming turbine production picks up, no fuel constraints, and several other unlocks. Some observers penciled 10-20 GW of SMR by end of period. Today: near-term grid share compresses to perhaps 50-60 GW, with the forward split moving closer to 50/50. Then it reverts. Once ratepayer protection is formalized, the grid reasserts as the cheapest and most reliable long-term supply. The mechanism for reversion is the Arizona construct APS has pushed—growth pays for growth, where all incremental upgrade costs are borne by the data center operator. He expects that to be cemented and formalized across every market, and expects it to take six to twelve months before politicians stop feeling their seats are threatened. The Bloom Bull Case He does not dispute near-term demand at all. "as much reliable Bloom capacity or solid oxide fuel cell capacity that can come online, will be deployed." If US deployable manufacturing produces 2-8 GW over the next two years, it gets absorbed. The premium is not a problem for buyers whose binding constraint is capacity. He also believes the product works. Hundreds of megawatts is deliverable, the systems are reliable, downtime is low because units are swappable, and the architecture is fully modular. The Bear Case Is About Price - "I don't see how they compete on price." Ten years out, in an unconstrained power market, he does not believe Bloom is competitive. He specifically does not believe the roughly 10% annual cost-down, on the grounds that the technology is structurally hard to make cheaper. He also flags a cost item he thinks the market underweights: the full system swap over a ten-year cycle, which makes ongoing O&M more expensive than a gas gen equivalent. Initial capex is the wrong lens; actual LCOE is critical to assess. He extends this into a coherent explanation of Bloom's own behavior. On the question of why they have not simply built the next facility if demand is as strong as claimed — his answer is not that they are sandbagging. He thinks they are building as fast as they can, and that the constraint is the supply chain, not the building. Solid oxide is an extremely small US market. You can put up a structure; scaling the full assembly chain behind it on the same timeline is the harder problem, unless more of it moves offshore. Crusoe Has Zero Bloom Projects Today - "Today, actually, we don't have any projects that are relying on Bloom fuel cells." The strategic rationale for staying at arm's length: "We've been a follower in this instance... we will accept it once the utility does." Buying 500 MW of Bloom directly means absorbing the regulatory risk that utilities may not accept solid oxide as high-rated ELCC capacity. Let the utility carry that. Turbines, recips, aeros and engines are all accepted technologies with known extreme-weather behavior and established effective load carrying capacity ratings. Solar, wind and battery now have them too. Solid oxide does not, because utilities have not yet observed large-scale fuel cell fleets through heat events and cold snaps. AEP has gotten comfortable off the back of the roughly 80 MW deployment plus smaller installations and Bloom's published test results. That is the template, and it is why the next few hundred megawatts of live operating hours matter far more than any order announcement. Where Bloom Actually Wins His model is not that Bloom wins on merit in a fair fight. It is that Bloom is the path of least resistance when a specific constraint blocks a project that already has hundreds of millions of development dollars sunk into it. If the binding constraint is price, Bloom loses. If it is speed to power, Bloom sometimes wins. If it is emissions, air permitting, noise or a regulatory restriction someone failed to plan for, Bloom wins. He reads the Nebius Vineland switch from gas gensets to solid oxide exactly this way — anti-genset pushback threatening a contract worth billions, with an obvious substitution available. He expects more of that, in lumpy project-specific chunks rather than as a smooth share gain. He also identifies the next leg of NIMBY-ism, which he thinks is underpriced: if communities dislike data centers, they dislike new gas generators considerably more. A fuel cell is lower emissions, quieter and a different class of asset. He calls it artful. That is a real, non-obvious tailwind. The Edge and Inference Market Is the Bigger Prize Crusoe is planning heavily for 10-50 MW modular builds, which he sizes at 20-40 GW over five years and would anchor at 20 GW in isolation. Amazon, NVIDIA, Tesla and xAI are all chasing the same edge market. "Bloom will leapfrog any gas combustion." In metro locations you cannot air-permit gas gen at all — this is a hard prohibition, not a noise preference. But he immediately caps the enthusiasm: much of that edge capacity is low-hanging fruit, converted Bitcoin sites at 5-18 MW with existing grid interconnects. "Grid power will always beat it." Bloom is the answer for incremental capacity and backup, not the base case. This is why he holds solid oxide at roughly 10 GW of the 100 GW mix, against 60-70% backstopped by combustion gas. He validates the native DC output argument, but for a better reason than efficiency. Fewer conversion losses lower the price, yes. The larger point is that it removes dependence on transformers and switchgear — equipment that is not only expensive but carries lead times that are themselves the binding constraint. A 345 kV breaker is two years out. Engineering around that bottleneck is precisely the kind of scenario where a project with sunk capital selects Bloom. What Changes His Mind He names two variables explicitly. Power price curves — if Bloom's costs do not fall, or if turbine pricing keeps rising, the relative position shifts and Bloom is in the money reasonably soon. And political sentiment, which he calls a big unknown and which he thinks is the more likely driver of fuel cell share than any technical milestone. Notably, a successful 200 MW deployment alone does not change his view. He already believes they can do it. source: Tegus

#NanchangMorningNews# On July 28, construction of Toushupu Park in Nanchang advanced steadily. The park’s landscaping work entered its final phase. Continuous stretches of flowers were in full bloom, with colorful flower fields set against urban buildings. Upon completion and official opening, the park will provide the city with a new waterfront ecological leisure space. 7月28日，南昌投书浦公园建设有序推进。目前，园区绿化工程进入收尾阶段，连片花海竞相绽放，缤纷花田与城市楼宇交相辉映。公园建成投用后，将为城市新增一处滨水生态休闲空间。

$BE's 40% faster installs got the headlines, while the real story is the deployment ceiling it removes. (Save this) Bloom announced Power Connect, which moves the wiring & testing off the construction site and into its factories, so modules arrive close to plug and play. Historically about 60% of the total installation cost was site construction requiring multiple specialized trades. That works fine for a 1 MW project. It does not work anymore in an AI world where Bloom is installing hundreds of MWs (see image below). You cannot scale skilled electricians that easily, so field labor becomes the constraint on deployment. Power Connect moves that constraint into Bloom's own factory, where it controls the process. Three things improve: Speed, which is the entire Bloom value proposition since it competes on time-to-power not price. Scalability, because a standardized factory process replicates across hundreds of MW in a way on-site construction never could. That matters if Morgan Stanley is anywhere close with its 5-8 GW Bloom deployment assumption thorough 2028. Margins, since factory labor is more predictable than field construction, with fewer weather delays, local contractor variables etc. Once again, very bullish news around $BE Details like this rarely make headlines, and digging them out is the whole job inside Milk Road PRO. The price rises Aug. 26, so lock in today's rate for life before then:

Lesser Fullness of Grain (小满 · 8th Solar Term) A Message from the Half-Full Grain · Just the Time to Rise Unlike the first stirrings of early spring, unlike the blaze of high summer, Xiaoman is a restrained yet resolute growth— all things swell, yet none brim over; everything moves forward, yet still holds space for hope. One week ago, the ZhuQue-2E Y5 soared into the sky. Like everyone, we already look forward to the next ignition, the next departure, the next farther reach. But true spaceflight has never been the brilliance of a single instant— It is in each "Xiaoman" that we gather the strength to cross the vastness of space. Life is the same. Flowers not yet in full bloom, the moon not perfectly round — that is when they stir the heart most deeply. Those distant shores still out of sight, the answers still on the road, are exactly what gives meaning to setting out again. "A grain Lesser full surpasses hollow perfection" — we seek no sudden completeness, only the will to keep moving forward. For the finest state is never resting at the peak, but heading into the next ascent while still brimming with fervent hope.

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