Do Bloom's Fuel Cells Work as Claimed? Data Says No

Based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, at the time of publication Hunterbrook Capital is short $BE and long a basket of comparable securities. Positions may change at any time. This article is not investment advice or any recommendation. See full disclosures below.

• Hunterbrook compiled a record of Bloom's fuel cell performance from public data spanning 15 years: government datasets across the U.S. (New York, Delaware, California) and South Korea, as well as self-reported federal filings covering 126 plants in nine U.S. states.
• Across the datasets, the fuel cells’ measured efficiency appears to fall below Bloom’s disclosed benchmarks before the five-year replacement interval the company claims. In New York, Hunterbrook calculated that all 37 systems fell below Bloom’s efficiency benchmark at a median of 20 months, with only one declining slowly enough to be on pace to stay above it for five years. In California, 105 of the 231 projects with usable fuel data recorded at least one month below the level at which a 2025 contract requires Bloom to repair or replace the system. And even on cumulative lifetime efficiency, the measure Bloom most typically uses, 44 of the 126 plants in the federal record fall below the guarantee line.
• Bloom's 95% output benchmark — a measure of how much electricity the cells actually produce against their rated capacity — was missed almost everywhere, almost always: 152 of 156 months in Delaware, 97.4% of months in California, and 22 of the last 24 months at one of Bloom's largest continuously metered Korean plants.
• The public data is reported daily or monthly, so Hunterbrook uses those intervals to track the timing and persistence of underperformance — not to determine any potential contractual breach, which may be assessed monthly, annually, or cumulatively depending on the contract.
• A part-owner of a Bloom project in New York told Hunterbrook the company paid their group a multimillion-dollar contractual penalty after failing to meet one…