OREANDA-NEWS.  June 14, 2013. Verizon announced an agreement to install Bloom Energy fuel cell systems at three of its California-based locations: two call-switching centers in Los Angeles and San Francisco and a data center in San Jose.  Bloom Energy’s solid oxide fuel cells are expected to generate more than 16 million kilowatt hours of clean electricity for Verizon in the Golden State each year.

The installation is part of Verizon’s plan to invest \\$100 million in a solar and fuel-cell energy project that will help power 19 of the company’s facilities in California and six other states across the country: Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and North Carolina.  When completed next year, the project will enable Verizon to generate more than 90 million kilowatt hours of its own green energy annually.  The project will also eliminate more than 15,000 metric tons of CO2 annually, which is equivalent to the CO2 emissions from more than 1.6 million gallons of gasoline consumed.

“Bloom is aligned with Verizon in the belief that the world’s biggest challenges deserve bigger solutions,” said Matt Ross, chief marketing officer, Bloom Energy.  “At Bloom we are excited to be helping Verizon meet the 21st century challenge of deploying a clean, reliable, efficient energy platform for their operations.”

Verizon has a history of adopting new technologies to revolutionize the information and communication infrastructure. The company’s distributed-generation strategy – generating power on site at the point of consumption, using advanced renewable and clean energy technologies – will accelerate Verizon’s progress toward its goal of cutting its worldwide carbon intensity by 50 percent by 2020.  Carbon intensity is a measure of the carbon emissions the company produces for each terabyte of data flowing through its networks.

“The ability to power our facilities and operations with our own on-site alternative energy sources helps Verizon meet our long-term sustainability goals, while also enhancing the resiliency of our networks and reliability of our services,” said James Gowen, Verizon’s chief sustainability officer. “This is more than the right thing to do for the environment; it is also the right thing to do for our customers and our business.”