Selling Through the Utility Instead of Around ItNarrow moat
Bloom Energy (BE) — moat facet
Selling to the utility converts Bloom from an insurgent into a supplier — a bigger market and a much less differentiated position.
For most of its history Bloom sold around the utility: a customer frustrated by interconnection delays bought generation and installed it behind the meter. The AEP agreement examined in the Future Bets pages inverts that — the utility itself becomes the buyer, deploying Bloom equipment as part of its own generation fleet.
As a customer relationship this is a different animal entirely. A utility buys on a regulated planning cycle, evaluates against a portfolio of alternatives on levelised cost, and has procurement processes designed to extract price. It also has a balance sheet, a credit rating and a regulator, which makes it a far better counterparty than most of Bloom's existing customers and a far tougher negotiator.
The strategic significance is that it converts Bloom from an insurgent selling against the grid into a supplier to it — a much larger addressable market and a much less differentiated position, since inside a utility's procurement process an Energy Server competes with turbines, batteries and transmission on cost per megawatt-hour rather than on speed.
Watch what share of orders comes through utilities rather than end users1. It is the clearest measure of whether Bloom is becoming an equipment supplier to the power industry — a bigger business, valued differently from the one the current multiple assumes.
The utility channel is genuinely new and materially larger than the direct one. It converts Bloom into a supplier to the power industry rather than an insurgent selling around it — more addressable megawatts, procurement processes designed to extract price, and competition against turbines and batteries on levelised cost rather than on speed.
Large buyers, utilities among them, are paying ahead; deposits tripling in six months is commitment, and a fall would be the first sign of cancellations.
- ReportedBloom's disclosed customers include financiers and channel partners rather than only end users of the power.Bloom Energy Form 10-K, FY2025 (Concentration of Risk — Customer Risk) — during the year ended December 31, 2025, revenue from three customers and distributors, the first of which is a related party, accounted for approximately 43%, 13% and 12% of total revenue; the same three represented approximately 41%, 17% and 15% of accounts receivable, against 28%, 28% and 20% a year earlier, with no material credit losses experienced to date; during 2024 three customers, the first a related party, represented approximately 23%, 16% and 14% of total revenue, and during 2023 two customers, the first a related party, accounted for approximately 37% and 26%; for concentration purposes a 'customer' is the contractual counterparty to which Bloom sells and fulfils installation, frequently a financier or strategic partner that owns the Energy Server and uses it to produce power for an end customer; direct purchase including third-party PPAs and international channels was 98% of revenue in 2025 against 95% in 2024, with managed services 2% and 5%; accounts receivable and contract assets rose $69.3 million on the timing of milestone billings and customer acceptance, particularly for several large late-year deployments — FY2025 (ended December 31, 2025) · publ. February 9, 2026 · source ↗