Bloom Energy has teamed up with Bank of America Merill Lynch to launch a leasing program for Bloom's gas-powered fuel-cell energy generation systems.

Bloom has managed to attract a number of high-profile customers since its founding in 2001, including some data center operators, such as eBay, Apple, AT&T and NTT America, among others. While the vendor says otherwise, cost of its Energy Servers remains an obstacle for many potential customers.

NTT America director of facilities engineering for West Enterprise Solutions Nael Younes, told FOCUS earlier this year that the company's investment in Bloom units made business sense primarily because of the large rebate the State of California offered for deploying technologies that ease demand on the electrical grid. (See the upcoming issue of DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine for more details from our interview with Younes. Click here to sign up)

Bloom has been conscious of the cost factor. Peter Gross, VP of mission critical systems at Bloom, told us the company put effort into being able to provide customers with a variety of means to either acquire capital to buy its products, finance them or enter into power purchase agreements. (See the full video of our interview with Gross here)

The new leasing program is part of Bank of America's environmental business initiative, through which the bank set aside US$50bn. Through the initiative, the company lends money, finances equipment, provides advisory services and offers carbon-market financing to clients to help address climate change and demands on natural resources.

BofA is also a Bloom customer.

Paul Omohundro, head of global vendor finance at the banking giant, said the company supported innovation in energy and has developed financing mechanisms to ease access to clean energy for some time now. “This program extends the impact of the bank’s commitment to focusing on environmental issues and empowers other organizations to deploy clean energy on a large scale,” he said.

The first two organizations to take advantage of the program are TaylorMade-Adidas Golf Company and the Honda Center – home ice rink of the National Hockey League's Anaheim Ducks in Anaheim, California. TaylorMade-Adidas is planning to install Bloom Energy Servers at its manufacturing facility in Carlsbad, California.

Andy Stenz, facilities director at TaylorMade-Adidas, said the Bloom fuel-cell installation enhanced the firm's operations while reducing its carbon emissions. “Through the Bank of America leasing program, we can use our existing budget to support the Bloom project and realize benefits immediately,” he said.