Delaware is celebrating the return of manufacturing to the former Newark Chrysler Plant.
Governor Markell (D-Delaware) and UD President Patrick Harker joined Bloom Energy officials and employees as they officially opened Bloom’s new manufacturing plant in Newark.
The 200,000 square foot Newark facility is Bloom’s first manufacturing facility on the East Coast and is the first tenant of University of Delaware’s Science, Technology, and Advanced Research or STAR campus. It produces the company's energy servers or “Bloom Boxes,” which generate electricity from a solid oxide fuel cell using natural gas.
Markell says the deal to bring Bloom to the First State is a critical piece to carrying Delaware’s manufacturing industry into the 21st century.
“We had a good partnership and we did make certain commitments to Bloom and Bloom made certain commitments to us. But all of that would have been for naught if Bloom was not confident that it would be able to attract great employees.”
Bloom currently employs 80 people at the plant and plans to hire over 100 more in the next few months. The new jobs include welders, production control technicians and electronic engineers. State officials estimate Bloom will eventually create 1,500 direct and indirect jobs, exceeding the 1,100 jobs held at the Chrysler plant when it closed in 2008.
Many high profile companies such as Google, eBay, and Wal-mart are already Bloom customers along with Delmarva Power locally.
J.P. Morgan Chase’s Managing Director of Global Real Estate Bill McHenry announced Tuesday that J.P. Morgan Chase is Bloom’s newest customer.
“We own 3 of the largest data centers in the U.S. We operate them here in Delaware. We are going to enter into a partnership to with Bloom Energy to do an installation here in Delaware," said McHenry. "We’re doing that because we have every faith in the technology and we have every faith in the people that are building the technology.”