Dive Brief:

• Fuel cell maker Bloom Energy has filed an initial public offering, according to a Wall Street Journal report last week.

• The IPO was filed under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which allows companies with less than $1 billion in revenue to register privately with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Financial details of the filing were not provided.

• The filing underscores Bloom’s ambitions and shortcomings. The company, which was valued at $2.1 billion in 2011, had said in 2012 that it had planned to go public in 2014.

Dive Insight:

Bloom Energy dominates the fuel cell sector, but that hasn’t made life easy for the much-hyped company. 

The company has managed to attract funding and investment from several prominent and large investors, such as an equity stake from Exelon and backing from Goldman Sachs and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Fuel cells work well as distributed resources and have relatively low emissions but in some applications, such as microgrids, they compete with lower emission resources such as batteries and solar panels.

Bloom’s aggressive bidding won it early gains in California’s Self Generation Incentive Program, but fuel cells have lost ground in that process due to subsequent revisions of the program. Bloom currently has fuel cells at 300 locations, accounting for more than 200 MW of capacity, Fortune reports, largely in California.

Greentech Media has reported that the structure of some Bloom’s notes has suggested that the timing of the IPO coincides with upcoming debt obligations. And the quiet IPO filing under the JOBS act is sometimes used to attract attention for an acquisition, according to Fortune.