Bloom’s Mission Critical Man Gross Joins Active Power Board update from February 2015

Peter Gross, who runs the mission critical business of fuel-cell maker Bloom Energy, has taken a seat on the board of Active Power, an electrical infrastructure vendor that does a lot of business in the data center space.

Gross is a well-known figure in the data center industry. He was a co-founder and CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a data center design and operations company acquired by HP in 2008. Following the acquisition, Gross worked as a managing partner at HP’s Carbon, Power, and Critical Facilities unit.

He joined Bloom Energy, one of the leading fuel-cell vendors, in 2012 to kick off and head the company’s mission critical systems practice. Since then, the company has closed numerous deals with high-profile companies who deployed its fuel cells to power their data centers.

Those projects include Apple’s massive North Carolina data center, where Bloom Energy Servers work in concert with photovoltaic panels to power the facility, and eBay’s data center in Utah, powered entirely by Bloom fuel cells, using the electrical grid as backup. Among smaller data center deployments is a CenturyLink data center in California.

Austin-based Active Power is known in the data center industry for its flywheel UPS systems and for its containerized electrical infrastructure solutions. In a statement, Gross said he was “thrilled” to join Active Power, which had “elegant” flywheel-based products, a compelling value proposition, and a growing customer base.

Active Power President and CEO Mark Ascolese said Gross was a respected mission critical industry leader who led design and construction of facilities around the world for some of its largest companies. “He is intimately familiar with what our customers' value in terms of power system design and electrical infrastructure,” Ascolese said in a statement.