On-Site Fuel Cells vs. the Grid: 20 Years of Reliability Data

Most people assume the grid is the dependable option and anything on site is the backup. Federal data, however, show the opposite.

In 2024 the average U.S. electricity customer spent about 11 hours without power. In fact, that was the most in the decade EIA has tracked, and nearly three times the 2014 figure. By contrast, a 2018 industry survey found gas customers lose service for about 3 minutes a year. And in our review of twenty years of federal pipeline incident reports, none described a single gas line failure cutting off a customer’s electricity.

The difference comes down to how each system reaches your building, rather than to the equipment at either end. Below we walk it link by link. Finally, we take on the one real weakness in the fuel-cell case, which is extreme cold, and show how a well-built site closes it.

Count the links between the power plant and your building

Grid power has a long trip, since it is made far from where it is used. It leaves the plant, climbs through a step-up substation, runs over high-voltage transmission lines, drops through bulk and distribution substations, rides a distribution feeder down your street, and passes through one last transformer before it reaches the meter. Notably, most of that sits on towers and poles, out in the weather, next to trees and traffic. If any one link fails and no backup path happens to exist, the building goes dark.

An on-site fuel cell, however, takes a different route. Gas comes up from the wells, moves through buried interstate pipelines, feeds a main under the street, and runs through a service line to your meter. From there, instead of crossing more wires, the fuel-cell plant turns it into electricity a few feet from the load it serves.

That is the core of the argument. With a fuel cell, the exposure near your site shrinks to two things: the service line and the plant itself. Both are on or beside your property, and therefore both can be engineered.

Notice where both chains begin. About 4 in 10 kilowatt-hours on the U.S. grid are made from natural gas (EIA). Therefore the regional gas risk a fuel cell takes on is not new. A grid customer already carries it, with the electrical layers stacked on top.

What the grid actually delivers

The grid, in fact, is getting less reliable, not more. EIA’s reliability data show the average customer went 3.9 hours without power in 2014 and 11 hours in 2024 (EIA Table 11.1). Major events, led by Hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton, caused 80% of the 2024 total (EIA).

Look at the grey part of each bar. Routine outages have held near two hours a year for a decade, while major events have grown. As a result, nearly all of the growth comes from major events such as storms, ice and wildfire.

Most interruptions start close to the customer, rather than at the power plant. Berkeley Lab found that local distribution systems cause more than 90% of interruptions and about half of all outage minutes (LBNL, 2012). Transmission and generation fail less often, but when they do, they take far more customers down at once (LBNL-47043).

It adds up. Sustained outages cost U.S. customers about $44 billion a year, and commercial businesses carry 70% of it (LBNL, 2018). Meanwhile, the outlook is not better. NERC’s latest long-term assessment puts 13 of 23 North American areas at elevated or high risk of energy shortfalls over the next decade, as peak demand is projected to grow by 224 GW (NERC).

What the gas network delivers

Gas customers, by contrast, lose service far less often. In a 2018 survey of North American utilities, the Gas Technology Institute put it at about 3 minutes a year for gas, against 156 minutes for electricity (GTI, 2018).

GTI is a gas-industry research group, so we checked its number against the federal record. Since 2010, pipeline operators have reported about 259,000 customer interruptions tied to incidents, across 73 million gas services (PHMSA). Specifically, that works out to roughly 0.0002 interruptions per customer per year. The electric figure for 2024 was 1.53.

The federal number is a floor, since PHMSA only records incidents above a damage threshold. However, even if the true rate were a hundred times higher, a gas customer would still be interrupted about seventy times less often than an electric one.

Now the question that matters most for on-site power. Operators filed 4,368 gas-origin incident reports from September 2006 to August 2026, across roughly 3 million miles of pipe. In our review of those reports, none described a customer losing electricity because of the incident. That includes major transmission ruptures such as Strasburg, Virginia in 2023. PHMSA forms are not built to track downstream power loss, however, so we treat this as our own finding rather than a federal statistic.

Single breaks rarely reach the meter because of physics. A pressurized pipeline holds hours of supply in the pipe itself, so a break upstream drains it slowly. Electricity, by contrast, has no such cushion. Supply has to match demand every second, and a tripped line removes supply instantly.

What local risk remains is mostly damage from outside the pipe, for example a backhoe or a vehicle. That is the kind of risk an owner can design against on their own property, with locate-and-mark enforcement, barriers around the meter set and a second service line.

The plant itself: why spare blocks matter

A fuel-cell plant is not one machine; rather, it is a set of independent blocks, so it can lose one without losing the site. Our Proton reference design for a 13.2 MW Atom uses six blocks of 3 MW each, five running and one spare: 18 MW installed and 15 MW firm. A block can come out for service while the factory keeps its full output, and Ion battery storage covers the fast load steps in between.

Bloom Energy reports that its fuel-cell fleet installed since 2020 has run at about 99.9% availability without redundancy. It adds that redundancy “can” bring availability close to 99.999% (Bloom 10-K). That second figure, about five minutes a year, is a design capability rather than a measured fleet record.

Similarly, a DOE-funded field test that Bloom ran in Anchorage points the same way. Two 25 kW solid-oxide modules ran on natural gas from December 2008 to December 2009, and the report puts their uptime at 99.6% and 99.7% against a 70% target (DOE/OSTI). Bloom wrote the report, and the units ran alongside the grid, so read it as a vendor measure of the hardware.

Bloom also reports that its systems powered customer facilities through more than 1,750 grid outages since 2018 (Bloom). Earlier, in 2012, the first 3 MW phase of a planned 30 MW Delmarva Power installation kept feeding the grid as Hurricane Sandy passed directly over it (Bloom). These are vendor figures, and they measure the plant rather than its gas supply. We cover the supply next.

Recent large fuel-cell agreements:

The weak spot: extreme cold

Extreme cold, however, is the one risk the gas chain shares with the grid. At least five times since 2011 (in 2011, 2014, 2018, 2021 and 2022), extreme cold hit gas production and gas-fired generation together. The three worst are below. In each of them, notably, the people who lost power were grid customers.

Gas, however, was not the only thing that failed. During Uri, frozen equipment at power plants caused 44% of unplanned generation outages, while gas supply caused about 27% (FERC/NERC). The failure also fed on itself, since blackouts cut power to gas facilities. Blackouts at wells and gathering stations caused 21.5% of the lost gas production. An on-site fuel cell draws nothing from the grid, so it does not feed that loop.

When gas runs short, it is rationed by a published priority list, and homes come first. Texas’s rule, adopted after Uri, ranks firm deliveries in this order: human needs, then electric generation, then minimum plant-protection volumes, then small commercial and industrial users. Interruptible customers come last (16 TAC §7.455). A fuel cell on firm service sits ahead of every interruptible load, including gas plants that buy interruptible transport. In addition, Texas counts distributed and backup generation registered with ERCOT as electric generation. That may lift a registered on-site plant to the second tier, which is worth confirming with the Railroad Commission for any Texas site.

In plain terms, a fuel cell on interruptible gas in Texas in February 2021 would likely have lost fuel along with the grid. One on firm service, with a second feed and fuel stored on site, turns the gas system’s only proven regional weakness into a design requirement.

How to engineer the gap closed

Every exposure left in the fuel-cell chain is on or near the site, so each one can be designed against. The grid’s exposures, by contrast, sit on someone else’s poles and in someone else’s control room.

The last row reverses the usual design. Most critical sites, for example, run on the grid and keep a diesel generator for backup. Here, instead, the fuel cell is primary and any grid tie becomes the backup. Outside a regional cold event, losing the site would take two unrelated failures in the same hour.

The bottom line

For a site that has to stay up, the data favor on-site fuel cells as the primary source. They remove the five exposed electrical layers where routine outages start and storm outages multiply. In their place, instead, is buried gas service. In our review of twenty years of pipeline incident reports, no single line failure was reported to cut a customer’s electricity. The plant itself is modular, and as a result the vendor puts a plant with spares close to 99.999% available.

The gas system’s one proven weakness, a regional shortfall in extreme cold, already threatens every grid customer. On site it becomes a design requirement: firm service, a second feed, stored fuel and a standby source. If you are weighing power for a campus, bring us the site and we will show you how Proton and Ion fit it.

Keep reading: Proton fuel-cell power, behind-the-meter AI power and the Grid Operator Watchlist.