FuelCell Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: FCEL) was given a rough trading day on Wednesday after Tuesday’s earnings report. Shares opened lower at $2.02, but the stock improved to where it was down “only” 9% at $2.15 after the first hour of trading.

The company reported second-quarter fiscal 2014 results after markets closed Tuesday. The fuel cell maker reported an adjusted diluted earnings per share (EPS) loss of $0.04 and $38.3 million in revenues. In the same period a year ago, the company reported an EPS loss of $0.04 on revenue of $42.4 million. Second-quarter results also compare to the Thomson Reuters consensus estimates for an EPS loss of $0.03 and $45.18 million in revenue.

It would probably have been impossible for FuelCell Energy to live up to the hype generated by the sale of a relative handful of fuel-cell powered forklifts to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) by one of its competitors, Plug Power Inc. (NASDAQ: PLUG). Shares that sold for less than a dollar in early 2013 shot up to a high of $4.74 in early March, a jump of more than 300%.

Since reporting first-quarter earnings on March 10 — also the day it posted its 52-week high — shares have dropped to around $2.40 a share, which still represents a stock price gain of 68% year-to-date, but the upward momentum has stalled even as the stock trades 23 million shares a day.

Regarding guidance, the company said that it expects revenues of $50 million to $60 million in each of the remaining quarters of the 2014 fiscal year. FuelCell Energy will hold its conference call Wednesday morning and may expand on its outlook then. The consensus estimates for the third quarter call for an EPS loss of $0.03 on revenues of $53.07 million. For the full year, FuelCell Energy is expected to post an EPS loss of $0.13 on revenues of $203.5 million.

In some general remarks regarding the FuelCell’s Direct FuelCell power plant, the company said that “the market opportunity for on-site hydrogen generation includes both industrial applications as well as transportation fueling.” The firm has a pilot transportation fueling station running in the Los Angeles area and a plant in Wyoming is in the process of commissioning. Both use renewable biogas from a wastewater facility to produce heat and renewable hydrogen.

The company’s CEO said:

Fiscal year to date orders and awards total 16.3 megawatts and we have a high degree of confidence in meeting our targeted 30 megawatts and expect to close additional orders above this level by the end of the calendar year. Our sales teams are actively advancing projects in North America and Europe, and witnessing greater appreciation of the attributes of our ultra-clean power generation solutions, giving me confidence in our near-term ability to progress projects in the sales pipeline to closure.

Shares traded down about 16% in after-hours trading, at $1.99 in a 52-week range of $1.10 to $4.74. Thomson Reuters had a consensus analyst price target of around $2.80 before the results were announced.

UPDATE: At 10:35 a.m. EST, the stock traded 7.8 million shares (at $2.15) versus an average daily volume of 23 million shares. That average daily volume is skewed by the early interest in the sector this year as FuelCell had traded more than 10 million shares in a day on two of the trading days in the past month.

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