The other night on “60 Minutes”, Leslie Stahl profiled Bloom Energy, a silicon valley energy firm that is today unveiled the Bloom Box. In the 60 Minutes segment, the Bloom Box (AKA Bloom’s Energy Server) was touted as a “holy grail” of energy – a clean, cheap, and distributed energy source that you could set in your backyard.
The Bloom Box
So what is it? The Bloom Box is a 100 kW fuel cell that uses natural gas, biogas, or waste landfill gas as a fuel input. Combine that with oxygen (normal air) on a proprietary thin wafer with 2 ink-esque coatings on each side and voila! electricity (in reality more complicated than this description, but for the purposes of this discussion, it will do). For the past few months, Bloom Boxes have been powering facilities at Google, eBay, and Fedex.
What makes this idea so appealing is the prospect of distributed electricity generation. The model for the US (and most of the world) since electrification began was centralized generation and distribution – large power plants transmitting electricity great distances to power homes and businesses. With a distributed source like the Bloom Box, all of the traditional infrastructure goes away – there is no need to build power lines or massive power plants. Hook one of these boxes up to a home or neighborhood and all of the power you need is right there.
While these are some of the exiting benefits of distributed fuel cell generation, a fuel cell is not an energy source in and of itself. They need a source of methane to function. Whether this means hooking them up to a natural gas line or a methane capture landfill, this will still need to worked out.
The CEO of Bloom, K.R. Sridhar, sees his invention as a revolution in energy. Imagine taking his box and dropping it into a village in the 3rd world. Hook it up to an anaerobic digester with cow manure as a feedstock and you have a reliable renewable energy source.
K.R. Sridhar, inventor of the Bloom Box. Source: CNET
Right now these boxes cost between $700,000-800,000.
Bloom Energy has some serious backers, including Kleiner-Perkins (the venture capital firm that funded Google and Amazon, among others) and Colin Powell.
From a macro-energy/climate change standpoint, these boxes could be a great asset in generating clean energy from renewable sources (so long as they are using landfill gas or biogas). They have rated efficiencies (>50%) greater than most conventional thermal power stations (33-48%), minus all of the massive energy distribution infrastructure and inefficiencies. If the price of these drops enough, they could also be an excellent way of meeting the energy demands of the developing world.
Bottom line: a company and product to watch very closely.
