Bloom Box Fuel Cells Capture Attention of American Public

A 60 Minutes segment last Sunday on a new-to-market fuel cell system developed in the Silicon Valley has captured the attention of the media and has gone far in advancing the concept of, and possible consumer demand for, the efficient, inexpensive, alternative energy represented by such fuel cell technology. The Bloom Box is a fuel cell system the size of a mini-refrigerator that could provide cheap, environmentally friendly electricity to US households within 10 years according to K.R. Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy.

Fuel cells combine a fuel, such as natural gas or bio-mass, with an oxidant, and turn the resulting chemical reaction into electrical energy.  The Bloom Box utilizes flat, coaster-size ceramic plates with a proprietary coating to create what experts believe to be one of the most efficient types of fuel cells.  According to Sridhar, a single Bloom Box plate could power one light bulb, and a stack of 64 could power a Starbucks.

For several months, some of Silicon Valley’s largest corporations – including FedEx, Walmart, Staples, eBay and Google – have been testing the Bloom Box.  eBay has been using the system for seven months to supply 15 percent of the energy needs of its San Jose campus.  According to the company’s CEO, John Donahoe, the system has already produced an estimated $100,000 in energy savings, indicating that the industrial system could pay for itself within approximately three years. Sridhar says he would like to see residential Bloom Boxes priced at $3,000.   

There are those experts, including competitors, who are slightly skeptical of Sridhar’s claims.  According to Friedrich Prinz, a fuel cell expert at Stanford, there is no reason to doubt that the Bloom Box works as Sridhar says.  “They just [needed] to take understood and recognized principles in material science and thermodynamics and implement them, and it looks like they’ve done that successfully.  Whether they’ve done it economically, I don’t know.” 

There are also some who believe, based on current technologies, that the Bloom Box might only be five to ten percent more efficient than conventional combined gas turbine power plants.  However, Bloom Energy has filed patents that hint at a possible process that could take the runoff of the main electricity generation – CO2 and water – and use it to produce oxygen and a “methane-like fuel.” 

“If such a reverse-reaction is possible – and it’s not clear that it is – then it would be huge,” says Michael Kanellos, editor-in-chief of Greentech Media, a news site dedicated to green technology. 

Watch the 60 Minutes video segment.

For more, read the story in National Geographic