February 22, 2010 2:23 PM
The Bloom Box to revolutionize alternative energy
2It's an exciting week for energy. Bloom Energy unveiled a refrigerator-sized personal power plant that produces energy cheaply and cleanly and may one day replace the traditional power grid.
Bloom Box is the creation of Bloom Energy, a Sunnyvale, California-based company that is promising to revolutionize energy with its “power plant in a box.”
According to K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, two blocks can power the average high-consumption American home -- one block can power the average European home.
Sridhar wants to put one in every home by 2020.
Bloom Energy became an instant hit online after it was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes.
So what is Bloom Box?
It’s a collection of fuel cells – skinny batteries – that use oxygen and fuel to create electricity with zero emissions.
The idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines.
Bloom Energy boxes cost between $700,000-$800,000, but Sridhar envisions making it available in every home, so he estimates they will lower the price to around $3,000 for a unit.
Bloom Energy (click here for their website) will go public on Wednesday, February 24, where it is expected to announce further details about their much-anticipated energy box.
Watch Bloom Energy CEO demonstrate the Bloom Box on 60 Minutes:
Casey Verdant
The world will have to wait to see exactly how Bloom Energy uses fuel cells to make electricity at this scale with no emissions, but powering over a 100 homes for less than $1 M is an incredible prospect. Great to know eBay, Google, and Fedex are pioneering the trials of this new technology: let the countdown begin!
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07:51 pm, Feb 23, 2010
Ian Suzuki
Sounds like it's burning fossil fuels and/or ethanol to produce energy. How is this innovative? How is it worthwhile? Yes, it is more efficient. But unless we switch to algae-powered biofuels, it will never work. Corn, sugarcane, and even switchgrass is horrendously inefficient and eats up land that we need for agriculture.
12:51 pm, Feb 25, 2010
