Bloom Energy Prepares to Reveal Energy-In-A-Box
It's a milestone, of sorts: Bloom Energy, the first energy investment of legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and one of the first big stories in cleantech, is finally revealing its technology. The startup has announced that after eight long years of secrecy, it will take off the covers on Wednesday.
To pique everyone's curiosity, Bloom's founder, K.R. Sridhar, has gone ahead and spilled some details in interviews and talks ahead of the big day. He went on 60 Minutes last night to show off his Bloom Box, a fuel cell that burns fuels like natural gas at twice the efficiency of today's power plants, and is cheap and portable enough to someday install in homes.
I've embedded the video below, but the important points are easy to sum up. Each Bloom Box will contain 64 "sheets" made of sand and covered with a proprietary "ink" that performs the fuel cell function.
Between each pair of sheets is sandwiched a piece of metal for catalysis. This sheet would ordinarily be made of platinum, but Sridhar says his company has figured out a cheap alloy alternative -- a sort of Holy Grail other fuel cell makers often search for.
Bloom has 20 large companies testing out Bloom Boxes, including Google (the first to give it a try), WalMart, Staples, FedEx, and eBay, which says it sources 15 percent of the power on its main campus from Bloom. These super-sized Bloom Boxes supposedly cost $700,000 - $800,000, but that doesn't say much about the overall cost of the electricity they produce.
The interview gets most interesting when Sridhar is talking about the home market -- interesting because that's where the big claims start. Sridhar claims that a residential unit, coming in the future, should cost about $3,000. Earlier in the interview, he says a typical American home would need two units, meaning an outlay of $6,000 dollars for all its energy needs.
Today, American homeowners often pay between $20,000 and $60,000, before subsidies and tax rebates, for solar panel installations that sometimes don't even cover their energy needs when the sun is up. So Sridhar is in effect claiming that Bloom can blow away solar panels.
In fact, at the price he's suggesting, it's not hard to imagine a Bloom box competing on price with a utility's coal-powered plants. That's not impossible in principle, but no other renewable energy company, in any area, has succeeded so far. Few technologies even come close, and those that do (like wind power) are intermittent; a Bloom Box would easily win by virtue of never shutting off.
At times, Sridhar's optimism becomes disconcerting. During the interview, it begins to seem as though he'll agree to any positive statement about his company. When host Lesley Stahl is asking him about the fuels that Bloom can use, for instance, they agree on several variations on natural gas, including landfill gases and biogas. Then she throws in another word: solar.
"We can use solar," says Sridhar, with a huge grin.
Can someone please explain to me what solar is in this context? Solar gas? Perhaps this mysterious substance is derived from the world's great supply of marketing hype. It's possible that Sridhar is simply too nervous to respond accurately, but there's also a history on Bloom's side of (thus far) unprovable claims about its potential abilities.
This sort of unalloyed optimism from Bloom has provoked skepticism in others. One of the 60 Minutes interviewees is Michael Kanellos, the editor over at Greentech Media. Kanellos isn't shy to pooh-pooh Bloom's chances on the air, saying that even if Bloom can get into households (which he gives one in five odds), a big company like General Electric will quickly take over the business.
After watching the 60 Minutes segment, one might wonder what Bloom could possibly have left to announce: now we know what the product is, and who has it. But there are a few details left, some of which might help allay skeptics' fears.
The big one is price per kilowatt hour, the one detail that dictates whether an energy technology will succeed or fail -- no other truly matters, no matter how cool or interesting the device may seem. If Bloom shows up Wednesday without this number, it will deserve all the skepticism we can heap on it.
But there are other announcements that the company could make, like future customers. There's also the matter of funding. Back in March of last year the company was reportedly looking for $200 million or more in venture capital. If it got its funding, that's at least one potential indicator that at least the investors who have gotten a look inside the company are confident.
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