Bloom Energy Unveils its ‘Bloom Box’ Fuel Cell
After working in secrecy for eight years, a Sunnyvale startup vaulted onto center stage in the cleantech revolution Wednesday by unveiling the Bloom Box, a fuel-cell technology that would allow homes and businesses to generate their own electricity.
More than 300 people, ranging from politicians to journalists to industry titans to Silicon Valley luminaries, crammed into an auditorium at eBay’s San Jose campus to learn how Bloom Energy plans to be the first company to achieve a long-sought advance: commercial production of a solid oxide fuel cell. So intense is the interest in the low-emission, power-producing technology that the company has already raised a remarkable $400 million from investors.
“Our mission is to make clean, reliable energy affordable for everyone in the world,” said K.R. Sridhar, Bloom’s cofounder and CEO.
The stagecraft of the coming out party rivaled Apple’s iPad launch and many political campaigns: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger introduced Sridhar as camera crews jockeyed for position around a cluster of Bloom Boxes, also known as Bloom Energy Servers, which look like sleek refrigerators. Venture capitalist John Doerr, a major investor in Bloom, led a panel discussion featuring executives from companies that are among Bloom’s first customers, including Coca-Cola, eBay, Wal-Mart, FedEx and Google.
Serving as sort of a test laboratory, search engine giant Google was Bloom’s first paying customer. A 400-kilowatt Bloom Box behind one of the buildings on Google’s Mountain View campus has been powering a large chunk of the building’s energy needs, without public notice, since July 2008.
“We’re really excited about it,” said Google co-founder Larry Page. “Distributed power is a big deal. I would love to see a whole data center running on this when they are ready.”
Unlike solar power and wind, which are intermittent and dependent on weather, fuel cells have the advantage of being able to run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Scientists around the world have been working on the technology for years, but Bloom contends it has overcome some of the major obstacles to widespread use, making cells more reliable and easier to produce than ever before. Experts say it is not yet clear whether Bloom can deliver on those claims.
Its cells are not cheap: The commercial-scale boxes cost $700,000 to $800,000. They come with a 10-year warranty that includes maintenance and replacement parts, and Bloom says most customers will break even on their investment within three to five years.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who joined Bloom’s board in 2009, talked about how the military has to provide power to numerous field operations — often in the form of generators — and said fuel cells could be an alternative. But fuel cells suitable for the average American home are still about a decade away, according to Bloom.
“My wife is mad because we have all this snow in Washington, and I refuse to put a generator up,” said Powell, who envisions a day when Bloom Boxes will provide electricity to rural villages in the developing world. “I tell her, it’s OK, we’re going to put a Bloom Box in there soon.”
Originally founded as Ion America, the company re-branded itself as Bloom Energy in September 2006 and is the first cleantech investment in the vast portfolio of venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where Doerr is a partner and where Powell and Sridhar are “strategic limited partners.” The company has more than 300 employees. Fuel cells use hydrogen, natural gas, methane or other fuels to produce electricity through an electrochemical process that produces a fraction of the emissions of a typical power plant.
About six types of fuel cells are being developed or already are on the market, and they often are divided into two camps: “low temperature” cells that rely on hydrogen and “high temperature” ones that can use other fuels.
“Because they operate at high temperatures, they can accept other fuels like natural gas and methane, and that’s an enormous advantage,” said Michael Tucker of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The disadvantage is that they can shatter as they are heating or cooling.”
Fuel cells, including solid oxide versions, are far from new. The U.S. Department of Energy and private companies have for years collaborated to accelerate the commercial readiness of fuel cells, with the Energy Department currently spending about $80 million a year on fuel-cell research and development.
“Solid oxide technology has always been considered the holy grail of fuel cells, but the issues are durability and cost,” said Mike Brown, vice president of UTC Power in Connecticut, a division of United Technologies and a leading fuel-cell maker.
Earlier this month, UTC announced that the new Whole Foods Market grocery store currently under construction in South San Jose will use a UTC fuel-cell system to generate 90 percent of the store’s electricity needs.
Since a byproduct of fuel cells is heat, the thermal energy will be captured and used for the store’s heating, cooling and refrigeration.
Bloom Energy, whose devices operate at about 800 degrees Celsius, or about 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit, says it has made several breakthroughs in the materials used to ensure that the elements expand and contract at the same rate, minimizing breakage.
PG&E hopes to install a Bloom Box at San Francisco State University within the year, pending approval by the California Public Utilities Commission.
“What has to be proven by any fuel-cell manufacturer is that their technology can operate reliably for years, ideally 10 years, with the ‘four nines’ — 99.99 percent reliability, or very little outages,” said Scott Samuelsen, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California-Irvine. “At this point, Bloom has excellent potential, but they have yet to demonstrate that they’ve met the bars of reliability.”