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Bloom Energy
Company typePrivately held
PredecessorIon America
Founded2002
FounderK. R. Sridhar
Headquarters
Sunnyvale, California
,
USA
Key people
K. R. Sridhar (founder, CEO)
Productsregenerative solid oxide fuel cells
OwnerKleiner Perkins (among others)
Websitehttp://www.bloomenergy.com/

Bloom Energy is a company that installs their solid oxide fuel cells in company buildings and sells them electricity.[1] The company, which is one of 26 named a 2010 Tech Pioneer by the World Economic Forum,[2] was started in 2002 by CEO K. R. Sridhar.[1]

History

Background work

Sridhar was the director of the Space Technologies Laboratory at the University of Arizona, which was asked by NASA to come up with ways to make life sustainable on Mars. The team then made a device to use solar power and Mars water to power a reactor cell that made oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to power vehicles.[3] When NASA canceled the project, Sridhar decided to focus on reversing the process, ie, using oxygen and hydrogen to create power.[3]

Venture backing

In Oct 2001, Sridhar had a meeting with John Doerr from the large venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.[4] Sridhar was asking for more than $100 million to start the company. Bloom Energy has received $400 million of start-up funding from venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins[5] and Vinod Khosla.[6]

In 2008 the company had a loss of $85 million.[1]

Products and services

Bloom Box

The Bloom Box is a solid oxide fuel cell made by Bloom Energy that can use liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons, from fossil or bio sources to produce electricity on the site where it will be used.[7] The current cost for each hand-made 100kw Bloom Box of the business size is $700,000–800,000. In the next stage, which will likely be mass production of home-sized units, Sridhar is hoping to bring down the cost of each of these home sized bloom boxes to under $3000.[5]

The Bloom Box's white ceramic plates are made by baking common beach sand, and each ceramic plate is coated with a "secret" green ink (anode) on one side and another secret black ink (cathode) on the other side.[5] Wired reports that the secret ingredient may be yttria-stabilized zirconia, based upon a 2006 patent filing that was granted to Bloom in 2009.[8] To save money the Bloom Box has cheap metal alloy plates between the two ceramic plates, instead of platinum, which costs about $42 per gram.[5]

Platinum was needed because solid oxide fuel cells operate at very high temperatures of 1200-1400F. [9]

Sridhar says that a single cell (one metal alloy plate between the two ceramic layers) produces enough power for a light bulb and 64 cells produce enough for a coffee shop.[10]

The Bloom Box can run on most hydrocarbon fuels, such as ethanol, biodiesel, methane or natural gas.[11] Colin Powell, who is on the board of Bloom Energy,[10] was recently quoted as saying "I have seen the technology and it works".[10] A Guardian report on the story added, "But industry watchers say they remain unsure exactly how it works."[10]

Services

Bloom Energy is developing Power Purchase Agreements to sell the electricity produced by the boxes, rather than sell the boxes themselves, in order to address customers' fears about box maintenance, reliability and servicing costs.[12]

Installations

Four Bloom Boxes to make up to 400 kW (kilowatts) have been installed at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, who were Bloom Energy's first customer.[12] Another installation is for five boxes[11] to make up to 500 kW at eBay headquarters in San Jose, California.[12]

Portable units

Writing for a Wall Street Journal blog, Rebecca Smith and Jim Carlton speculated that portable Bloom Boxes could be of use to the armed forces.[13] Other applications could be remote villages in Africa or Asia, which either do not have 24x7 electricity or currently use expensive diesel generators.[13]

Feasibility

According to BBC tech blogger Maggie Shiels, Bloom Energy is "being very coy and playful about what it will reveal to the press".[14] She quotes Michael Kanellos of Greentech Media regarding the general scope and feasibility of Bloom Energy's plans: fuel cells are not new technology and in order to succeed in the marketplace the Bloom Box would need to be cheaper than existing types of renewable energy.[14] If Bloom Energy can develop such a technology, Kanellos predicts that established energy firms such as General Electric would derive most of the profits due to greater ability to manufacture and market a product.[14] Jacob Grose, senior analyst at Lux Research told Fortune Magazine that he doubts Dr. Sridhar has come up with a way of making these ceramic fuel cells cheaply.[1]

John Doerr, who is one of the major venture capitalists of the company, asserts that the Bloom Box is cheaper and cleaner than the grid.[11] In a followup story entitled "Bloom Box: Segway or savior?" Fortune notes that "Bloom has still not released numbers about how much the Bloom Box costs to operate per kilowatt hour" and estimates that natural gas rather than bio-gas will be the primary source of fuel for Bloom Boxes.[15]

Sridhar said that his devices are making electricity for 8–10 cents/kwh using natural gas, which is cheaper than today's electricity prices in some parts of the United States.[16] He also said the boxes will have a 10 year life span.[16] The CEO of eBay says Bloom Boxes have saved the company $100,000 in electricity bills since they were installed in mid-2009,[5] yet Paul Keegan of Fortune calls that figure "meaningless without the details to see how he got there."[15]

An expert at Gerson Lehrman Group, wrote that, given today's electricity transmission losses of about 7% and utility size gas fired power stations efficiency of 26-48%, the Bloom Box is up to twice as efficient as a gas fired power station, but no less efficient than one. [17]

Secrecy

There is no Bloom Energy sign on the company's building, and there is little information on the company's website. The CEO gave a media interview (to Fortune Magazine) for the first time in 2010, eight years after founding the company, because of pressure from his customers.[1] A few days later, he allowed a journalist (Lesley Stahl of the CBS News program 60 Minutes) to see the factory for the first time.[12]

Bloom Energy has announced a press conference scheduled for Wednesday, 24 February 2010.[10]

Competition

A Gerson Lehrman Group analyst wrote that GE dismantled its fuel cell group five years ago and Siemens have almost dismantled theirs.[18] United Technologies is the only large conglomerate that has fuel cell technology that could compete with Bloom Energy.[18] Toshiba only has technology to provide energy for a small device, not a neighborhood.[18]

Katie Fehrenbacher of Business Week reports that Sprint Nextel owns 15 patents on hydrogen fuel cells and is using 250 fuel cells to provide backup power for its operations.[19] Sprint has been using fuel cell power since 2005.[19] Last year Sprint's fuel cell program received a grant of over $7 million from the United States Department of Energy.[19] The Sprint program has partnered with ReliOn and Altergy for fuel cell manufacture, and with Air Products as a hydrogen supplier.[19] Business Week that a German fuel cell firm called P21, which is based in Munich, has been working on similar projects to supply backup power for cellular operations.[19]

In October 2009 the Department of Energy awarded nearly $25 million in grants for research and development of solar fuels, which Michael Kannelos notes in Wired may be similar technology to the solar cells in Sridhar's description of the Bloom Box.[8][20] Department of Energy grant recipients included a variety of startup companies and universities.[20]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e "Is K.R. Sridhar's 'magic box' ready for prime time?". Fortune. February 19, 2010. Retrieved 2010-02-22. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help) Cite error: The named reference "bstfort" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  2. ^ "Bloom Energy Shifts Power via Fuel Cells". BusinessWeek. December 7, 2009. Retrieved 2010-02-22.
  3. ^ a b Schenker, Jennife (December 7, 2009). "Bloom Energy Shifts Power via Fuel Cells". Business Week.
  4. ^ "The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?". CBS News. February 18, 2010. Retrieved 2010-02-24.
  5. ^ a b c d e "The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?". 60 Minutes. February 21, 2010. Retrieved 2010-02-22.
  6. ^ Coursey, David (February 23, 2010). "Why I'm Bullish on Bloom Energy". PC World. Retrieved 2010-02-24.
  7. ^ "Bloom Box: What is it and how does it work?". Christian Science Monitor.
  8. ^ a b Kanellos, Michael (22 February 2010). "Bloom Box fuel cell launch". Wired. Retrieved 24 February 2010.
  9. ^ [1]
  10. ^ a b c d e Goldenberg, Suzanne (22 February 2010). "Bloom Box fuel cell launch". The Guardian. Cite error: The named reference "The Guardian feb22" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  11. ^ a b c "Tech Pioneers Who Will Change Your Life". Time Magazine. Retrieved 24 February 2010.
  12. ^ a b c d "Bloom Energy Revealed on 60 Minutes!". Greentech Media. February 19, 2010. Retrieved 2010-02-22. Cite error: The named reference "gtm" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  13. ^ a b "The Bloom Box: Energy Breakthrough or Silicon Valley Hype?". Wall Street Journal.
  14. ^ a b c "Valley Vibe: Is the Bloom Box energy nirvana?". BBC. Retrieved 23 February 2010.
  15. ^ a b "Bloom Box: Segway or savior?". Fortune. Retrieved 24 February 2010.
  16. ^ a b New York Times article
  17. ^ [2]
  18. ^ a b c Answering the Unanswered Questions Gerson Lehrman Group
  19. ^ a b c d e Fehrenbacher, Katie (February 23, 2010). "Phone Companies Are Developing Fuel Cells, Too". Business Week. Retrieved 2010-02-24.
  20. ^ a b "New Form of Solar Energy: Direct Solar Fuel". Business Week. October 28, 2009. Retrieved 2010-02-24.
  • Bloomenergy.com
  • Gottmann, Matthias; McElroy, James Frederick; Mitlitsky, Fred; Sridhar, K.R.; Patent WO/2004/086537 SORFC Power and oxygen generation method and system. 7 October 2004.
  • Sridhar, K.R.; Patent WO/2007/001343 Nanostructured fuel cell electrode. 4 January 2007.
  • Sridhar, K.R.; Venkataraman, Swaminathan Patent WO/2007/038499 Fuel cell water purification system and method. 5 April 2007.
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