An India-born rocket scientist has lifted the veil off Bloom Box fuel-cell, a revolutionary new technology that holds the promise to supply the world with abundant clean, cheap energy.
"The core of our technology is simply sand," said K.R. Sridhar, 49, founder of the Silicon Valley clean tech start-up Bloom Energy at Wednesday's unveiling of his invention in San Jose, California on the campus of eBay, one of Bloom's first customers.
The sand is the raw material used to make wafers that can make electricity. Sridhar has persuaded some big names that by making them out of sand he can make fuel cells that are efficient and inexpensive.
Whereas other fuel cells contain polymers and platinum that make them prohibitively expensive, Sridhar said Bloom's consist of specially coated ceramic squares made from a common sand-like substance.
Bloom's fuel cell works like this: Oxygen is pumped in on one side and natural gas on the other. The two combine inside the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity. No burning, no combustion, no power lines from outside, as CBS puts it.
"The proof of the pudding is the reaction from the business people," said former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who joined Bloom's board last year, said at Wednesday's event that also included an appearance by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"Will it work for 10 or 20 years without something going wrong? We'll find out," he added.
Bloom Energy says the best proof that its fuel cells work is in the ones already working like those at eBay's headquarters.
A half-dozen big companies have already bought Bloom Boxes at a cost of $700,000 to $800,000. But Sridhar's goal is a $3,000 box that anybody can use to power their home though he says home use is 10 years away.
"Don't start signing up for orders yet," said Sridhar. "This is a product of the future."
"We believe that we can have the same kind of impact on energy that the mobile phone had on communications. Just as cell phones circumvented landlines to proliferate telephony, Bloom Energy will enable the adoption of distributed power as a smarter, localised energy source," Sridhar said.
It will allow customers, he said, to "lower their energy costs, reduce their carbon footprint, improve their energy security".
"What people need to understand is we are not building a company, we are building an industry," said Sridhar
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