Motherboard

The world of tech and environment journalists stopped breathing for a moment yesterday morning as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, venture capitalist John Doerr, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the heads of Google, Wal-Mart, eBay, FedEx, and Coca-Cola joined K.R. Sridhar, the founder and CEO of energy messiah startup Bloom Energy, to gather around an ominous, monolith-like box, veiled in a black sheet.

The gasps were just audible above the silent, Bloom Box-powered air conditioning when Sridhar pulled back the curtain to reveal … a giant box of sand.

It could have won best, most expensive joke of the year, but Sridhar wasn’t joking. By baking sand into ceramic tiles and applying some special ink to both sides, he’s creating stacks of fuel cells to power things with amazing efficiency. One small handheld stack, says Sridhar, could supposedly power a house. (See our previous coverage and a video here.)

Then again, the sand box might have been a neat metaphor for the Bloom skeptics. Was this really the energy holy grail that Bill Gates might pray for at night? Or was it merely a bit of majestic slight-of-sand, a lesson for marketing students that would go down as the best hyped-launch in the history of clean-tech?

Okay, fine. It was both.

Hype is just as important as sand to the Bloom boom. The boxes that are already being beta tested by the aforementioned companies aren’t cheap: one commercial-scale box, about the size of a refrigerator, cost $700,000 to $800,000. To bring costs down of course, Bloom needs to keep researching while making lots more boxes, leveraging economies of scale.

Bloom isn’t the first or the only fuel-cell maker. Since 1999, the US Department of Energy, researchers and companies have been trying to accelerate the development of solid oxide fuel cells — the kind of high-temperature cell (1,000 degrees Celsius) that Bloom makes, and which, unlike other fuel cells, can make electricity out of all sorts of fuel, not just tricky hydrogen.

Bloom’s Secret Sauce

Bloom’s electro boom box is however based on some secret, proprietary technology that has nothing to do with sand: it’s the green ink that acts as the anode and the black ink that acts as the cathode.

And Bloom’s the boldest and loudest fuel cell maker so far, already being thought of as the Google of energy (if Google isn’t already the Google of energy). It’s that kind of hype that in heady, money-soaked, tech-fetishizing Silicon Valley can become self-fulfilling prophesy.

What else will help: if the Bloom is as reliable as they say it is. Lots of skeptics are focusing on the life of the box, whether it can last for 10 years, with 99.99 percent reliability and few outages.

If so, the thing could be deserving of all the celebrity-soaked promo videos. Until countries like the US are easily powered by hydro, wind, solar, biomass, or even nuclear, the Bloom Box would be a nice addition to our grid.

Or rather, not to our grid. The promise of the box is that it disconnects us from a grid that can be heavily reliant on coal in lots of places and that’s often very inefficient, losing lots of electricity as the juice travels from the power plant to our homes. So going off the grid isn’t just for techno-fearing woodsmen or green commandos: grow your own electricity and you can theoretically get it cheaper and cleaner.

For now, the cheaper part will depend upon whether you a) can afford the $700,000 investment and b) live in California, which is the only state with clean energy subsidies big enough to make the cost and savings and green benefits comparable to, say, a small-scale solar plant. The company is aiming for residential units at $3000 a pop.

Big blue chip companies and Tesla-driving, LEED-rated mansion owners in California aren’t the only ones who could benefit soon: as Treehugger notes, the Bloom could be a boon for poor countries where there’s no electrical grid to begin with.

And in places that already rely on wind or solar power, the Bloom could be a better backup than battery power, for when the sun or wind doesn’t shine.

Then again, it may not be eliminating the need for a power grid; after all, if you’re using natural gas, you’ll still need some distribution network to feed your box.

Also let’s keep in mind the old law of unintended consequences. Mix secret ingredients, cheap Indian labor and production, and the problems of extracting natural gas, and that box could be kind of monolith-ish, less Bloom and more Pandora.