Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday November 9, 2011
The Indian held up a block of thin ceramic tiles the size of a loaf of bread. "This will give enough energy to power the average US home. Twenty-four hours, 365 days. Put a bunch of these together in a box and you can power a supermarket."
Two years ago K. R. Sridhar unveiled his Bloom Box. And he spearheaded a revolution that is going to change the world as we know it. Its energy needs, anyway.
This revolution will be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century. Huge amounts of money are being invested into it right now. Some will fail. But others will generate oceans of wealth. So if you are going to get into the game, pick carefully.
Let me walk you through it. There are plenty of alternative energy sources that can power our world. But they all have problems. Usually they are too expensive compared to existing methods such as coal-fired generation. Or the technology is not quite there yet. Bloom is one that appears to be working.
Sridhar is - literally - a space scientist. He conceived his catalytic cells while working on the Mars mission at NASA. When the project was shelved he set out on his own, later persuading venture capitalist John Doerr to invest in him. To the tune of $100 million. Seems like a lot? Well now it's over $600 million.
But Bloom Energy Servers are real. They have been installed at major hubs of Google, eBay, FedEx, Walmart and other big players. And after the past couple of weeks' events their sales will explode.
What are they you ask? A thin ceramic square, simply baked sand, which acts as the electrolyte. On one side is painted an anode chemical, on the other a cathode. When an energy source passes over these sheets along with oxygen, it generates electricity. One square gives enough for a 25W electric light globe.
What's special is that the source can be almost any energy - natural gas, petrol, methane, solar energy. So potentially you could run it off a tank of cow manure, though now they are using natural gas. It gives off half the emissions of competing technologies. But most importantly, the boxes are self-contained. They don't need a power grid, they do all the generation on the premises.
Currently Bloom boxes are double the cost of equivalent power generators, which is why just the very rich California corporations are their main customers. But after the Hurricane Sandy experience, every big data centre in the world is looking around at ways to secure their power. If only Bloom were a corporation, this would be a great time to buy their shares.
If they need muscle, they have the enthusiastic support of Arnold Schwarznegger who has been behind them since he was The Governator. He made California a vivid green: an investment in Bloom boxes earns a 20 percent cost subsidy, plus 30 percent federal tax break because it's a green technology. Our own politicians could learn a thing or two from America.
There are several other competing fuel cell systems in the running, like Australia's Ceramic Fuel Cells Energy, or Ceres Power or - of course - giants like GE and Siemens. But like I said at the beginning, this will be the century's big economic opportunity - already they are predicting Bloom's IPO at $3 billion, and it will happen soon.
Meanwhile Australia obsesses about cleaning brown coal, cuts back incentives for alternative energy, and may totally miss the boat.
ray@ebeatty.com
