An India-born rocket scientist is all set to unveil a natural gas-fuelled cell box that promises to provide abundant, cheap, clean electricity to light up most American households within the next 10 years.
K.R. Sridhar, 49, founder of the Silicon Valley clean tech start-up Bloom Energy, will bring out his invention at a big press event Wednesday in San Jose, California on the campus of eBay, one of Bloom’s first customers.
The event will feature a star-studded lineup that includes California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Secretaery of State Colin Powell, a director of his company, eBay CEO John Donahoe, venture capital firm and early Bloom believer John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers.
Sridhar has raised $400 million to produce his magic boxes after eight secretive years of toil. The invention has already created quite a buzz since it was featured on CBS’s ’60 Minutes’ Sunday.
A former professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and director of the Space Technologies Laboratory (STL) at the University of Arizona, Sridhar also served as an advisor to NASA in the areas of nanotechnology and planetary missions. Sridhar initially developed the idea behind the Bloom Box while working with NASA, as a means of producing oxygen for astronauts landing on Mars.
Sridhar argues that a Bloom Box fuelled by natural gas installed in one’s backyard would produce half as much carbon dioxide as a fossil-fuel power plant. As he suggested on ’60 Minutes’, one bread loaf-sized unit capable of producing one kilowatt of power could power a single American home.
Sridhar provided the first inside look at his Bloom Box, which contains stacks of fuel cells that generate electricity. Natural gas or biofuel are pumped into the Bloom Box to produce clean, scaled-up, and reliable electricity.
The unit does not vibrate, emits no sound, and has no smell, although Sridhar admits to some initial, but minor, glitches at some installations.
He expects his boxes will cost about $3,000 for consumers. Currently, several large technology companies, such as Google and eBay, have been using Bloom Boxes in limited capacity.
EBay said it has already saved $100,000 in electricity costs since its 5 boxes were installed nine months ago. It even claims that the Bloom boxes generate more power than the 3,000 solar panels at its headquarters.
Sridhar received his Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Madras before moving to the US in the 1980s. He earned an MS in Nuclear Engineering and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, home to such start ups as Netscape.
You’ll generate your own electricity with the box and it’ll be wireless. The idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines.
It has a lot of smart people believing and buzzing, even though the company has been unusually secretive – until now.
K.R. Sridhar invited “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl for a first look at the innards of the Bloom box that he has been toiling on for nearly a decade.
Looking at one of the boxes, Sridhar told Stahl it could power an average U.S. home.
“The way we make it is in two blocks. This is a European home. The two put together is a U.S. home,” he explained.
“‘Cause we use twice as much energy, is that what you’re saying?” Stahl asked.
“Yeah, and this’ll power four Asian homes,” he replied.
“So four homes in India, your native country?” Stahl asked.
“Four to six homes in our country,” Sridhar replied.
“It sounds awfully dazzling,” Stahl remarked.
“It is real. It works,” he replied.
He says he knows it works because he originally invented a similar device for NASA. He really is a rocket scientist.
“This invention, working on Mars, would have allowed the NASA administrator to pick up a phone and say, ‘Mr. President, we know how to produce oxygen on Mars,’” Sridhar told Stahl.
“So this was going to produce oxygen so people could actually live on Mars?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” Sridhar replied.
When NASA scrapped that Mars mission, Sridhar had an idea: he reversed his Mars machine. Instead of it making oxygen, he pumped oxygen in.
He invented a new kind of fuel cell, which is like a very skinny battery that always runs. Sridhar feeds oxygen to it on one side, and fuel on the other. The two combine within the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity. There’s no need for burning or combustion, and no need for power lines from an outside source.
In October 2001 he managed to get a meeting with John Doerr from the big Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
“How much do you think, ‘I need to come up with the next big thing’?” Stahl asked Doerr.
“Oh, that’s my job,” he replied. “To find entrepreneurs who are going to change the world and then help them.”
Doerr has certainly changed our world: he’s the one who discovered and funded Netscape, Amazon and Google. When he listened to Sridhar, the idea seemed just as transformative: efficient, inexpensive, clean energy out of a box.
“But Google: $25 million. This man said, ‘How much money?’” Stahl asked.
“At the time he said over a hundred million dollars,” Doerr replied.
But according to Doerr that was okay.
“So nothing he said scared you?” Stahl asked.
“Oh, I wasn’t at all sure it could be done,” he replied.
Comments
This fuel cell (called the Bloom Box) will need a fuel source to turn into electricity. The fuel source could be petrol, methanol or natural gas.
The difference and biggest benefit of the Bloom Box is that it converts energy more efficiently and produces less carbon dioxide in the process.
In the article, the inventor claimed that using natural gas as the fuel source, the Bloom box produces only half the amount of carbon dioxide compared to a power generation plant.
The Bloom Box is large and not quite ready for use with homes yet. Since the Bloom Box would most probably use natural gas as its fuel source, it remains to be seen how it can be implemented in Malaysia. Unlike in the US, we don’t have gas pipes to our homes.
