Bloom Energy Shifts Power via Fuel Cells

Breakthrough technology from a richly funded Silicon Valley startup could revolutionize the energy business, especially in the developing world

 

 

Around 1.5 billion people, or nearly a quarter of the world's population, live without electricity today. That's according to figures from a November U.N. report centering on the plight of people in places like South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa who lack access to modern energy. Many of these "powerless" live as humans did centuries ago, in darkness and cooking over wood fires that damage their health and the environment.

To halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015—one of the U.N.'s eight Millennium Development Goals—1.2 billion more people must gain access to electricity and 2 billion more need to obtain other fuels such as natural gas or propane, according to the U.N. But building traditional power grids would take too long, cost too much, and only add to the world's climate change woes.

Enter Bloom Energy, one of 26 companies named on Dec. 3 by the World Economic Forum as 2010 Tech Pioneers offering new technologies or business models that could advance the global economy and have a positive impact on people's lives. Through its cutting-edge work with fuel cell technology, the Sunnyvale (Calif.) company aims to help homes and businesses generate their own electricity and fuel their own vehicles—bringing power and light to remote villages and even reducing dependence on today's electricity grids in the developed world.

The technology at the heart of Bloom Energy's vision to help planet earth was first developed for use in outer space. While working as a director of the Space Technologies Laboratory at the University of Arizona, the company's Indian-born co-founder and chief executive, K.R. Sridhar, was asked by NASA to come up with a way to make life sustainable on Mars. His lab's initial project was a device that would use solar power and Martian water to drive a reactor cell that generated oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to power vehicles.

The Bloom Box

The project set Sridhar thinking. If he reversed the reaction—feeding oxygen and fuel (hydrogen) into the cell to generate electricity—he could change the way people generated and consumed energy. He developed the first of his so-called Bloom boxes to do just that, but took it a step further by making the process reversible. That way, when hooked up to a renewable power source such as a wind turbine or solar panel, the refrigerator-size unit makes and stores hydrogen and oxygen. And at night or when the wind dies down, it changes direction and uses the stored gases to make electricity.

"I quit doing my NASA work because I believe this particular technology can change the world," says Sridhar. "Just like developing nations leapfrogged over fixed telephony to mobile, we think our technology will allow developing nations to do the same thing for electricity."

The Bloom box also has another benefit that could become increasingly important if the world's automakers succeed at developing hydrogen-powered vehicles. Since one of the byproducts of the Bloom fuel cell is hydrogen, the device could be used to create fuel for cars. And even if hydrogen vehicles don't materialize for decades, Bloom boxes could generate electricity for hybrid or electric cars. Either way, the system would allow people to sidestep traditional gas stations.

With his ideas in hand, Sridhar approached venture capitalists Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, and the venerable Silicon Valley firm responded by making its first-ever cleantech investment. Precise funding figures aren't public, but Bloom Energy says it has raised "hundreds of millions" of dollars in financing.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/dec2009/gb2009127_746740.htm

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