Will Clean Electricity Blossom with Bloom Box?

Is Bloom Energy too good to be true or a breakthrough clean energy game-changer?

Its origins were in providing NASA with a device to manufacturer oxygen for a manned Mars colony. But when the mission was scrubbed, K.R. Sridhar set his sights back down here to the challenges on Earth, and, figuratively speaking, turned his device inside out. Instead of giving off oxygen, it would take oxygen in. And the output would be cleanly generated electricity.

A February 21 60 Minutes segment offered an introductory peek into the people and the principle behind a clean energy innovation that will be officially introduced on Wednesday, February 24. Bloom Energy, and its Bloom Box fuel cell technology, have been mum until now on the details while they have been raising a staggering $400 million in investment capital with the hope of launching what Sridhar insists will be a clean energy game-changer.

Also largely below the radar until now have been Bloom's cadre of trial customers, among them FedEx, Wal-Mart, Google (their first customer) and eBay, of whose use of Bloom's technology Tonic wrote about in October, and who tells 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl that the company has saved $100,000 in energy costs in the last nine months.

The Bloom Energy fuel cell can be powered by natural gas, reclaimed methane from landfills (which happens to be eBay's approach) and even solar, and the technology is designed with the express hope of making large, centralized power plants and the vast distribution grid a thing of the past. Current costs are high, but Sridhar believes that a household-scale fuel cell device could get down to about $3,000.

GreenTech Media editor-in-chief Michael Kanellos, speaking on camera to Stahl, and TriplePundit.com writing separately, say: not so fast. Kanellos, describing himself as "hopeful but skeptical" and TriplePundit both remind us that there have been instances of great hype followed by rapid deflation surrounding fuel cell technology over recent years, with lofty goals and visions brought back down to reality through unavoidably high costs of manufacturing and raw material (rare metals such as platinum in particular).

When the company and product formally introduce themselves mid-week, we will discover if the Bloom Box will be a handful of wilted hope, or a bright bouquet of clean energy opportunity.

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Photo by somegeekintn via Flickr.