Power lines may be a historical relic by the time your kids buy their own home, or at least they will be if Bloom Energy has anything to say about it. The brains behind the company, K.R. Sridhar, has created a power plant that is about the size of your water heater – and he’d like to put it in your backyard. The idea is that these “Bloom Boxes” will replace big power plants and traditional power transmission grids by using one of the slim, wireless generators to supply completely clean energy to every home.
Bloom Energy produces the boxes in blocks that can be combined to create the amount of power necessary. ”The way we make it is in two blocks. This is a European home. The two put together is a U.S. home,” Sridhar explained to 60 Minutes. Just one block will power four Asian homes and up to six homes in India.
Several powerhouse companies in the Silicon Valley, including Google and eBay are already using Bloom Boxes to power their campuses. When you charge the ceramic fuel cells that power the Bloom Boxes with renewable energy sources, like the landfill gas that eBay uses to power their Bloom Boxes, they are carbon neutral.
The Bloom Box is an evolution of a technology that Sridhar originally invented for NASA to use to create oxygen on Mars. When NASA scrapped the Mars mission, Sridhar had a brilliant idea, instead of producing Oxygen with the cells, he pumped it into them. The chemical reaction between oxygen and a fuel source that happens with in the cell produces electricity with no burning, no combustion and no power lines. Even better, unlike most attempts at power cell technology, the ingredients are cheap. Sand is the main ingredient that makes up the cells themselves, coated with Sridhar’s top-secret “ink” and then fed any traditional fossil fuel source.
