Will 'Bloom Box' Be the Next Big Thing in Energy?

(Feb. 25) -- In a much-hyped product rollout that began on last week's "60 Minutes," Bloom Energy this week publicly unveiled what might just be the future of clean energy.

Dubbed the Bloom Box, the company's refrigerator-sized fuel-cell-powered generator has the tech world buzzing. With the promise of freeing consumers from the dependency of power company grids, the developers boast of producing massive amounts of cheap energy.

KR Sridhar, co-founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, poses next to Bloom Energy power servers, Feb. 24.

Paul Sakuma, AP

KR Sridhar, co-founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, poses next to Bloom Energy power servers at eBay offices in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday.

The company made its presentation of the Bloom Energy Servers, as they are formally known, to an audience in Sunnyvale, Calif., that included Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who sits on the board of directors at Bloom Energy. Company executives from Google and eBay who already use the Bloom Box for a portion of their energy needs also attended.

The servers range in size from small, hold-in-your-hand boxes capable of powering a home, costing about $3,000, to $700,000 industrial boxes the size of a refrigerator.

In announcing Wednesday what the company called "a cleaner, more reliable'' energy technology, Bloom Energy said the server "is distinct in four primary ways: It uses lower-cost materials, provides unmatched efficiency in converting fuel to electricity, has the ability to run on a wide range of renewable or traditional fuels, and is more easily deployed and maintained.''

Moments after the presentation wrapped up, commentators began debating whether the next big thing in energy had just arrived.

Here's a sampling of opinion.

Writing at Energysource, a blog at Financial Times, Kate Mackenzie offered a measured appraisal of Bloom Box's potential:

Grizzled energy-watchers are harder to convince than the tech audience: even if one small company did make a transformative development, they tend to reason, the challenges of scale, grid upgrades, and other infrastructure challenges remain extremely difficult.

Engadget was invited to Wednesday's event and took the following video of the Bloom Box.

After viewing the company's presentation, Engadget's Ross Miller wrote:

Bloom Energy showcased a number of customers today -- FedEX, Walmart, Staples, Google, Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Cox and, of course, eBay -- and if the numbers meet their mark, you can color us mighty impressed.

Speaking to National Geographic, Nigel Sammes, a ceramic designer and fuel cell expert at the Colorado School of Mines, was not impressed by what he saw Wednesday:

It's a big hype. I'm actually pretty pissed off about it, to be quite honest. It really is nothing new. Go to any [solid oxide fuel cell] Web site and you'll see the same stuff.

Alexis Madrigal, writing at Wired, sees price as a potential stumbling block:

When you do the math, the Bloom Box's electricity costs substantially more per kilowatt hour than the grid ... Over the next few years, it's probable that, like many technologies, the unit costs of Bloom's fuel cells will decrease as the scale of production increases, but it's unclear how cheap the Bloom Boxes can get.

The San Francisco Chronicle, meanwhile, wonders if some of the Bloom Box's unforeseen consequences will be worse than the device's promise:

It may just do to the power plant what the laptop did to the desktop because it doesn't require a grid. But it's not the Holy Grail of clean energy: It eliminates combustion, which is great, but it will only be as clean as the fuel it runs on. And if use becomes as widespread as its inventors hope, the boom in deforestation to produce biofuels for the boxes could be catastrophic.