His company, publicly traded Bloom Energy, sells fuel cells—steel boxes that generate electricity using natural gas. The boxes, which it calls energy servers, emit a nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, but they are supposed to make much less of it than traditional power plants and do so without generating lots of smog ingredients like nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxides.
Every time there is a disaster your power price is going to go up, because somebody has to pay for the damage, Bloom is capitalizing on the outages by wooing potential customers in fire-risk zones to protect against grid failure with Bloom-powered
Over its 19 years in business, Bloom has installed several thousand of its 15-ton boxes worldwide for big tech companies including Apple, AT&T and Paypal, which are willing to pay up to guarantee 24/7 power for data centers where the cost of downtime is nearly $9,000 per minute. A lot of its customers are in states with the highest power prices and big clean-energy subsidies, like New York, where Home Depot has installed them as backup generators “wherever they make economic sense
The natural gas, thanks to fracking, is already there,” Sridhar says. And yet, despite big promises, Sridhar’s boxes are highly unlikely to transform the grid in California, or anywhere else. The reasons are manifold 多樣化的, but boil down to this: Bloom’s technology is too dirty and too costly.
decade ago, Sridhar envisioned that by now his fuel cell technology would be in every home, costing $3,000 a pop. In reality, not a single home in America has its own Bloom box. Instead, his boxes are used mostly for industrial and commercial customers, costing approximately $1.2 million each. Without subsidies, they generate power at a cost of roughly 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour versus 10 cents per kwh for grid power nationally.
He later worked at the University of Arizona’s Space Technologies Lab, building an oxygen-generating machine for NASA’s missions to Mars. When the Mars Polar Lander crashed in 1999, his project was canceled. Undeterred, he worked to more or less reverse that technology, to turn methane and oxygen into carbon dioxide and electricity.
Those initial machines were hand-assembled, Sridhar recalls, in a hobby shop at Moffett Federal Airfield in Santa Clara County, rather than on today’s automated assembly line. A former Bloom executive claims that those early boxes had to be monitored 24/7, and that internal modules stacked with hundreds of 4-by-4-inch fuel cell wafers needed to be swapped out a couple times a year, at $225,000 a pop. Another complication of these Rube Goldberg devices was the filtration systems—metal canisters filled with pebbles of solid catalysts that separate sulfur compounds and other contaminants from the methane gas 甲皖. According to the same executive, the first time technicians went to empty the canisters, they simply sucked out the used catalyst with a Shop-Vac and ended up spreading a rotten-egg smell across the neighborhood. Bloom called the executive’s account “hearsay
