Will the Bloom Box Replace the Grid — or Is It All So Much Hype?

On March 23, 1989, scientists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced they had produced “cold” fusion – a cheap, clean inexhaustible energy source that would change the world forever – on a tabletop.  Dan Rather even said so.  I saw him say so on TV and got as excited as a 16 year old can get about such things.

It came to nothing.

Then in 2001, I was barraged for what seemed like months with smug, knowing articles about some mysterious machine that would change life forever; all we had to do was listen to the Silicon Valley/Microsoft/Apple types telling us so.

This was the Segway.

Eh.

Now, on 60 Minutes, comes the Bloom Box, the public coming out party for secretive Bloom Energy and its founder K.R. Sridhar.  The company claims to have perfected fuel cells – a technology around since the 19th century and being developed by hundreds of other companies – to the point that they will revolutionize the energy industry, replace the “grid,” and do it all cleaner and cheaper than almost any alternative.

The company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars – from John Doerr, an early backer of both Google and Segway, among others – and gotten the likes of Colin Powell on its board.  Companies like FedEx and eBay already are using their boxes, and the company is planning a big public unveiling on Wednesday.

Also, Sridhar claims he developed his technology based on work he did for NASA that would have allowed the atmosphere of Mars to become breathable – the Schwarzenneger movie Total Recall come to life.  Yes, it is as if Sridhar created that alien device that Arnold sticks his hand into, thereby bringing oxygen to Mars and preventing his head from exploding from bad special effects.  And now he wants to use that alien technology to power your refrigerator!

Michael Kanellos of greentechgrid appears in the 60 Minutes piece as the skeptical view, but even he says there is a 20 percent chance the idea will work, albeit with GE backing it, not Bloom Energy.  His latest questions for Bloom are here.

And ecogeek.org presents a seemingly realistic but not damning evaluation of Bloom’s fuel cell technology as “cleaner” though not technically “clean.”

earth2tech lists 10 important things to know about Bloom:

1). It’s doing something that many are tackling: While Bloom Energy is nowpositioning itself as revolutionary — that will replace the power grid no less — fuel cells have been under development by endless amounts of companies for decades. Any consumer electronics company from Samsung to Sharp, or auto maker, from Hyundai to Toyota, has researchers developing fuel cell technology. Fuel cell patents have consistently remained at the top of the list of out of greentech patents filed every year according to Clean Energy Patent Growth Index (CEPGI). The problem is that fuel cells have remained too expensive. We’ll see if Bloom can get those costs down.

So what to make of it?  Do I dare hope?  Is this the realization of that cold fusion enthusiasm or more Segway-like buildup that will aggravate me still a decade later?

The answer from the clean tech blogosphere seems to be “maybe,” … which I actually find quite hopeful.