PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

Energy/Environment/Clean Technology
A Clean Tech Black Box
While Dr. K. R. Sridhar was director of the University of Arizona’s Space Technology Laboratory
from 1996–2001, he developed an electrolysis process for NASA that would use solar-generated
electricity to separate oxygen, water, and methane from the Martian atmosphere. The process was
to be used in an experiment to grow plants in an enclosed tent on the surface of Mars. NASA canceled
the project, but Sridhar, a mechanical engineer with degrees from the University of Madras
and the University of Illinois, moved to Silicon Valley to pursue a different kind of application for
the technology—clean energy.
The website for Bloom Energy in Sunnyvale is a single page with flash images, the
cryptic slogan “Be the Solution,” and no other information. The company, launched as
Ion America in 2004, has raised $165 million in four rounds of funding, including
venture funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Cypress Semiconductor, and Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), plus at least $2.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy.
It is reportedly the venture that initially launched KPCB partner Vinod Khosla’s interest in
clean technology.
Bloom Energy already has R&D facilities in Chennai and Khosla, and at the February 2008
Cleantech Forum in San Francisco, the company announced a “massive” facility planned for
Mumbai to take advantage of Indian engineering talent. While there is a high degree of secrecy
about the project, it is believed that Sridhar has reversed the process he developed for NASA, so
that natural gas is heated and reformed into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, with a portion of
that exhaust mixture oxidized and run through a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) stack to create
electricity, and a portion of the exhaust hydrogen separated and purified.
The ultimate deliverable is believed to be a scaleable fuel cell unit that can be deployed at the
municipal grid, commercial building, or household level—depending on the size of the stack—
generating both electricity and a supply of hydrogen suitable to power automobiles or for industrial
uses. Powered by natural gas or propane initially, the unit emits only small quantities of carbon
dioxide. Run on biodiesel, emissions could fall to zero. Because the reverse electrolysis is a
chemical process with no combustion, it uses relatively little fuel up front. The fuel cell stack’s
ceramic core offers a cost advantage over cells using a platinum core. That edge could open an
important market powering data center cooling systems.
Bloom successfully completed a 1-kilowatt prototype at the University of Tennessee-
Chattanooga in 2005 and has since field-tested a 5-kilowatt demonstration project at the San Jose
campus of Cypress Semiconductor. A $2.76 million demonstration project agreement signed
with Santa Clara County in September 2007, to power the county’s 911 communications facility,
is now in the construction phase. The project has 50% funding from a U.S. Department of
Energy grant, with the county paying the remainder out of earmarked energy retrofit funds.
Bloom is said to be pursuing a two-track strategy—scaling up prototypes to the 100-kilowatt
level for use in centralized power plants, and also reducing the size and heat output of the 1-
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