Power plant in a box - Bloom Energy Bloom Box

Renewable energy and it's mass adoption is going to be a big GREEN trend of this decade. If you followed the green tech, you probably know that Bloom Energy unveiled their Bloom Box yesterday in a highly publicized announcement. CBS news 60 mins also aired an interview with the CEO Dr. K R Sridhar a couple of days ago.

Bloom Energy plans to have a distributed energy solution for consumer in coming year, the company compares the distributed energy with distributed computing(PC) and distributed telephony(cell phones) where consumer is in control.
Bloom Energy would like you to have one in your backyard and to prove his points, he has many customers using the bloom boxes in Silicon Valley inclusing eBay and Google. Right now, one bloom box costs roughly $700,000 which is enough to power 2 European homes or 4 Asian homes or 1 american home (we use more energy here in America per home) which is not bad. At first, the refrigerator size bloom box and it's promise seem unbelievable and impractical, but as CEO Sridhar said, he is hoping to bring cost down to $2000 a box in the future so that every home can have it in its backyard.
So why so much buzz about this, anyway bloom is not the only company working on fuel cells. This is really an innovation we all need to pay attention to for the following reasons:

• The fuel cell(ceramic battery) is made of sand, if mass produced, can be made very cheap.
• Even though natural gas is collided with oxygen to produce electricity, there is no burning of fuel hence no carbon emission at all.

Bloom energy has a video presentation at their website - How a solid oxide fuel cell works?

This technology is very interesting to me and I know I will be watching closely, how soon this becomes available and affordable in rural India where energy production and distribution is a major problem and bottleneck to the rural development.