 View Images Held by CEO K.R. The company's first product... (Associated Press) 
 
 KR Sridhar, co-founder and CEO of Silicon Valley startup Bloom Energy, holds up a stack of fuel cells at a news conference at eBay offices in San Jose, Calif., Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010. But fuel cell experts say that, based on the information the company made public today, the Bloom Box technology is not revolutionary, nor is it the cheapest or most efficient fuel cell system available. The savings are big but there's a catch. Will there really be a Bloom Energy Server for our homes? Go to any [solid oxide fuel cell] Web site and you'll see the same stuff." The Bloom Energy Server is certainly an exciting development, but that excitement should be tempered by the challenges it faces, and the likelihood that another company has something at least as exciting in development. However, Bloom Energy didn't offer more details about how that worked, and Pivovar said that using wind or solar would require an extra step to convert the energy into something that could power the fuel cells, which could result in some energy loss. Fuel cells are devices that combine a fuel, such as natural gas, and an oxidant, such as oxygen, and turn their chemical energy directly into electrical energy. One of these jumbo Bloom Boxes, called Bloom Box Servers, could power a hundred homes, and four of them could power a 35,000-square-foot (3,250-square-meter) office building, Sridhar said on CBS. Bloom Energy does claim that its box can produce more energy _ with less environmental damage _ than other fuel cells on the market because it isn't reliant on just hydrogen to trigger the chemical reactions that create power. The fuel could be piped in from municipal natural gas systems—much as it is for gas stoves and ovens—or created from biogas or, as in the case of eBay, harvested from natural gas-rich landfills. Friedrich "Fritz" Prinz, a fuel cell expert at Stanford University, said there's no reason to doubt that the Bloom Box works as Bloom Energy's Sridhar claims. What they've demonstrated is they have these systems and they've been able to deploy them," said Bryan Pivovar, fuel cell group manager of the Hydrogen Technologies and Systems Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. That's an important question because the company's product _ a box of fuel cells that looks like a giant filing cabinet _ currently costs $700,000. Estimated energy savings for the seven months: $100,000. At that rate, the Bloom Boxes should pay for themselves within three years, Donahoe told the business-news site Fast Company. There are commercial fuel cells, such as ones made by UTC Power, that can operate continuously for that long, Brown said. A key detail Bloom Energy disclosed was the price its customers pay for power generated by their Bloom machines, and how much money they save over buying regular power from utilities. Fuel cell systems in which both the generated electricity and heat are used can be 90 percent or more energy efficient. The big Bloom Energy Servers already in use don't currently do this, but if such a reverse-reaction is possible—and it's not clear that it is—then "it would be huge," Kanellos said.
– Bloom Energy's plans to put a zero-emission energy server into mass production is an "exciting development," writes David Coursey, but the company has loads of work to do before the so-called Bloom Box becomes the game-changer the hype suggests. The company is promising miniature $3,000 servers will be on the market in 10 years to power homes, but that's a long way from the big $800,000 device it's currently pitching to companies. The company didn't offer many details on how it will get there, notes AP, and plenty of other companies are at work on the same concept. One fuel cell expert tells National Geographic he's "pretty pissed" at the lack of explanation and dismissed it as "all hype." Coursey is more hopeful at PCWorld. "Who can really say? If I were guessing, I'd imagine Bloom servers might appear to power whole neighborhoods and be operated by traditional power companies before the home server appears. It all depends on how the technology and market place develops over time."