Bloom Box ! Responsible NPD?

For the past two days, the web has been abuzz with reports of a mysterious refrigerator sized box that can power entire households. It is purported to be the next big step in clean energy evolution, or the “holy grail” or “shiva lingam” of the energy sector. Technical specifications have not been released yet, except for a very very basic description of what’s in it, and how much power it can generate.

The company that developed it, is headed by K. Sridhar, a University of Madras graduate who went on to being an advisor to NASA, and then launched his company – Bloom Energy to develop next-gen clean energy tech.  Sridhar has toiled on the R&D of the Bloom Box, for 8 years in shrouded secrecy, funded by angel investors Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers. Incidentally, these are the same venture capitalists that funded Google in its early days.

Now, to the Bloom Box.  According to Sridhar, it is a small “box”, containing disks of Silicon dioxide(SiO2) that are coated with secret patented “inks” that allow the disks to react with chemicals in the air producing energy(huge amounts) and Co2(in very very tiny amounts). The smallest BloomBox can produce up to 100kW of power, thereby satisfying the energy and heating requirements of an entire house, and possibly even cars. Ebay, the company’s first customers, use 4 Bloom Boxes to power an entire building on their campus, and claim to have saved over $100,000 in annual energy costs. Each box costs $700,000, but will eventually be available for retail purchase at around $3000.

As a Product Development engineer myself, I believe that I must build in sustainability into every product I design and develop. We are the new generation, and we must focus our efforts into building products that have the potential to revolutionize industries.  I constantly try to think about the usability of my products 8-9 years down the line, and try to build them with materials that will perish naturally without causing any harm to the environment. I would hate to see my product filling up landfills because I did not plan its obsolescence.

I would love to see the BloomBox powering entire rural counties in India. Huge power-grids being decommissioned and the land being used for fruitful pursuits such as agriculture. But I believe that the powers that be will never allow the Bloombox to prosper and multiply. This little game-changing device is going to re-write the way humans think about energy. Infrastructures of entire countries will have to be re-thought and re-planned. It has the potential to destabilize entire governments. As engineers, do we really believe that automobile manufacturers cannot make a car that will give 100 mpg? They had the technology to do this decades ago. But it is a planned strategy to keep people dependent on resources that they control. In a few months, the government will stage a huge explosion that kills an entire town that was using the Bloombox and then claim it was using unsafe fissionable materials or some malarkey. They would then commandeer the technology in “the interest of national security” and no one will ever hear of the Bloom Box again. Even if entire populations tweet and FB and Buzz about this tech, and make every single person on this planet aware of the prescence of this technology, the “powers” would find a way to squash it.

I would really like to see how the makers of Bloom Box will fight the “evil” consortium of “the man” to make their technology freely accessible to all humans on this planet. And in the meantime, if Mr. Sridhar suddenly disappears or meets with an untimely accident, my eyes will turn squarely to “the Man”.

“Inspiration for this article was drawn from conversation with my dear friend and daring entreprenuer Mr. Bharani Setlur”

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