The Bloom box is no longer one of Silicon Valley's best-kept secrets. After much media fanfare and a slew of announcements, the Bloom Energy website finally came to life with information after weeks of waiting. For those charged with powering the data center, consider what General Colin Powell said to his wife, "Don't worry about a generator honey, we'll get a Bloom box for our backyard instead." This is the goal that Bloom Energy has put in its sights but for data centers today, it's tested, proven and in use. It uses natural gas or bio-fuels to create electricity. Energy created by the Bloom box reduces carbon emissions in half or is completely carbon neutral with bio-fuels. Pairing the Bloom box with Alternative Energy sources creates predictable, viable and clean reliable energy. The form factor of the Bloom box is a parking space footprint and is designed on server architecture meaning it is redundant and hot swappable. Reliability reported by customers and monitored by Bloom Energy shows reliability ranging from 98-99% availability. These energy servers have no moving parts and make no noise. This product incorporates what Virginia Tech researchers said would be in our energy future--distributed energy generation.
Listening to the six videos of customer panel presentations from Coca Cola, Cox Enterprises, EBay, FEDEX, Google, and WalMart, a commonality exists among these large enterprises with a total representation of over 4 million employees and $480 billion in revenues. Getting green and reducing carbon footprints has to deliver back to the shareholders. With the Bloom box they all say it does and that payback varies from 3-5 years. Another benefit is the predictability of energy costs for the next 10 years and it has the kind of scalability that Wal-Mart says it must deliver back to their shareholders. Google found that using the Bloom box "removed the variability from Alternative Energy."
For data centers there are two key benefits in using the Bloom box: first, "reverse backup" or using the Bloom Energy Server as primary power, and only purchasing electricity from the grid to supplement the output when necessary, and second, the Bloom box natively produces DC power, which provides an elegant solution to efficiently power DC data centers. According to Bloom Energy's KR Sridhar, Ph.D. Principal Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, the Bloom Energy Server is "disruptive technology." What's interesting is this is another challenge to stringing high voltage wires all over the country.
Those large enterprises found the same things that this SMB Interconnect has learned and written about in the past. They too hit the wall implementing conservation and gained about 15% in low hanging fruit. Next, they moved to efficiency again, hitting walls before then implementing Alternative Energy solutions fitting their scale.
You see, you can't skip conservation and efficiency, and I told you that you too would be Building Your Own Power Plants. Listen to Jim Kennedy; Chairman of Cox Enterprises--his aim was a passion motivated by what he leaves for his grandkids. His business side didn't neglect profit, reduced costs and CO2 output.
Does this thing (Bloom box) really work? I really liked General Powell's story and comments that, "We shouldn't sell a story, we will sell a product and the product will sell itself." The North American utility grid has been under fire since 1990 for reliability, expansion and cost containment. They have failed on all three counts miserably. Reliability is horrid and it's due to the huge infrastructure mainly consisting of copper overhead power lines that are subject to weather and people--not just backhoe operators but drivers. The old method of delivering power brings with it vulnerabilities--being surges, spikes, lightning, power line influence and utility company practices in rolling the juice to just stay alive. At the cost of keeping the grid alive, reliability tanks. Then, the subjective forces going against this huge "outside plant" means that new thinking and solutions will gain momentum. Expansion today by any utility pitching fossil fuel use is seemingly doomed.
The disruptive nature of the Bloom box comes at a time when numerous utilities are meeting oppositional forces arguing against expansion and overhead lines because of ill health effects, environmental issues and because the costs associated with expansion make their way back to the consumer and businesses paying the electric bills. What really gets my attention other than the twofold efficiency gains over the grid is the similar situation that the PSTN is under. Will we end up using the electric grid as a backup source of power?
Last minute I want to add something else. Remembering what my buddy Eric has taught me about energy--"it's political." Keep this in mind and course there's the ongoing Climate Gate. Look past the politics and for those that use a little common sense they too will discover that paying your "traditional phone bill or electric bill" consists of paying a good portion just to cover government taxes, fees and surcharges. My motivation is simple--I don't want to keep paying these taxes and penalties for using power. Here are examples of six large enterprises coming out of the closet saying going green is profitable, and it is. You can bet that they don't like taxes and penalties just as much as me. In the bigger picture profitability is attainable in a bigger way because energy consumption is a metric that is found ingrained in everything we do and these guys know it too.
