Bloom And Bust

KR Sridhar's bloom energy promised to turn natural gas into clean electricity “cheaper than the grid”. but after blowing billions, its fuel cells have turned out to be outrageously costly—and not so green after all.

- CHRISTOPHER HELMAN

As wildfires raged last October, more than a million northern Californians suffered through blackouts, their electricity cut in order to reduce the likelihood of high winds sparking new conflagrations. In smoke, KR Sridhar smelt opportunity. His company, publicly traded Bloom Energy, sells fuel cells—steel boxes that generate electricity using natural gas. The boxes, which it calls energy servers, emit a nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, but they are supposed to make much less of it than traditional power plants and do so without generating lots of smog ingredients like nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxides.

Even better, Bloom’s units get their fuel via underground pipelines unaffected by the Diablo winds that threatened California’s high-voltage wires and led to the power outages that Sridhar considers intolerable in any modern society, let alone in Silicon Valley.

“Every time there is a disaster, your power price is going to go up, because somebody has to pay for the damage,” Sridhar says. “That is the catalyst for change.” Bloom is capitalising on the outages by wooing potential customers in fire-risk zones to protect against grid failure with Bloom-powered “microgrids”, like its 26 so far in California, which carried customers through last year’s blackouts.