Bloom Box: The new clean energy
eBay is one of 20 large corporations already trialling the Bloom Box
Every home could one day benefit from clean energy produced by its own individual power plant, thanks to an invention from the US.
The Bloom Box is the brainchild of former NASA rocket scientist KR Sridhar, who once built a similar device to generate oxygen on Mars for future colonists.
However, by pumping oxygen into the box, along with fuel, Mr Sridhar created a chemical reaction resulting in electricity.
Mr Sridhar, the co-founder of Bloom Energy, located in California's Silicon Valley, envisions that the wireless box might eventually provide efficient and inexpensive green energy to homes and businesses - effectively doing away with traditional power plants.
Twenty corporations including Google, FedEx, Walmart and eBay have already purchased and begun testing the Bloom Boxes.
But such transformative power may only become commercially viable if the Bloom Box fuel cells - made by Mr Sridhar himself using cheap sand-based ceramics coated with special green and black 'inks' - can work reliably and efficiently.
Other fuel cell technologies have proven notoriously finicky, according to the Popular Science blog.
Yet Mr Sridhar claims one of his simple disks can power a light bulb, and a stack of 64 disks with cheap metal plates in between them can power a Starbucks.
And unlike fuel cells that require pure hydrogen, the Bloom Box can use fuels ranging from natural gas to bio-gas.
Still, sceptics like Michael Kanellos of Greentech Media have pointed out that fuel cells have been around for years.
In order for this product to really work, Mr Kanellos said, "it needs to be cheaper than solar. It needs to be cheaper than wind".
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