KR Sridhar, who was part of NASA’s Mars programme, realised that to be a true explorer you need to live off the land. That made Sridhar look for a very compact, efficient, highly utilitarian ecosystem for energy while keeping the planet sustainable. Sridhar, who is now the founder, chairman and CEO of Bloom Energy, has developed a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) that produces electricity by running natural gas or bio-methane across rows of reactive materials. Bloom Energy, which is already powering many Fortune 500 companies, signed an MoU with Gail India to deploy natural gas powered fuel cells. It is already powering a technology company at Bangalore’s Technology Park. Sridhar spoke to Anup Jayaram on the way forward in India.
You have been in the SOFC space for awhile. When did you start looking at India closely?
I first met with BC Tripathi of Gail in 2012, just to understand the market and whether there could be a partnership. When a new customer came along, we were able to work together. That created the opportunity for us to explore a longer-term relationship.
Is natural gas the only option?
While natural gas is the main mode, in rural areas there is bio-methane. This can be produced using human and animal waste.We can use the bio-mass that comes from that as an asset to produce fuel that sustains. Urban areas can use the bio-gas from landfills. So, whether it is methane from the natural gas or bio-methane, our systems are agnostic. They can use them both. We would like to start off with natural gas for which the infrastructure exists. My vision for Gail is for them to create a national network of pipelines through which bio-methane can be inserted just as natural gas, as that industry matures. There is a significant amount of self-sufficiency in fuel through the bio-gas plant. That’s the future.
Can you explain what exactly the SOFC is and how it works?
There is a piece of ceramic and there are painted layers on both sides. On one side the methane comes in, also the water that we produce from our own internal process. In the process it releases electrons. Unlike in any other technology, there is no burning and no combustion in our process. It directly converts chemical energy into electrical energy.
Unlike conventional energy, you do not have power lines. How efficient is it to deploy the Bloom Box?
The box is the fundamental difference. It is more than just an off-grid solution. It is distributed for complete base-load. To some extent solar is an off-grid solution. But you need the grid as a bank to take the electricity when it is being produced and give it to you when it is needed when the sun is not shining. So, that truly is not an off-grid solution. Whereas this is a distributed generation system that is there 24×7 so long as there is gas being supplied.
Today, for customers that require reliability in Indian cities , we are able to offer them on a go-to cost of ownership the same price as the cost of grid plus whatever the cost it takes to operate diesel gensets and batteries. We are a technology player. Our costs keeps coming down, similar to what you saw in the computing and the mobile phone industry. On the other hand, in conventional electricity generation, the costs are going up. So, with time we will capture more and more of the market with a value proposition. Fast forward to a decade, and we could be the cheapest form of generating baseload.
How does Bloom compare to solar?
Whatever it took for an entire solar industry to scale up to a certain level in 30 years since the first product came, Bloom Energy alone as a company has put that much capacity in six years. So we are five times faster in scaling up. And our footprint is 150 times less than that of an equivalent solar installation. While manufacturing our products is like building complex automobiles, we can scale up very fast and land use is not an issue. So, this may be the only way that urban centres can be powered by distributed generation.
While you can provide power where there is a gas pipeline, how will it work in rural areas?
In a small town we can put up a Bloom box and the bio-waste from around the region will go in powering that village. That will happen soon. There is a certain infrastructure required to collect the bio-mass. We would like a local partner to do that. I see a hybrid in the future. Like a LAN and WAN, I see the grid as the WAN and the micro-grid as the LAN even within a housing colony or within a village. These micro-grids will be connected to barter, exchange or whatever they need. Should there be any issues with the macro-grid, the micro-grid will be able to sustain by itself. That’s the future.
That’s the future.
How has the government reacted?
The government is super excited about what they have seen so far. They have been generous, now we need to translate that to action and execution. We have a funnel of prospective customers here. We are talking to them. Once we announce our first project, people will realise that it does not work in just a US situation, but in India too. With Gail signing this MoU we will have some traction. My hope is that within a few months we can have our solutions here. The announcement will depend on the consumer, since these are big investments they will have to make.
So, you will get these boxes and install them here?
Initially we will get our boxes here. There is a significant Make-in-India role here. We already have 200 Bloom employees working in India, including in manufacturing. They manufacture certain electrical subsystems for us.