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K.R. Sridhar: Power to the People, with Bloom Energy
Bloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar is a man with a mission to change the world. A former NASA advisor who developed technologies to sustain life on Mars, this earnest scientist is now harnessing his visionary skills and a large team of engineers to solve the energy crisis. His ambitious goal? To revolutionize the energy industry, just like cell phones revolutionized the communications industry. His team is developing high efficiency fuel cells to provide a global distributed system of electricity supply at low cost. Although the company is still in stealth mode, industry speculation is rife about its future plans. KR agreed to discuss Bloom Energy's progress in this exclusive Fresh Dialogues interview. Why is energy the focus of KR Sridhar's mission? "Energy is a passport to a better living. For the rest of the world that doesn't have access to power, to electricity; to give them that is empowering them to a better life. If your solution works and you make it affordable and you distribute it all over the world, then you have definitely changed the world....You give power to the people." What's in the Bloom Box? "It takes the chemical energy from the fuel and converts that to electrons with no in between conversion. So you are changing your currency only once. It's an electro-chemical reaction..like a battery...but the big difference is it's a power generator so you keep supplying the fuel in and you'll keep getting the electrons out - most importantly without combustion. It's a one step conversion... high efficiency...you burn less fuel - less greenhouse gases -and eliminate all the combustion related polluting gases." What's the link with transportation? "Transportation can potentially go in two directions in the future. One is a hydrogen infrastructure for the car, the other one is an electrical infrastructure for the car...plug-in hybrids...Our device can either produce the electricity that'll charge the car or provide you hydrogen if the transportation becomes hydrogen based. So we've sort of become the gas station for the transportation industry." Bloom Energy's road map and schedule "We're building both the bridge and the future destination...There's a sense of urgency, you feel like you need to do it faster than humanly possible. This is a big scale issue. It's not a microchip. These are huge devices and they need to be build in very large quantities...factories, machines for factories. These things don't happen overnight. It's going to be slower than what the bits and bites people in Silicon Valley think because it's not like software that you're just going to copy a million times instantly and distribute...You are not talking about eight quarters. You are talking longer than that." (Note: Bloom Energy filed its first patent in 2003. To check out the patents, click here) What motivates KR? "The driver that makes you wake up in the morning ...comes from something very fundamental. Any parent knows that... anywhere in the world...if there's one thing they have in common: they want a better life for their children than what they had. I deeply believe, unless we solve this energy issue and not make it a zero sum game... then we cannot promise our future generations a better life that what we had." How are the Tennessee trials going? "We're very optimistic about where it's going and we feel very good about where it is and it'll get there." Note: Bloom Energy was Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers' first clean tech investment. Industry reports say the company has received over $250 Million in funding, and is valued at $1.45 Billion but KR advised that reported figures were not accurate. To read this interview transcript click here Alison van Diggelen: I appreciate your taking the time. So let's talk about how affordable it (the Bloom Box) might be...I've read that $10,000 is a target... KR: Don't use any numbers. Alison: Is this all speculation? KR: That's all speculation. So all that I can simply tell you is: if it needs mass market adoption, it needs to be affordable. And affordability is already set in the marketplace because today you buy electrons and you pay a certain price. If I offer you all the advantages of the kind of device I'm talking about, and you have to pay the same price you're paying your local utility, then it's affordable to you. So that goal is there. Our goal is clearly to make it affordable; if it's not affordable, it'll be the niche market, it'll be a Tesla... Alison: Right. And your goal is to make it absolutely affordable? KR: We need it to be a Honda Civic. Alison: A Honda Civic? I like that analogy. That's great. Let's talk about barriers to entry. You're notoriously in stealth mode. Are there high barriers to entry to this? How many Ph.D.s do you have working on it? KR: Absolutely - very high barriers to entry. The high barriers to entry come (from) - it's a very complex interdisciplinary field; it requires knowledge not just in one area, in a significant number of engineering, science, material science disciplines...and the development of all the technology, the process know-how is fairly complex...and a significant amount of capital - and I can't give you the number - that needs to be invested over a long period of time, to get it to where it needs to be. Those become the barriers to entry. But clearly, it's a huge enough market that other people will try. Alison: And how many Ph.D.s do you have on your team, working on this problem? KR: Let's say it's in the hundred range. Alison: It's in the hundred? And I assume, this being Silicon Valley, people from around the world. KR: Around the world. Alison: You're getting the best talent on this problem and they're presumably all sworn to secrecy... KR: They're the best in what they do and that's why they're here. Alison: You filed your first patent in 2003 and I understand there was one filed last year? KR: Mmm-hmm. Alison: Can you describe the trends from 2003 to now? You're obviously a very patient man and you've talked about your motivations, but can you talk about the whole trajectory? In 2003, when you filed that patent, did you think that by September 2009, you'd be in production? KR: We'd roughly laid out this timeline in our very first series of fundraising from our investors. For a project of this timescale, we're probably within two, three quarters of the original projection...and again you need to understand that this is the kind of product that nobody has built before and an industry to support it doesn't exist...So we're not just building a company, we're building all the support infrastructure that needs to be around us. So, given that caveat, if you accept that as the give-or-take, we're on plan. Alison: So there must be growing enthusiasm and excitement in this building? KR: Absolutely. The big thing is the entire Bloom Team, from employees, to investors to board members to everybody else, are real believers in what we do and real believers in the mission of the company. So that alone creates the enthusiasm. Alison: I bet. You've said 'we want our products to speak before we speak.' What do you mean by that? KR: There's been enough hype of people coming and saying 'this is what we will do' ...a lot of them have not come to fruition...That doesn't mean that they did something wrong. It's just a very difficult problem to solve or somebody would have solved this a long time ago. And for us, we just didn't want to add to that hype of coming and saying, 'this is what it'll do.'We first wanted to be sure it works...It's not just that it works, it can be made affordable. It can make a difference. You're creating a business, you're creating an industry, so it needs to work, it needs to be a quality product that has reliability, that people will buy. It needs to be the kind of product that makes a difference in somebody's life to want to buy it. It can be...affordable - there's a value proposition to it - and at that affordability rate, the business can be successful because it's making a profit. Alison: Well KR Sridhar, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for joining me today on Fresh Dialogues. KR: Thank you.
Dr. Sridhar has successfully assembled and led major project teams consisting of strategic consortia of industry, academia, and national labs, and has served as an advisor to NASA. Among his significant projects, Dr. Sridhar helped develop strategic plans for the space agency in the areas of nanotechnology and planetary missions. His work on NASA payloads to Mars which were designed to convert Martian atmospheric gases to oxygen for use in propulsion and life support were recognized by Fortune Magazine, where he was cited as one of the top five futurists that are inventing tomorrow, today. Dr. Sridhar has served on many technical committees, panels and Advisory Boards. He has over fifty publications, and has performed pioneering work in the areas of Space Technology, Microsensors and Devices, Multiphase Flow, and Solid Oxide Electrolysis and Systems, the last of which is the basis of the technology being used at Bloom Energy. Dr. Sridhar received his Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering with Honors from the University of Madras, India, as well as his M.S. in Nuclear Engineering and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Sridhar enjoys interacting with K-12 children and inspiring them to learn math and science. He lives in Los Gatos, California with his wife and two children. |
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KR Sridhar is the principal co-founder and CEO of Bloom Energy. Prior to founding the company, Dr. Sridhar was a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering as well as Director of the Space Technologies Laboratory (STL) at the University of Arizona. Under his leadership, STL won over $20 million in nationally competed R&D contracts. 