Alumnus KR Sridhar's company fueling massive eBay facility

As reported in Forbes and described in detail in a new eBay blog post, the company's new data center in Salt Lake City will use fuel cell servers from Bloom Energy as the primary power source. Five banks of these servers (30 units in all)  will provide six of the eight megawatts of power needed to run the facility.

KR Sridhar (MSNE ’84, PhDME ’90), the founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, wants to provide clean, reliable, and affordable electricity to everyone in the world.

“We need a paradigm shift for energy,” he said.

The paradigm that Sridhar advocates is distributed generation, where electricity is produced at or near where it is used. But unlike some renewable solutions like wind turbines and solar panels, which produce energy only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, Bloom Energy has created servers with a footprint the size of a parking space that produce 100kW of power, enough to meet the baseload needs of 100 average homes or a small office building 24/7.

The servers, known as Bloom boxes, are filled with thousands of individual, patented fuel cells. Each fuel cell is a thin (150 microns), four-square-inch ceramic substrate coated with proprietary inks. Oxygen enters the cell from one side and fuel from the other side. An electrochemical reaction inside the cell converts the fuel and oxygen into electricity. The fuel source can be natural gas or biogas.

A single fuel cell square produces about 25 watts of electricity, or enough to power a light bulb, making it a simple building block. Using an inexpensive metal alloy between each square, Bloom can stack the squares into a device the size of a bread loaf to produce one kilowatt of energy. Stacking 25 one-kilowatt devices together produces 25 kilowatts, and so on.

According to Sridhar, Bloom chose this modular approach because it is quick and easy to install the energy servers.

“If you can install a power plant for someone in a few hours, think about how important that is,” Sridhar said.

Sridhar and his company were featured in a “60 Minutes” report that aired in 2010.

Some of this information was published previously on mechse.illinois.edu.