Does the Bloom Box Signal the Future of Cleantech?
By John Elkington
It’s always hyper-stimulating to be in California, even when its public finances are in disarray. I love watching venture capitalists work themselves into frenzies about the latest breakthrough, be it Dean Kamen’s Segway, Steve Jobs’ iPad or K.R. Sridhar’s ‘Bloom Box’—a low-carbon fuel cell system hailed as the most radical technology to have come out of Silicon Valley since the personal computer.
Well maybe: only time will tell whether Bloom Energy will fulfill the wet dreams of its backers, including legendary venture capitalist John Doerr. The initial signs are certainly promising: among customers already signed up are Coca-Cola, eBay, FedEx, Google and Wal-Mart. And at the heart of the Bloom Box system, the current version of which weighs 10 tons and costs around $800,000, may lurk the seeds of an array of future low-carbon solutions.
Travelling around Silicon Valley in February—I admit it—I inhaled. The atmosphere spoke of a heady mix of heroics, hype and hope. And nowhere was this more intoxicating than at the sixteenth Cleantech Forum, held in San Francisco on 24-26 February. After trekking through the ‘Valley of Death’, as Cleantech Group President Sheeraz Haji put it, many cleantech firms now see operating conditions improving—not least because of the $512 billion in direct government stimulus funding. That’s the good news. The bad news (for the US at least) is that China’s $200 billion cleantech stimulus led the pack, with China and Hong Kong accounting for 69% of cleantech investment last year.
I was roaming the Valley with a group of founders, CEOs and senior executives of nineteen UK cleantech companies taking part in the first government-backed Clean & Cool Mission. And it was striking how “sustainability” was the pretty much universal mantra, whether we went to giant companies like HP, San Francisco’s City Hall, leading change agents like Arup or IDEO, or early stage companies like Better Place or Serious Materials.
Hallelujah!
Even wearing corrective lenses, it is clear that great economic tectonic plates are now moving—with key drivers including climate change, energy security and water scarcity. Cleantech Group Executive Chairman Nick Parker warned Forum participants that “creative destruction is accelerating.” In 1960, Standard & Poor’s listed companies lasted an average forty years, which had halved to twenty years by 2000—and the turnover rate is now 10% a year. Who, he wondered aloud, would be tomorrow’s “clean chips”?
Major corporations now use the Forum to scout for succulent new start-ups. This year’s most striking seduction effort came from Veolia Environnement. Senior Vice President Philippe Martin announced their new Innovation Accelerator, saying he expected to be joined on the Forum platform in 2011 by the CEOs of at least four new cleantech firms Veolia will be working with by then. He was mobbed as he came off the stage. All well and good, but as cleantech Davids clamber into bed with corporate Goliaths, we need to keep our wits about us, ensuring that these ill-matched relationships truly serve the sustainability agenda.
About John Elkington
John Elkington is Executive Chairman and co-founder of Volans. His seventeenth book, published by Harvard Business Press in 2009, is The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World. His personal website is http://www.johnelkington.com.
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