Science!

Science, not the kind of science you get from Al Gore and Bill Nye the Science Guy, but honest to goodness, practical, empirical science. Science that could alter the direction of mankind. This $400 million energy project purports to produce clean, cheap power from fuel cells in a box.

Start-up Bloom Energy is unveiling a fuel-cell product Wednesday that can power a small office building. It expects to have home systems within a decade that are about the size of a loaf of bread, it says.

Bloom's technology gives users the ability to produce electricity — as opposed to buying it from utilities — and has the potential to extend electricity to parts of the world lacking traditional power systems and lines, Bloom says.

Bloom CEO KR Sridhar expects home models within 10 years that cost less than $3,000. He says consumers could see the so-called Bloom boxes powering apartment buildings and housing developments before that.

Sridhar, a professor of aerospace engineering who once led a team developing technology to sustain life on Mars for NASA, says utilities could buy the boxes, too, to power neighborhoods.

With Bloom's fuel cell, air and fuel — such as natural gas, ethanol or biogas — are fed into the cell. The oxygen ions react with the fuel to produce electricity. There's no burning, so the fuel cell is two-thirds cleaner than coal-fired plants, Bloom says.

Video HERE