Energy Bloom
At first glance, Bloom Box seems impossibly brilliant. Natural gas has been used to produce power for long, but here is a device with a twist. Unlike the traditional plants where the gas is used to turn the turbine, Bloom Box mixes it with air and directly produces power leading to a better conversion rate! Thus this device, unveiled in February 2010, strikes that elusive balance between environment-friendliness and cost. At 9 cents a unit (after incentives), it is cheaper than conventional thermal power and causes much less pollution. Walk into the California campuses of companies like Google, eBay, Fedex or Wal-Mart and you’ll see gleaming boxes of “Bloom Energy Servers” — essentially hundreds of Bloom’s proprietary solid-oxide fuel cell plates housed inside sealed enclosures — quietly making the world a more ‘power’ful place.
A Trip into Space
Even as the US Space Shuttle Program wound down, 2010 saw a revival of commercial interest in manned space flights. Three big moves signalled a revival: One, the successful test flight of Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship 2, a six-passenger ship for sub-orbital flights at $200,000. Two, Space Adventures — a US firm that has taken seven passengers to space on the Soyuz flights — signed up with Boeing to take passengers to the International Space Station. Three, in July, American startup Bigelow Aerospace that builds expandable space modules, joined hands with Boeing to build a low-earth commercial space station.
(This story appears in the 31 December, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)