A man who designed a working oxygen farm for Mars turned his efforts toward earth with the new fuel-cell power plant dubbed the Bloom Box.

The idealist genius said reverse engineered his work on the oxygen farm, and instead of pumping out oxygen, he pumped it in and created electrical power.

CBS talked to the man, K.R. Sridhar, and he showed just how straightforward the process was.

Sridhar feeds oxygen to it on one side, and fuel on the other. The two combine within the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity.

There’s no need for burning or combustion, and no need for power lines from an outside source.

The secret to the process is a green and black ink that creates the chemical reaction that produces electricity.

Some huge names are already using the Bloom Boxes, and aside a few hiccups, swear by the new technology.

FedEx installed a mini Bloom Box power plant in Oakland. Walmart did too, and eBay has been using five of the boxes and say they account for 15 percent of power generation on their huge campus. EBay’s CEO said the biogass-powered generators already saved them more than $100,000 in energy costs in just nine months.

Each box costs $700,000 to $800,000, but if it reaches a larger scale, that price will inevitably go down. Since the Bloom Box is a green technology, anyone installing the devices also gets a 30 percent tax break (an additional 20 percent in California); which brings the cost down significantly.

Even skeptics admitted that the technology was a breakthrough. One tried to poo-poo the company by saying that GE would be making the cells instead. But regardless, it works and if it continues to work the Bloom Box could essentially change how power is produced.

Instead of having massive nuclear power plants or valleys filled with solar panels, Sridhar — and the skeptics — say that companies could buy the fuel cell boxes and drop them into a neighborhood and not worry about the failing transmission lines or the gazillion-dollars to update the grid for other green energy.

Sridhar wants to take it a step further, installing boxes the size of a dog at every home. And he wants to sell them for less than $3,000 — about the cost of a low quality, low power wind generator. Because the system can work on just about any gas people could simply install it like they would a new dryer.

I’ll be watching the Bloom Boxes intently as they become a publicly traded company, and I truly hope the device works as well as the designer says. These boxes could be the key to real green energy without having to reinvent the wheel when it comes to infrastructure.

[Via CBS Video | CBS Story]

Related posts:

1. Electric Cars To Sell Unused Energy Back Into Grid?
2. 1816 Sterling Motor May Drive Solar Energy In 2010
3. Google Testing Set-Top Box