I thought I should drop the hatchet on Bloom Energy before they drop the bomb with the unveiling of their new clean energy fuel cell the Bloom Box this Wednesday. If you need to know a little more about the Bloom Box and Bloom energy, you should watch this video (http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6228923n) from Monday night's episode of 60 Minutes. Seriously,,, watch it then read on. (So fitting to be sponsored by Pfizer, biggest scam of the human species).
So what's the scam right? If these Bloom Boxes are a scam and they don't work then no one will buy them,,, so the scam will be over almost as soon as it starts; not too much harm, not too much foul. Perhaps not the case? Part of the scam is that I think these things actually work (meaning they run more efficiently than our community/state coal burning facilities and are cheaper to run than paying for energy from the grid), and so does Mr. John Doerr (he's the Gandolf-like character that is about to unfold in this story, he discovered and funded Netscape, Amazon and Google), and with the help of 60 Minutes,,, so will you. 60 Minutes brings this amazing breakthrough in energy production to the mainstream *investing* public. OK, so it sounds good, but the best scams are complex and this one has 2 parts.
Part one is financial. The seed has already been planted on 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes reports a single Bloom Box costs about $700,000 but John Doerr (the wizard) thinks he can reduce that cost to as low as $3000 in the next 5 to 10 year time frame. This last sentence (the spell) does two things: it assures investors that this is both an advanced technology because crappy tech doesn't cost 3 quarters of a million dollars per unit,,, AND it ensures that this advanced technology will be brought to people's homes in the next 5 to 10 years at a price the lower-middle class could afford. For those of you who don't invest regularly, 5 year and 10 year prospectus of stocks are very important for long-term lazy investors, in fact they are often all that novice investors look at when investing. An investor that doesn't want to work the stock market on a daily basis likes to find good steady growth over 5 or 10 years. John Doerr is basically saying the 10 year prospectus for Bloom Energy looks really good. And it will look good (perfectly timed juxtaposed against our currently failing market); you know and use Google because Mr. Doerr and Google both did what they said they would.
So you might be thinking you don't see the scam. It's true, technology-wise and financial-wise we are not being scammed quite yet. It's part two, the execution of the scam that hits us pretty hard: ecological impact. Bloom Energy and the Bloom Box would be successful no matter what happened at this time. They have a product that not only is assumed to work but is much more efficient than our current energy grid. Bloom Energy does not need a wizard (John Doerr) to make money and be successful. However, if they want to make ungodly amounts of money and rule the world,,, it helps to have a wizard to cast a few spells. While Bloom Boxes cost $700,000 they will only be bought by large corporations like Walmart, Ebay, and your local energy companies,,, during this time people like you and me will only be able to invest in these companies and the corporation Bloom Energy. Let's say in 10 years the Bloom Box does drop to $3000, then today's investors will also become owners of a Bloom Box. Sounds killer but there is a catch.
A Bloom Box is presented as a more efficient and compact way to produce usable energy. When compared to our current grid, the Bloom Box allows more efficient energy at a lower cost to be made and used. This is fine if only the largest top 500 companies used Bloom Boxes, it's more efficient than the energy they were using before the Bloom Box. But once you put many Bloom Boxes at every company in America (corporations and startups), and 1 or 2 at every home in America, the efficiency is lost. The total net emissions for all Bloom Box units at that scale will completely out-weigh the current emissions of our old grid (this is speculative of course, but I think it makes a good argument,,, at least good enough for someone smarter than me to crunch the numbers and do some possible comparisons). This scam has a quick financial turnaround and a slow ecological turnaround, which means it is perfect to exploit and capitalize on.
It's cool that Bloom Energy has created this advanced technology. We should embrace it and ask our energy companies to get on board and use Bloom Boxes to power the grid. This will make our monthly energy bills more affordable and we can sleep better at night knowing that the grid is running cleaner than it used to; perhaps stop using coal all together in the US. That's not a scam,,, everyone wins; people get a better product, Bloom Energy capitalizes in an acceptable way, America energy becomes cleaner, and nothing is exploited. Most importantly the wizard goes home and the investors looking for easy money look elsewhere (or they buy PG&E stock, after PG&E purchases a ton of Bloom Boxes, and cross their fingers).
We can't let this scam work. Scams are bad, it's that simple. Don't invest when Bloom Energy unveils on Weds,,, they first need to adjust their deployment strategy before our culture should be on board. And don't buy a Bloom Box when the price is reduced in 10 years. This is a dangerous scam. This scam will cost us our ecosystem at a time when we need to be working harder to preserve it. As a final note I do think Bloom Boxes are a good step if implemented properly and used in the correct manner, however we should not waiver from our ultimate energy goal, which is ironically pointed out at the beginning of the 60 Minutes report: "The Holy Grail is a power source that is inexpensive, clean, with no emissions." This goal is out there it just requires the involvement of our entire American culture, not just a few scientists with a price tag and our pocket books. This holy grail will be discussed in my next post.
By the way, in case you are curious,,, in this story K. R. Sridhar, Bloom Box creator, is Frodo,,, and Michael Kanellos, the skeptic,is definitely portrayed as Gollum.
*FYI, I am not qualified to give investment advice, these thoughts are just speculation based on my opinion. I think the scam could go a couple ways: investors will turn a quick profit and pull out in less than a year since the Bloom Box proves not to work as advertised, and the company goes down in flames,,, or investors stick it out for 10 years because of the success of the Bloom Box, and the slow destruction of our ecosystem speeds up just a little more. Either way I'm bummed at the end of the day/5 to 10 year time frame.
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