One of the consistently strange things about the green tech world is that people continue to believe that science and technology are all that matter.

It’s just not true. Innovation in business models and in the political realm are at least as important as coming up with a slightly more efficient solar cell — or delivering a slightly improved fuel cell like Bloom Energy appears to have done.

For example, marketing matters! As I noted here on this post about air conditioners and iPhones, advertising and the like can help generate demand for a product that far exceeds how much better something makes your life. And what we saw today was a clinic in marketing. They lined up starpower to appeal to all kinds of audiences from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Google’s Larry Page to Colin Powell. John Doerr might have been asked if Bloom Energy was the next Google, but what that extravaganza really looked like was an Apple event.

In any case, once a new product has succeeded, it begins to reshape buyers’ expectations about future products and services. (There were plenty of touchscreens before the iPhone’s.) Technological momentum builds and next thing you know, there’s a touchscreen on your coffee mug. So, perhaps the greatest service that the Bloom Box could do for green tech would be making distributed generation an expectation for more companies and people. That would be a big societal shift — and one that has always struck me as tougher to make than people think. You grow up with your own well, like I did, and you see the virtues of centralized services. Doing it yourself is a pain in the ass, even if it’s cheaper and/or better in some way.

Of what I’ve seen, Todd Woody’s writeup in the New York Times covered the news best, and this Lux Research post on the “economics of the Bloom Box” is the best analysis piece so far.

Bloom’s Stu Aaron told us that the company intends to produce electricity from natural gas at a lower cost to the customer than the grid. Stu claimed the cost of electricity over the fuel cell’s 10-year life is $0.08/kWh to $0.10/kWh (when running as base-load for 24 hours a day), including government incentives and assuming a $7/mmBTU natural gas long-term contract. Stu also confirmed that the 100 kW fuel cell system’s price without incentives is in the range of $700,000 to $800,000.

The only other piece of analysis I’ll add is a tidbit from the eBay blog post on their boxes. I’ve been wondering about the operation and maintenance costs/difficulties associated with the boxes. eBay says that their five boxes generated 2 million kilowatt-hours in the first six months of operation. That works out to about 93 kilowatt hours per machine per hour. That’s pretty good, falling just a bit short of their 100 kilowatt ratings.