When I was a kid, I enjoyed watching Marty McFly traverse time in his DeLorean, powered by a flux capacitor. The flux capacitor was a magical device, the size of a coffee can, that generated the huge amount of power necessary to travel through time. Later, as a fan of Captain Picard's exploits through the universe, I wished that our own space engineers would invent the warp drive, an engine capable of mixing antimatter and dilithium crystals to create a warp field around spacecraft allowing faster-than-light travel. While these breakthrough technologies remain the stuff of science fiction, a 60 Minutes segment last weekend on something called a "Bloom Box" triggered similar flights of fantasy across the blogosphere.

The Bloom Energy Server, as it's officially known, isn't actually a server at all. In press releases, the company's founder (a former NASA rocket scientist) is seen holding a black glossy box that looks like a couple of Mac Minis stacked on top of another. Installed, the fuel cell array resides in a giant outdoor metal box that looks like a power substation. And power is what this server does.

The server is actually a fuel cell array. Fuel cells have been around for over a century, but have never really caught on as a source of electricity because they've traditionally required high heat or high pressure to work, and past designs have relied on expensive precious metals to create the electricity. When automakers first started looking for alternatives to the internal combustion engine, some (Toyota) developed gasoline-battery hybrids, while others (BMW and Mercedes) pursued hydrogen fuel cell technology. The promise of being able to convert abundant hydrogen into electricity, with water the only byproduct, was alluring. The technological and cost hurdles of distributing and storing hydrogen, however, proved formidable. Other than Honda's FCX Clarity fuel cell vehicle in limited production, most automakers have abandoned their fuel cell efforts. Some battery companies are considering fuel cells to power cell phones and laptops, but those efforts are seen as mainly experimental.

The Bloom Energy Server claims to have solved these technological problems in producing green energy. The device doesn't use any precious metals. Instead, it runs on wafers made from beach sand and coated with special inks to create the fuel cells. It still requires fuel, but can run on any number of fuels including regular gasoline, natural gas, or biogas. It has an efficiency factor in excess of 50%, far better than solar, and unlike solar, it can generate electricity on demand. On the negative side, the server is not carbon neutral unless it's fed with biogas.

So what's not to like? Skeptics abound, pointing out that the underlying technology is nothing new. Skeptics also point out that the cost remains high (nearly one million per box) and installation is limited to large companies like eBay and Google for now. Reliability may also be a problem, as temperature and dust seem to shorten the life of the arrays. The company claims it is working through these issues and that with mass manufacturing, it can reduce the size and cost of the array to produce a box that can power a typical home for $3000.

So will a Bloom Energy Server power your data center one day? The promise is certainly great. Imagine a data center totally off the grid, generating clean electricity at much lower cost than grid electricity, with a backyard fuel cell. I don't know the answer to that question. What I do know is that unlike the flux capacitor or warp drive, this thing is real and it's working now. That's reason enough to get really excited about it.