There is no small irony that the future for a Silicon Valley “unicorn” – a tech company valued at over $1 billion – is squarely aligned with the fortunes and technologies of shale gas production and pipelines. A compare-and-contrast with Tesla’s IPO and markets are illuminating.
Let’s start with the obvious. If you are amongst those who bought stock in Tesla at its IPO in 2010, you’ve seen a 15-fold gain. Ain’t hindsight wonderful? That’s the kind of story founders and investors dream about. The jury is out on Tesla’s future, but its history and impact are indisputable. Credit Elon Musk with inspiring nearly every automaker to produce an electric model.
This week the market greets another and long-anticipated energy-tech IPO with Bloom Energy seeking to raise $250 million at a market value of around $1.6 billion; numbers essentially identical to Tesla in 2010. In the yin-yang of energy realities; Bloom Energy’s fuel cells use natural gas to make electricity, meanwhile Tesla’s cars use electricity to virtue signal. (I know, a cheap shot; but some truth.) Will Bloom perform like Tesla? And will KR Sridhar, Bloom’s CEO, similarly ignite competition in fuel cells? We’ll soon see.
Neither Bloom nor Tesla were first to market with their respective technologies. Indeed, the underlying technology for Bloom and Tesla emerge from similarly old foundations. Battery-powered cars predate the internal combustion engine, and the fuel cell predates Thomas Edison’s first generating station by almost a half-century. That both batteries and fuel cells are finally practical at scale emerges from the long march of critical advances in basic materials sciences. Tesla can now ride the new abundance of lithium battery chemistry while Bloom rides the transformative abundance of natural gas from shale. Yes, Bloom is a Silicon Valley company, but its S1 properly notes the latter reality.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Forbes
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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. In 2016, he was named “Energy Writer of the Year” by the American Energy Society. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Forbes