Rumors circulating through the venture investment circles hint that Bloom Energy Corp. is currently raising another $150 million in funding. If they’re successful, the 11 year-old company will have a valuation of $3 billion, despite the fact that the average market capitalization of publicly traded energy storage and stationary power companies is only $433.5 million.

These massive numbers probably have you wondering who the heck Bloom Energy Corp. is and why so many investors are throwing money at them. Good question. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company specializes in fuel cells that turn natural gas into power.

Now, at first glance that doesn’t sound too impressive. Or clean. Most of us have encountered gas-powered generators that do that same thing. The difference is that Bloom’s fuel cells don’t actually burn the fuel. The company’s patented solid oxide fuel cell technology converts fuel into electricity through a clean electro-chemical process rather than dirty combustion. This design allows the Bloom energy servers to convert fuel into electricity at nearly twice the rate of some legacy technologies, and it works just as well with biofuels.

Each Bloom Energy Server provides 200kW of power, enough to meet the baseload needs of 160 average homes or an office building… day and night, right on site and in roughly the footprint of a standard parking space. For more power, all a consumer needs to do is simply add more energy servers.

In early 2006 Bloom shipped its first 5kW field trial unit to the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. After two years of successful field trials in Tennessee, California, and Alaska, to validate the technology, the first commercial (100kW) products were shipped to Google in July 2008. Other clients include Wal-Mart, Bank of America, NASA, and eBay. Since that initial commercial installation, Bloom Energy has produced more than 100 million kilowatt hours for its customers and reduced their carbon footprints by over 140 million lbs.

According to Gigaom, the company could potentially be a game changer for distributed cleaner power generation with its more efficient more well designed fuel cell, but it continues to need lots of capital to scale up manufacturing so that fuel cells can be available and cost-effective on a commercial scale. And that’s where all this money comes in.

The company broke ground on a new factory on the east coast at the University of Delaware’s campus in Newark, Delaware, and recently scored a deal to build one of the world’s largest fuel cell farms for Apple in Maiden, North Carolina.

Photo Credits: Bloom Energy