The world woke up to an energy revolution this week thanks to the Arnie-backed launch of Bloom Energy, a firm based in Sunnyvale, California, whose fuel cells rapidly gained huge publicity and created much excitement.

What makes this particularly interesting is that the main material which has led to this groundbreaking discovery is one that has been used for hundreds of years, ceramics. When ceramic porcelain was first discovered it was as impressive as a Bloom Energy fuel cell would be to anyone today. This really was a groundbreaking discovery and revolution in materials and the manufacturing of them into different useful items such as pottery.

Solid technology

The technology that's causing such excitement looks unspectacular: a chunk of ceramic. But such solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) can efficiently combine everyday fossil-fuel natural gas with oxygen from the air – without burning – to generate electricity on a small scale. That offers a way to meet a building's demand for power without losing energy to heat and friction in a conventional power plant or to transmission losses in a national grid.

Bloom claims its boxes can half a building's carbon footprint, a figure backed up by many familiar with such fuel cells. They are impressively compact, but so are most SOFCs. Inside is a chunk of ceramic which acts as an electrolyte, allowing ions to transfer between air and fuel, pushing power around an external circuit.

Temperature limbo

Ceres Power in Crawley, is another manufacturer of SOFC’s, but have taken this a step further by reducing the temperature required SOFC’s, thereby saving power . These operate below 600 °C, because they use an electrolyte that works at lower temperatures than those used by Bloom.

That's low enough for the device to be held together with steel welds. "That was a real 'Aha!' moment," says Peter Bance of Ceres. "We don't rely on the ceramics for support – we can use steel."

A porous steel sheet at the cell's heart is printed with ultra-thin layers of ceramic anode, electrolyte, and cathode. Home boilers powered by the cells are cheap enough to begin rolling them out in their thousands this year, the start of a four-year programme to install 37,500 in the homes of customers of the UK's biggest energy supplier, British Gas. The technology could, says Bance, "almost make your electricity bill disappear".

MAKE International runs a successful internet store, specialising in designer porcelain pottery, china pottery and all sorts of other ceramics pottery.