In the world of energy, the Holy Grail is a power source that's inexpensive and clean, with no emissions. Well over 100 start-ups in Silicon Valley are working on it, and one of them, Bloom Energy, is about to make public its invention: a little power plant-in-a-box they want to put literally in your backyard.

You'll generate your own electricity with the box and it'll be wireless. The idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines.

Two boxes can power the average high-consumption home and one box can power the average low-consumption home, at least that's the claim being made by K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, on the 60 Minutes show on CBS. The original technology comes from an oxygen generator meant for a scrapped NASA Mars program that has been converted, with the help of an estimated $400 million in private funding, into a fuel cell.

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