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Bloom Box: cheap and clean energy?
Flapke
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I didn't find a thread about this yet, so here it is.
Bloom Energy had a bit on 60 minutes last Sunday about the Bloom Box, a fuel-cell that apparently is capable of replacing the grid. It's supposed to be cheaper and cleaner.
Interview with the CEO, K.R. Sridhar.
Here is a link which has the 60 minutes bit and this is the company's website. Big announcement tomorrow.
Anyway, I'm highly skeptical every time something like this gets announced, but if all these big companies are already using this tech, they get $400M in investments and Colin Powell is working with these guys...man I don't know..
Bloom Energy had a bit on 60 minutes last Sunday about the Bloom Box, a fuel-cell that apparently is capable of replacing the grid. It's supposed to be cheaper and cleaner.
Interview with the CEO, K.R. Sridhar.
Here is a link which has the 60 minutes bit and this is the company's website. Big announcement tomorrow.
Anyway, I'm highly skeptical every time something like this gets announced, but if all these big companies are already using this tech, they get $400M in investments and Colin Powell is working with these guys...man I don't know..
Flapke on
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How does that work though?
But it does have a number of pluses, so I hope they are able to sell this to a number of companies so that the cost can go down.
So as near as I can tell it works like this:
1. Bake a ceramic wafer
2. Paint one side with special sauce A
3. Paint the other side with special sauce B
4. Stack a bunch of wafers together.
5. Feed gas (or biofuel) to one side of the stack
6. Feed oxygen to the other side of the stack
7. Electricity and various waste gases come out
Fuel cells are not a new idea, so it's that special sauce that more or less makes the fuel allegedly more efficient at creating "green" electricity. How efficient and how green are the things that remain to be seen.
$400 MILLION dollars is a lot of investor money to come up with special sauce. Then you have the gall to charge clients $700k or more for each unit. Ebay bought a few(?) and "saved" $100k in electricity costs in the first year. At that rate it will take them at least 10 years to break even. Will they last that long?
The cost of these units is going to have to drop dramatically for anyone other than a mega-corporation to care about them. In the meantime, the dude that looks like M. Night Shyamalan has a swimming pool full of money.
But this just sounds like a really fucking advanced battery to me.
It was just painfully awful.
60 minutes is just a terrible show, and I hope that vacuous bint Lesley Stahl needs to stay far away from any stories that rely on a knowledge of basic science or how reality works.
GT: Tanky the Tank
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Yes it is, but the idea is that it's more efficient than an ordinary power-plant and thus cleaner.
A non-60 minutes article I read mentioned something about it requiring fuel and O2, and the waste gases changing via what the fuel input was, but that if they were hydrocarbons that yes it'd be CO2.
tl;dr: Good idea for the US, where moving from coal-fired power generation to natural gas would be an effective environmental measure. Less good idea in Europe, where we're already over-dependent on natural gas for power and heat, from unstable supplies with wildly fluctuating prices.
Running them on biogas or bioethanol would be a possibility, but there isn't enough of either about for it to be a major component of energy demand.