Electricity could be made by Bloom Box which is a fuel cell using oxygen and natural gas. You could have seen Bloom Energy’s Bloom Box on “60 Minutes” Sunday. September 1 is when it is actually available. An “energy server” is what Bloom Energy calls the Bloom Box saying it is clean, reliable and affordable power. Energy needs are met for large corporations by this stand-alone unit already. Bloom Energy also advertised that power plants and transmission lines of the energy grid won’t need to be used with the Bloom Box. However, like other fuel cells developed thus far, the price has to come way down before the Bloom Box could be considered practical.
$ 100,000 saved in 9 months by eBay with Bloom Box
10 years were used to make Bloom Box. Business Founder, K.R. Stridhar raised $ 400 million for technology. This was shown in the “60 Minutes” feature on Bloom Energy on Sunday. The Bloom Box has ceramic discs in them. These discs have secret formulas on them. A fuel source like natural gas goes in one side and oxygen on the other. There is an electro-chemical response because of the disks. When the elements react, power is created. More power comes with more discs. Just 64 disks in a Bloom Box is enough energy to keep a Starbucks running. Twenty companies in California are using Bloom Boxes, where a 20 percent state subsidy plus a 30 percent federal tax break for clean energy cuts the $ 800,000 price in half. More than $ 100,000 was saved be eBay, reports eBay’s CEO, John Donahoe, who told CBS the business installed five Bloom Boxes that run on carbon-neutral bio-gas from landfill waste.
Is the electrical grid going to be swapped out?
Stridhar told Newsweek the Bloom Box could replace the power plants and transmission lines of the electrical grid like personal computers exchanged mainframes. Google uses Bloom Energy and has servers ganged together to make huge data centers. Energy farms can do this too with Bloom Box. Subsidies may be the only reason Bloom Box is selling. Stridhar even said this. Economists of scale say the price could be as low as $ 3,000 for each installation in a household. The cost goes down 10 to 15 percent each time volume doubles.
Fuel cell market info
There ought to be more of a demand for Bloom box soon. GBI Research published a report on the global fuel cell market on altenergy.com. This report showed that fuel cell costs will go down when demand increases and technology goes up. 2013 may be when fuel cells could become commercialized. This would be because of price drops. A 2008 report by Freedonia Group said that U.S. commercial fuel cell demand will expand nearly sixfold through 2012 to $ 975 million. There is an expected rate of growth in that time frame of those using electricity coming from fuel cells. That rate is a 41 percent growth.
Additional reading
CBS News
cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/18/60minutes/main6221135_page2.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody
Newsweek
newsweek.com/2010/04/22/this-is-brand-new.html
Altenenergymag
altenergymag.com/emagazine.php?art_id=1468
