Oxygen and natural gas are utilized by a fuel cell, Bloom Box, to make electricity. You may 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. Numerous companies already use this unit that is stand-alone to help with energy. Bloom Box may just replace power plants and transmission lines of the energy grid, says Bloom Energy. Before any person will really get the Bloom Box though, the price must come down.
9 months of utilizing Bloom Box saves eBay $ 100,000
Bloom Box took forever to create. About 10 years were used. Company Founder, K.R. Stridhar raised $ 400 million for technology. This was shown within the “60 Minutes” feature on Bloom Energy on Sunday. The Bloom Box holds a stack of ceramic discs coated with secret formulas on each side. One side holds natural gas. The other side actually has oxygen. The disk creates an electro-chemical reaction between the two elements to produce power. The taller the stack, the more power is generated. 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 along with a 30 percent federal tax break for clean energy cuts the $ 800,000 price in half. Bloom Boxes running on carbon-neutral bio-gas were sold to eBay’s CEO, John Donahoe. They were installed 9 months ago and, as outlined by CBS News, have saved eBay more than $ 100,000 in electricity already.
Will the electrical grid go the way of the mainframe?
Stridhar told Newsweek that the Bloom Box could replace the power plants and transmission lines of the electrical grid like personal computers exchanged mainframes. He said companies like Google, a Bloom Energy customer, have small servers ganged up in groups of thousands to create huge data centers. Bloom Boxes can be clustered the exact same way to create energy farms. Stridhar said that Bloom Box may only be sold right now because of subsidies. But economies of scale could bring the price down to about a $ 3,000 investment for a household installation. When volume doubles, price could go down. It will likely go down 10 to 15 percent every time.
Fuel cell market info
There should be more of a demand for Bloom box soon. A report on the global fuel cell market by GBI Research published on altenergymag.com said that advancing technology and increasing demand will bring the cost of fuel cells down. The price will allow fuel cells to become commercialized by 2013. Freedonia Group did a report in 2008 showing that through 2012, fuel cell demand will go up six fold to $ 975 million. Using fuel cells for electric power generation was expected to grow 41 percent a year in that time frame.
Further 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
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