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Bloom Unveils Its Game Changing Energy Box
- ableal 17y agoThey really blew out all the stops in publicizing this ... Just the facts: http://bloomenergy.com/products/data-sheet/ http://bloomenergy.com/products/data-sheet/ Seems the 'box' we discussed a couple of days ago does output 25 kW (I had guessed 30 kW, based on a 10c/kW back-of-the-envelope calculation).
- snewe 17y agoInteresting note: "Includes a secure website for you to showcase performance & environmental benefits."
- pkulak 17y agoThey say that 1 KW will power the average US home, hu? Yeah, so long as all heating is natural gas and no one ever turns on a hair dryer. Maybe they were talking about averaged load? But then they seem to have left out the 4 tonnes of lead-acid batteries you'll need.
- teilo 17y agoI believe the idea here is not that a single 1KW stack would be used to power a home, but that several homes would run off of a single 25KW module, so that you only need to accomodate their collective peak requirements
- andreyf 17y agoA well-sized electric furnace will use more than 25kW in one home alone: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html
- houseabsolute 17y agoPresumably if you can get the natural gas to the box, you can get it into home furnaces as well.
- andrewcooke 17y agoif you don't all get up and shower at the same time...
- teilo 17y agoLet's consider this system in the context of the USA, where we have massive amounts of natural gas, but no efficient way to turn it into electricity. Existing turbine systems waste gas two ways: The inefficiency of combustion turbines, and transmission loss. Now, if we were to bolster our existing natural gas transmission infrastructure in order to support fuel cell technologies, we can presume that heating will continue to be provided by combustion heat exchange systems such as gas furnaces and water heaters. Additionally, there are other ways we can generate fuel which can equally be used in combustion heat exchange and fuel cells. Chief among them is our garbage, much of which can be transformed into raw materials for methane production. Yeah, I know, the AGW folks will be crying foul on this one. I'm going to ignore them for the sake of this argument. Now, even if you do not eliminate entirely the heavily centralized form of electricity production which we use now, you have dramatically reduced the load on the system as a whole by localizing power production in small modules everywhere. The result: say goodbye to rolling blackouts and cascading grid failures.
- andrewcooke 17y agoyes, and more generally making things hot is easy (efficient). so it's normally pretty stupid to use electricity for this (you would be better burning whatever you used to make electricity directly). [edit - ah, i see that they are hoping to use the "waste" heat to get the overall efficiency up]
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- eru 17y agoAgreed. But --- who heats with electricity? (Heat pumps can be a good idea, though.)
- pkulak 17y agoI use a heat pump. It's 55 degrees outside right now, so I'm not using much electricity. I doubt I'd save any money heating with gas.
- eru 17y ago"Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" (http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c7/page_50.shtml http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c7/page_50....) also seems to favour heat pumps.
- MikeCapone 17y agoDepends where you are. In Quebec, about 90% of the electricity comes from hydro, and it's pretty cheap. A lot of people (more than half, I think) heat their houses with electricity.
- erreon 17y agoIn South Texas a lot of the houses are heated with electricity. In my parents neighborhood they don't even have natural gas available to the houses at all.
- Vivtek 17y agoI do, partly. Especially nice in the bathroom.
- holygoat 17y agoMy shitty uninsulated California house is entirely heated by electricity. Only the water tank is heated by gas. Managed to break $400 for December's heating bill. I damn near lost my shit.
- tonystubblebine 17y agoCould somebody help with some background on the science? What strikes me as odd is that you put fuel in the fuel cell. One of the examples they give is using these to charge your hyrbid car. So, by the transitive property, aren't you putting fuel into your car? I guess I'm trained to think of alternative energy sources like sun and wind, so I'm thrown off here. What's the innovation? I can see that you're generating electricity locally, which I guess means we could get energy to places without running power lines. But reading the article, that doesn't seem like the point of these. The article does claim that the energy is more efficient than what you get on the grid. But if that's the case, why don't we just put a ton of these onto the grid and push down the cost of electricity for everyone?
- mrtron 17y agoFor your car example: You would have to put some fuel like natural gas into your car. This would be converted to electricity. The innovation is it would not be converted from fuel to mechanical energy (motor spinning) to electricity, but rather by a more efficient fuel cell. That is a big game changer.
- mbreese 17y agoYou put in a hydrogen source... in this case, likely natural gas. It combines with oxygen from the air in a process that yields electricity, water, and a small amount of CO2. The key benefit is that the fuel isn't burned. It's converted chemically, so it is a very efficient process. They have a good flash video explaining it here: http://bloomenergy.com/products/solid-oxide-fuel-cell-animation/ http://bloomenergy.com/products/solid-oxide-fuel-cell-animat...
- beambot 17y agoAny idea about the relative efficiencies between this chemical reaction versus a thermodynamic process (say, Sterling Engine)?
- pingswept 17y agoI don't think there's a clear winner yet. The devil is in the details, as they say. A good Stirling engine will beat a lousy fuel cell, and a good fuel cell will beat a lousy Stirling engine. Both are in the range of 20-50% when implemented well, but they both have lots of problems. Fuel cells, for example, typically have a membrane at their core; that membrane tends to get clogged with crud. Stirling engines, on the other hand, are generally heavy (and thus expensive) and need to use exotic materials to handle high temperatures, which they need to operate efficiently.
- m_eiman 17y agoThey have created 11,000,000 kilowatts so far. Are they saying that they've generated 11GWh, or that they've produced cells that continuously generate 11GW?
- MaysonL 17y ago> 11 M KWH (>11 GWH), according to a slide shot on engadget's coverage
- DannoHung 17y agoThe most interesting claim is that it's a reversible reaction. This explains the "it runs on solar" comment in that it can be used in place of batteries or a flywheel to store energy by turning the excess load back into fuel during peak generation from solar/wind and then expend it later.
- bbot 17y agoThe claim is "interesting " insofar as it is astoundingly unlikely, and almost certainly untrue. The chemistry of solid oxide fuel cells are well understood. It only works one way. They don't produce hydrogen when you feed them voltage. It's like spinning the flywheel on a car engine backwards, and expecting gasoline to pour back into the fuel tank.
- ashishbharthi 17y agoAs they mentioned it can work on variety of fuel sources, they can probably create Gasoline -> Fuel Cell -> Electricity -> Motor type powertrain and create very efficient cars like 100mi/1gallon or something.
- bbot 17y agoDoubtful. Solid oxide fuel cells are very efficient, but have lousy power density. A big cabinet full of Bloom fuel cells does 25 kilowatts. That's a lot of electricity, but it's only 33 horsepower. You would need two cabinets and a bank of capacitors, for lousy performance. Then you would need a tank of compressed natural gas, which also doesn't have awesome power density numbers, after you spend the power to compress it. And, of course, solid oxide fuel cells aren't a turn-the-key-and-go kind of power source. They run at 1000C, and take an hour to get that warm, all while burning fuel. More general concerns: It's supposed to be multi-fuel, and is designed for third world use. But solid oxide fuel cells are notorious for having problems with catalyst poisoning. How have they solved that? They mention that it's reversible, in that it can take air and electricity, and produce fuel. This is troubling, in that it is utter bullshit. No fuel cell can do this. And of course, how is this green? It burns natural gas! It may be greener than a gas turbine power plant, but it still produces carbon dioxide.
- tjmc 17y agoQuestion for mods - why was bbot's reply here and elsewhere on this thread killed? Both times he's simply raised the very valid point that fuel cells don't run backwards. There are some woefully uninformed comments on this thread already. A little education would help.
- hendler 17y agoFuel Cells and Proton Exchange Membranes often use Platinum or Palladium as a catalyst - which is very expensive. Bloom's box uses something cheaper. The science/tech is used in a lot of places you might not expect, like submarines too. It can be the most efficient way to generate and process hydrogen as well. For example, if you put enough solar panels/wind turbines to power the United States - you would invest so much in power lines, and so much would be lost in transmission, that it's not economic. Fuel cells can generate hydrogen from water at the point of generation - I believe more efficiently than electrolysis. Then the hydrogen could be transported similarly to CNG. Then Hydrogen can be "burned" or run the other direction through the Fuel Cell. The politics and economics are becoming more favorable. Glad to see coverage on Mashable.
- dantheman 17y agoHas anyone seen anything about costs? That actually lists dollar amounts? I know this isn't vaporware (it's running at a few companies), but I until we know how much it costs it doesn't really matter.
- blhack 17y ago$800,000 per unit. They hope to get it to ~$3000 in the next 5 years.
- dantheman 17y agoExcellent -- ~3k is a price that makes me happy, 800k not so much. Let's hope as they move out prototyping to the assembly line they're able to achieve the economies of scale they're looking for.
- clistctrl 17y agohaha, sounded like 800k was the price for the huge box (the kind ebay is running) and $3000 is the price of one big enough to run your home.
- kreneskyp 17y agoThats what they originally stated in the 60 minutes story. $3000 isn't bad. If what they are claiming is true then you would pay it off in less than 5 years and then have reduced electricity afterwards. Throw in an electric car and you've seriously reduced your fuel costs.
- jws 17y agoGrinding some numbers: The data sheet says 661000 btu/hr of fuel to run at 100kw. 100kwh is 341,230 btu, so it looks like about 50% efficiency from shipped hyrdocarbon source to electricity on site. Very good. On the american house using 1kw, that is obviously not a peak. At 8 cents/kwh, a 1kw average use house has a $57/mo electric bill. Looking at my bills I can only presume they counted a lot of small apartments and homeless people in cardboard boxes in the average.
- hop 17y agoFuel required @ rated power: 0.661 MMBtu/hr of natural gas. Rated power output (AC): 100 kW Figure fuel costs of $10 per MMBtu. So it pumps out 100kW/hr electricity for $6.60. ~$0.09/kWh for electricity in Oregon (its double that for NYC). So we pay about $9 for 100kW/hr. Thats a 30% savings in Oregon and about 70% for the East Coast. But it still releases a lot of CO2 - 773 lbs/MW-hr. http://www.bloomenergy.com/products/data-sheet/ http://www.bloomenergy.com/products/data-sheet/ So if you ran one straight for a year and you used all its output, it would save $20k-$40k depending on electricity prices. So if they can get the price sub $100k and natural gas supply and price stays even, they could sell a lot of them.
- dantheman 17y agoNatural Gas Figures for US (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...) Natural gas - production: 582.2 billion cu m (2008 est.) country comparison to the world: 2 Natural gas - consumption: 657.2 billion cu m (2008 est.) country comparison to the world: 1 Natural gas - exports: 28.49 billion cu m (2008 est.) country comparison to the world: 10 Natural gas - imports: 112.7 billion cu m (2008 est.) country comparison to the world: 1 Natural gas - proved reserves: 6.731 trillion cu m (1 January 2009 est.) country comparison to the world: 5
- timdorr 17y agoDoes that say we have a little more than 10 years of natural gas left that we know about? Or is that just in the reserve tanks?
- SpacemanSpiff 17y agoSo forgive me if this sounds jaded, but I fail to see how this technology is a "game changer." 1. Based on the EIA Annual Energy Review 2001 transmission losses only account for 3.1% of total power generation in the U.S. 2. A modern, large gas combined-cycle power plant has a quoted efficiency of over 60% http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/power-generation/power-plants/gas-fired-power-plants/combined-cycle-power-plant-concept/scc5-8000h-1s.htm http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/power-generation/power-p... 3. From the presentation: "The carbon footprint is 50% cleaner than the grid and 100% renewable" Wait a minute, if the power generation is truly renewable, then how can it have a carbon footprint at all (other than manufacture etc.)? Isn't the whole point of renewable energy to have a perpetually renewing "closed system"? By that definition then the carbon footprint would be tiny compared to the grid. The reason they say 50% is probably because they are thinking most people will run the units from gas, but that's definitely not renewable. Also, I can't imagine the efficiency of the unit is much higher than 50-60%, but maybe there's some data on that which I have missed. 4. "They have created 11,000,000 kilowatts so far" How much of this is from the burning of fossil fuels versus renewable fuel sources? I am all for fuels cells and development of renewable energy. I think what would truly be a "game changer" is if this device could be used to store the cyclical output from a local renewable energy power system - for example store the energy created during the day from a PV installation for use at night. In my opinion this is more "green washing" than green. edit: formatting
- wooster 17y ago> Isn't the whole point of renewable energy to have a perpetually renewing "closed system"? Nope. Renewable just means the energy source can be replenished. Technically, charcoal would fall in this category, even though it has a pretty hefty C02 output.
- SpacemanSpiff 17y agoThat's exactly my point. The process of growing the trees that produce the charcoal should remove as much co2 as is released when the charcoal is burned, thus a closed system.
- tocomment 17y agoSo is this a breakthrough in fuel cell design? Did they discover a completely new way to make fuel cells? Or is this rather a repackaging of existing fuel cell technologies?
- dnsworks 17y agoNow we know where the $400m went. Getting Colin Powell and the governator to shill for your company must require quite a bit of capital.
- Corrado 17y agoThe big question in my mind is can they make this small & portable enough to put into my next car? That would be game changing to me.