Electricity could be made by Bloom Box which is a fuel cell using oxygen and natural gas. Bloom Energy’s Bloom Box won’t really come out until Sept. 1 although it was featured on “60 Minutes” Sunday. An “energy server” is what Bloom Energy calls the Bloom Box saying it is clean, reliable and affordable power. The stand-alone unit is already used by major corporations. It is used to help conserve energy. Bloom Energy believes the Bloom Box can replace the power plants and transmission lines of the energy grid. There could be hardly any sales of Bloom Box unless it can get the price dropped quite a bit.
Bloom Box saves eBay $ 100,000 in 9 months
The Bloom Box has been 10 years within the making. In its “60 Minutes” feature on Bloom Energy, CBS News reports that company founder K.R. Stridhar has raised about $ 400 million for the technology. The Bloom Box holds a stack of ceramic discs coated with secret formulas on each side. A fuel source like natural gas goes in one side and oxygen on the other. The disk creates an electro-chemical reaction between the two elements to produce power. The taller the stack, the more power is generated. Starbucks can run on a Bloom Box. All it needs in it are 64 disks. 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. John Donahoe, eBay’s CEO, told CBS News that five Bloom Boxes running on carbon-neutral bio-gas from landfill waste, installed nine months ago, have saved more than $ 100,000 in electricity costs.
Are we going to lose the electrical grid soon?
Within the past, personal computers changed mainframes. Stridhar explained to Newsweek that Bloom box may do this very same thing in replacing power plants and transmission lines on the electrical grid. 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 could be clustered the very same way to create energy farms. Stridhar said that Bloom Box may only be sold right now because of subsidies. A $ 3,000 investment for home installation could possibly be possible. This is, of course, if you consider economists of scale. When volume doubles, price could go down. It will likely go down 10 to 15 percent each time.
Then there’s the fuel cell market
Soon, Bloom box could possibly be demanded more. This is expected to increase. Fuel cell costs goes down with advances in technology, says altenergymag.com that published a global fuel cell market report by GBI Research. Fuel cells may be commercialized as soon as 2013. $ 975 million can be where demand for fuel cells will go to by 2010, increasing sixfold. This was shown by a 2008 report done by Freedonia Group. Using fuel cells for electric power generation was expected to grow 41 percent a year in that time frame.
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
