Incredible, if true.

[Viperfreak2]

http://dvice.com/archives/2010/02/bloom-box-could.php#more

Watch the second video. My built in BS detector wants to go off, but I cannot see any logical reason these wouldn't work, except by sending the price of natural gas through the roof. BUT at least that isn't imported.

[ravenheart]

Facinating - meeting halfway between combustion engine and hydrogen fuel cells - kinda like 'kiddies first fuel cell'. Makes me curious if this technology could be used in cars with a tank of natural gas as fuel and what range you would get ... would certainly be easier to manage than liquid hydrogen.

[Viperfreak2]

It says a cube can power a European house, two cubes an American house. Seems reasonable to say it could power a car.

[Weasel]

I guess it would depend on the usable lifespan on the fuel cells that compose the cubes... Do they last lets say 50 years? 100 years? Longer? You could buy one with your first house and transfer it with you to any houses you buy in the future, could be your own portable power supply, just supply a fuel source.

Come to think of it, I wonder how long a home sized unit would run on a single BBQ pit sized bottle of propane? Or a full house sized propane source? Could be a better option to a gas or diesel powered generator as a home back up source, mobile home source, winnebago/camper source?

[JCL]

Originally Posted by Weasel

Come to think of it, I wonder how long a home sized unit would run on a single BBQ pit sized bottle of propane?

Well, they are around 50% efficient in producing electricity. So if you use one to produce electricity, and hook it up to your electric stove, you could boil about half as much water as if you just put the pot on your BBQ.

Or, you could hook it up to an electric light bulb, and run it for half as long as a propane light of the same power.

[AzX5]

Slammed....

Bloom Energy tech 'not unique,' analyst says | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

One energy analyst is taking a pessimistic view of Bloom Energy's highly touted fuel cell, saying that there's "nothing that unique" about the technology.



Bloom Energy's CEO K.R Sridhar
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

On Wednesday, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based start-up introduced the Bloom Energy fuel cell, which is designed to be stacked into small blocks and housed in a unit about the size of a refrigerator and sold as an alternative to electricity from the grid. The company has begun selling 100kW units, costing between $700,000 and $800,000 each, and some of the "Bloom boxes" are already in use by companies such as Google and eBay.

"It's not bogus," said Sam Jaffe, a senior research analyst at IDC Energy Insights, but that doesn't mean Bloom's technology is all that impressive. "They have clearly spent a lot of money on research and developing this product, but there's nothing that I can see that is that unique about it."

And it's not cheap. "It's a very expensive fuel cell. There are a lot of other vendors out there with very expensive fuel cells," Jaffe said.

One aspect of the Bloom technology that's garnered a lot of attention is the fuel-switching ability. "That is not unique," Jaffe said. "Any high-temperature fuel cell should be able to do that. The fact that it's solid oxide and it's primarily ceramic opens up the possibility of making it much more cheaply, but every start-up in the energy field has an expensive product that they claim one day will be cheap. There is no reason to believe that Bloom has the ability to make it that much more cheaply. I'm pretty pessimistic about it."

And generating electricity using a Bloom box is not necessarily going to be any greener than getting electricity from the grid, as Jaffe explains in his IDC Insights blog. "At a capital cost of $7-$8 per watt, it's hard to find a competitive technology that's more expensive than buying a Bloom box. Even photovoltaics cost less when purchased on the scale of 100 kW at a time."