The Bloom Box is getting big play these days:
A U.S. energy company has unveiled a fuel cell that it says can transform the nation’s current system of grid-distributed power into localized energy sources.
The Bloom Energy Corp. of Sunnyvale, Calif., says its “Bloom Energy Server” — or “Bloom Box” — is a solid oxide fuel cell that can use a variety of fuel sources to provide “a cleaner, more reliable and more affordable alternative to both today’s electric grid, as well as traditional renewable energy sources.”
Exciting stuff. And I presume there will be a lot more exciting stuff arriving in coming years. This sort of item makes me think about First Energy’s offer to Northwest Ohio communities: Sign up with us for nine years and we’ll give you a 6% discount on a portion of your monthly bill.
First Energy says it’s making the offer so they can figure out how much coal to buy in the next few years. I suspect it’s because they know new technology such as the Bloom Box is about to steal their business.
Michael Graham Richard comments (via Treehugger):
“Bloom Energy’s 3 main selling points are: “lower energy costs, clean power, and reliable power.”
The first will obviously depend on many things, especially how low they can get production costs for Bloom Box fuel cells. K.R. Sridhar, the founder of Bloom Energy, claims that costs could be brought down as low as $3,000 for a stack, but I’ll believe it when I see it. In the developing world, decentralized power generation has the benefit that you don’t have to build expensive transmission lines, so it might take off faster there.
The second point depends on what you compare it to. If you take the current U.S. grid average, then a Bloom Box running on natural gas would indeed be clean and produce about half the CO2. But compared to cleaner sources like hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, biomass, etc, you’d probably still produce more CO2. But if these fuel cells are deployed first in states that are very dependent on coal and that have access to natural gas (or even better, biogas), they could make a pretty significant difference.
The most promising use of the Bloom Box, in my opinion, is as a backup for a wind or solar power system. The natural gas/biogas fuel cell would be your backup for when the sun or wind doesn’t shine. If Bloom Energy really can bring the price down low enough, it could be more affordable than large battery packs.
The third point, reliability, will be entirely dependent on how good the technology is. Fuel cell membranes can be contaminated in various way, so the robustness of the design will be key.”