Will the Energy Industry kill the Bloom Box?

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Those two blocks can power the average high-consumption American home -- one block can power the average European home. At least that's the claim being made by K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, on 60 Minutes last night. The original technology comes from an oxygen generator meant for a scrapped NASA Mars program that's been converted, with the help of an estimated $400 million in private funding, into a fuel cell. Bloom's design feeds oxygen into one side of a cell while fuel (natural gas, bio gas from landfill waste, solar, etc) is supplied to the other side to provide the chemical reaction required for power. The cells themselves are inexpensive ceramic disks painted with a secret green "ink" on one side and a black "ink" on the other. The disks are separated by a cheap metal alloy, instead of more precious metals like platinum, and stacked into a cube of varying capabilities -- a stack of 64 can power a small business like Starbucks.
Now get this, skeptics: there are already several corporate customers using refrigerator-sized Bloom Boxes. The corporate-sized cells cost $700,000 to $800,000 and are installed at 20 customers you've already heard of including FedEx and Wal-mart -- Google was first to this green energy party, using its Bloom Boxes to power a data center for the last 18 months. Ebay has installed its boxes on the front lawn of its San Jose location. It estimates to receive almost 15% of its energy needs from Bloom, saving about $100,000 since installing its five boxes 9 months ago -- an estimate we assume doesn't factor in the millions Ebay paid for the boxes themselves. Bloom makes about one box a day at the moment and believes that within 5 to 10 years it can drive down the cost to about $3,000 to make it suitable for home use. Sounds awfully aggressive to us. Nevertheless, Bloom Energy will go public with details on Wednesday -- until then, check the 60 Minutes sneak peek after the break.

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http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/24/doe...gy-google-ipo/

After eight years of operating in quasi-stealth, Bloom Energy came out with a bang today at an event in Silicon Valley attended by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Colin Powell, Larry Page, John Doerr, and executives from eBay, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and FedEx. All of the big-name companies, including Google, are beta customers of Bloom’s distributed energy fuel cell technology (which was the subject of a 60 Minutes profile on Sunday and various other stories since then).

Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins VC who backed both Bloom and Google, said today: “This Is Like The Google IPO.” Except without the IPO part. Doerr was referring to the fact that, like Google, Bloom has kept its business close to its vest until it actually could show some progress in terms of customers and products. Five Bloom energy boxes about the size of a parking space each now provide 15 percent of the power at eBay’s campus. Walmart is testing the boxes in two locations where it is carrying 60 to 80 percent of the energy load of an entire store. Google co-founder Larry Page calls the technology a “very big deal” and looks forward to the day that it can expand the number of Bloom boxes Google uses to the point where it can power one of its data centers.

Bloom founder and CEO KR Sridhar, who got his start designing technologies for NASA that would allow humans to live on Mars, explained how Bloom’s fuel cell technology works. It takes almost any fuel from ethanol to biomass and turns it into electricity. Fuel cells are nothing new, but Bloom has figured out a way to make them cheaply and efficiently. A Sridhar claims that a Bloom box, which he calls an energy server, is twice as efficient as the electricity grid. “For the same amount of electricity, you need half the fuel,” he says. “If you use a renewable fuel you are carbon neutral. Use all the electricity you want and don’t feel guilty about polluting the environment.”


Each fuel cell, which is made from sand essentially (zirconium oxide), is a square wafer about the size of a CD box. Each wafer can produce about 25 watts of energy, enough to power a lightbulb. Stack them together and you get a box that could power a house. Group them into larger units, and you get enough energy to power a building or an entire campus. He calls them energy servers because they are modular like servers in a data center. Need more energy? Add more boxes.

They are like backyard generators. No electricity is lost through distribution, and they can convert a variety of fuels into electricity, allowing customers to use whatever is locally available or cheapest. There are no moving parts, vents, or discharge other than heat.

Right now, only businesses and large facilities can afford these things. They cost about $750,000 for a 100 kilowatt system (Google is using a 400 kilowatt systems to power one building on its campus, and the Walmart stores are also using 400 kilowatt systems). Nevertheless, Bloom says the systems should pay for themselves within three to five years because of lower electricity costs. A typical electricity cost for commercial customers is 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour versus 13 cents for what they might pay a California utility. That 3 to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour in savings adds up if you are running a huge retail store or a data center.

The costs should come down over time to the point where Bloom boxes really can be used in homes. One potentially disruptive feature of the technology is that it works both ways: fuel can produce electricity, but it can also go the other way so that electricity produces fuel. Sridhar foresees the killer app for his technology becoming practical in about a decade: a Bloom home energy server combined with solar panels or some other renewable energy. The electricity from the solar panels could produce fuel, which can be used to produce electricity to power the house or even to gas up your (modified) car.
 
With $400 MM investment, I doubt anybody is going to let that sit on the shelf. They want a return ASAP
 
oh yeah the investors want it to come out but the question is will the established competition tolerate this doohickey that pretty much unseats conventional electricity and heating industries.

remember..

Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 documentary film that explores the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the early 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, the Californian government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology.
 
The bloom box isn't some magical device. It's a boatload of hype around a fuel cell device much like what's already being worked on. Segway? It'll revolutionize personal transportation!!!!

Oh, and WHO killed the electric car? People that demanded they be able to drive a fucking week without plugging it in, that's who! Just look up threads where I've talked about my truck. People freak out, thinking their car needs to be able to go more than 50 miles at a time, even though they'll only drive 12 miles in a day. Go figure.
There just isn't demand for an all-electric car, until battery tech gets really good and/or batteries are swappable like in electric forklifts.
 
First of all I doubt the energy industry will bury this, that talk is foolish...

Secondly they never once mention how much of a given input fuel these things require. They can burn natural gas, fantastic, its clean and cheap but how many MCF's or MMBTUs does it take to generate one KWH or MWH?
 
Well yeah, of course he's going to say that, otherwise whats the point? If we can just burn nat gas at our house and be more efficient his little cube is pointless. The real question is how much energy do you put in and how much do you get out.

If you put in 1000 MMBTU and get out 2000 MMBTU then this thing is a miracle box.

If you put in 1000 MMBTU and get out 750 MMBTU which seems more likely, its still relatively efficient and could provide numerous improvements over household generators and moving electricity on our antiquated grid, which is very inefficient.

But I do not see how it somehow creates energy. He may say it does, but its pretty tough to get something from nothing.

He is probably more likely referring to it being more efficient then current means of electricity generation where some 46% of all electricity is lost in transmission. It may also be very efficient on a small scale which is good, but I doubt its more efficient at getting BTU's out of natural gas then say a natural gas power plant. The difference with his? you don't have to move it and that as i already said is HUGE.

Thsi sounds promising but with little or no technical information its pretty tough to say just what if anything it means for the energy industry.
 
Oh.. lets play with numbers.




Ebay has 5 boxes, having paid at least 3.5Million for them.

In 9 months, they have saved 100,000.00. Or 133,000.00 a year. In 26 years they will break even.

Sign me up.
 
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