Natural gas and oxygen are what Bloom Box uses to make electricity. This is with a fuel cell. You might have seen Bloom Energy’s Bloom Box on “60 Minutes” Sunday. September 1 is when it is really available. Bloom Energy advertised by saying Bloom Box gives clean, reliable and affordable power as an “energy server” for your home. The stand-alone unit has already been used by major corporations. It is used to help save energy. Bloom Energy assumes that Bloom Box can take over. There will be no need for transmission lines of the energy grid and even power plants. Price is a big factor within the Bloom Box. Unless it gets cheaper, it won’t succeed.
9 months of employing Bloom Box saves eBay $ 100,000
The Bloom Box has been 10 years in the making. Business Founder, K.R. Stridhar raised $ 400 million for technology. This was shown within the “60 Minutes” feature on Bloom Energy on Sunday. The Bloom Box has ceramic discs in them. These discs have secret formulas on them. 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. There should be more discs stacked in it. With additional discs, power is added. A Bloom Box with 64 disks will power a Starbucks. It costs $ 800,000, although twenty companies in California have found a way to cut the price in half with the 30 percent federal tax break and 20 percent state subsidy. Bloom Boxes running on carbon-neutral bio-gas were sold to eBay’s CEO, John Donahoe. They were installed 9 months ago and, as outlined by CBS News, have saved eBay more than $ 100,000 in electricity already.
Will the electrical grid go the way of the mainframe?
In the past, personal computers exchanged 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. Huge data centers are created by small servers put in groups together. Google, along with other Bloom Energy customers, do this. Bloom Boxes could be used within the same way. Energy farms can be created. Stridhar said that Bloom Box may only be sold right now because of subsidies. But economies of scale could bring the price down to about a $ 3,000 investment for a household installation. The cost goes down 10 to 15 percent every time volume doubles.
Fuel cell market info
There should be more of a demand for Bloom box soon. GBI Research published a report on the global fuel cell market on altenergy.com. This report showed that fuel cell costs will go down when demand increases and technology goes up. The price enables fuel cells to become commercialized by 2013. $ 975 million will be where demand for fuel cells will go to by 2010, increasing sixfold. This was shown by a 2008 report done by Freedonia Group. There is an expected rate of growth in that time frame of those using electricity coming from fuel cells. That rate is a 41 percent growth.
Further reading
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
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