maydaverave
10 kW
- Joined
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Bloom energy, gonna save the world?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/18/60minutes/main6221135.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/18/60minutes/main6221135.shtml
Bloom energy, gonna save the world?
- Thread starter maydaverave
- Start date
Ypedal
100 TW
I just watched a segment on 60 minutes about this.. way too few details on the tech side but looks interesting ( and actually being used, vs that other company that keeps promissing supercaps :lol: )
Dude was dreaming of a 3000$ setup for the average home... yeah right..
Dude was dreaming of a 3000$ setup for the average home... yeah right..
deronmoped
10 kW
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- Oct 6, 2008
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- 706
Ypedal said:
Even at $3,000.00 it's would not be economical for a lot of people. The payback period would not happen. It's almost always better to do things in quantity. Have one large one for the whole block would probably be a better deal.
Great idea for the US as we have reserves in natural gas that could last a hundred years. By then hopefully we will have Fusion energy at a nice price.
I like General Fusions approach, if it works it actually looks cheap enough. Very interesting concept.
http://www.generalfusion.com/t5_general_fusion.php
Deron.
paultrafalgar
10 kW
Did you notice that when she asked him if his fuel could be solar, he said Yes. WTF! You can't feed a fuel-cell solar power!
That rings alarm bells in my head.
That rings alarm bells in my head.
deronmoped said:
It would take me 67 months at my current monthly electric bill to pay that back. That's bad, but not nearly as bad as installing enough solar panels to accomplish the same thing... cheapest off-grid system I've seen that would meet my needs is around $20,000.
hydro-one
10 kW
deron you truly are a maniac, you want some kind of fusion reactor in your basment, instead of a 3,000$ catalyst stack? how could that thing ever be cheap enough? mixing liguid lithium with lead thats sickly ironic dont you think?
If this is real it will revolutionize power generation for you gas heads....when he says it could be solar, he either means photocatalyst or electrolysis hydrogen, followed by his cell? or bio-solar eg algae. or perhaps some light/dark cycle advanced bio-gas generator ive heard of ... wonder if algae could be burnt in here?
but if that catalyst is cheap enough or long lasting enough , could work really good. could be good for a natural gas ebike? i really hate ICE engines but this seems sweeter....sort of solid state engine.. my brother is working on a wood gasifier, that would be a good gas to burn in here i would think!!
cool
!!
If this is real it will revolutionize power generation for you gas heads....when he says it could be solar, he either means photocatalyst or electrolysis hydrogen, followed by his cell? or bio-solar eg algae. or perhaps some light/dark cycle advanced bio-gas generator ive heard of ... wonder if algae could be burnt in here?
but if that catalyst is cheap enough or long lasting enough , could work really good. could be good for a natural gas ebike? i really hate ICE engines but this seems sweeter....sort of solid state engine.. my brother is working on a wood gasifier, that would be a good gas to burn in here i would think!!
cool
!!
I'm a bit skeptical, but does anyone know what chemical reaction this is?
He talks about "taking in oxygen" and "taking in fuel" and that sounds like a hydrocarbon reaction(which necessarily outputs CO2). In what capacity is that going to "save the world"? I could be wrong in that it could be another type of reaction, but I couldn't find any specification.
However, it doesn't sound like combustion:
He talks about "taking in oxygen" and "taking in fuel" and that sounds like a hydrocarbon reaction(which necessarily outputs CO2). In what capacity is that going to "save the world"? I could be wrong in that it could be another type of reaction, but I couldn't find any specification.
However, it doesn't sound like combustion:
deronmoped
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hydro-one said:
You know, I would rather have a fission reactor like they put on deep space probes. A radioactive thermoelectric generator (RTG), heated by a source of plutonium 238. Comes with the house, buried in the ground and powers the house, car, bikes... for hundreds of years. Now that would be cool. Tons of extra power, light the place up like the 4th of July, electric heat, electric heated concrete everywhere (would be nice to work under my car on a heated garage floor), heat the greenhouse to a nice toasty temperature during the winter... Never turn anything off again!
Anyways, I was not thinking of that Fusion reactor for home use, I just hoping once they get the Fusion thing going, sense the fuel is all most free, electricity would be super cheap.
Deron.
paultrafalgar
10 kW
Psst! Don't tell deron, but a billionth of a gram of plutonium can give you cancer and it's got a half-life of 10s of thousands of years, so if he puts it under his house his gonads will be irradiated and his "line" will die out........... 
maydaverave
10 kW
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If you had a solar powered electrolosis machine turning water into oxygen and hydrogen then you could truly go off the grid. No wires, no pipelines, no oxygen and fuel delivery trucks 8)hydro-one said:
MitchJi
10 MW
Hi,
Yay or Nay? Bloom Box Fuel Cell
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/bloom-energy-bloom-box-60-minutes-cbs-news-video.php
Green Savior or One More Fuel Cell Company?
Bloom Energy is a well-funded startup that is starting to come out of stealth mode (with a big launch planned for Wednesday). Its first major media exposure was a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday (you can see the video below) that made some big claims about how this is going to "replace the grid" and produce lots of clean energy. Let's see if this passes the smell test...
The first thing that comes to mind is that CBS News really needs to hire a technology/science consultant. They're all impressed by the fact that "a box" can produce power, while this is basically what all fuel cells have been for almost 200 years. There's also a weird reference to terraforming Mars, which implies that the device on which the Bloom Box is based was a technological breakthrough because it could produce oxygen (producing oxygen isn't hard, the hard part is having enough energy and water).
So What Are We Left With?
So if we distill this breathless segment into the fundamentals, what we have left is a company that claims to be able to make fuel cells inexpensively enough for them to be deployed to residential and commercial customers. Instead of having centralized power plants, you would have distributed micropower.
That sounds good if they can deliver on the low price and if their products are reliable, but so far there's no word on price per kilowatt of capacity and no word on efficiency, the two most important things to know about a fuel cell. Can they really make reliable fuel cells much more cheaply than their competitors? That's impossible to tell from just this video. Maybe we'll know more on Wednesday.
How Green Would it Be?
The green credentials depend on the fuel source. If they use natural gas as a source of hydrogen, CO2 will still be emitted. Probably less than from a gas burning power plant because the efficiency will hopefully be higher and the transmission losses lower (unless their fuel cell is cheap, but very inefficient), but we're still not talking about truly clean power.
If they get the hydrogen from biogas, this could be carbon neutral, but there won't be enough biogas around for everybody.
How to Use a Bloom Box
The most promising use that I can think of is as a "on demand" backup to wind and solar power. In many places, backup generation for renewables is provided by natural gas (unless you have lots of hydro and nuclear available to pick up the slack), so if you're going to use gas, you might as well use it as efficiently as possible.
Yay or Nay? Bloom Box Fuel Cell
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/bloom-energy-bloom-box-60-minutes-cbs-news-video.php
Green Savior or One More Fuel Cell Company?
Bloom Energy is a well-funded startup that is starting to come out of stealth mode (with a big launch planned for Wednesday). Its first major media exposure was a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday (you can see the video below) that made some big claims about how this is going to "replace the grid" and produce lots of clean energy. Let's see if this passes the smell test...
The first thing that comes to mind is that CBS News really needs to hire a technology/science consultant. They're all impressed by the fact that "a box" can produce power, while this is basically what all fuel cells have been for almost 200 years. There's also a weird reference to terraforming Mars, which implies that the device on which the Bloom Box is based was a technological breakthrough because it could produce oxygen (producing oxygen isn't hard, the hard part is having enough energy and water).
So What Are We Left With?
So if we distill this breathless segment into the fundamentals, what we have left is a company that claims to be able to make fuel cells inexpensively enough for them to be deployed to residential and commercial customers. Instead of having centralized power plants, you would have distributed micropower.
That sounds good if they can deliver on the low price and if their products are reliable, but so far there's no word on price per kilowatt of capacity and no word on efficiency, the two most important things to know about a fuel cell. Can they really make reliable fuel cells much more cheaply than their competitors? That's impossible to tell from just this video. Maybe we'll know more on Wednesday.
How Green Would it Be?
The green credentials depend on the fuel source. If they use natural gas as a source of hydrogen, CO2 will still be emitted. Probably less than from a gas burning power plant because the efficiency will hopefully be higher and the transmission losses lower (unless their fuel cell is cheap, but very inefficient), but we're still not talking about truly clean power.
If they get the hydrogen from biogas, this could be carbon neutral, but there won't be enough biogas around for everybody.
How to Use a Bloom Box
The most promising use that I can think of is as a "on demand" backup to wind and solar power. In many places, backup generation for renewables is provided by natural gas (unless you have lots of hydro and nuclear available to pick up the slack), so if you're going to use gas, you might as well use it as efficiently as possible.
TylerDurden
100 GW
Bloom Energy expands manufacturing and hiring
By Dana Hull
dhull@mercurynews.com
Posted: 04/14/2011 02:21:39 PM PDT
Updated: 04/14/2011 04:44:54 PM PDT
Brad Fields, 39, spent most of his adult career working in production at NUMMI, the Fremont auto plant that shut down a year ago.
Now Fields is production manager at Bloom Energy, the Sunnyvale fuel-cell company that has a bold mission: to make clean, reliable energy affordable to everyone in the world.
"When NUMMI closed, I had a couple of different options. I could have worked at another auto plant, or another Toyota facility," Fields said in an interview. "But I chose to work at Bloom because this is a green job. We are creating the future of Bloom manufacturing, and to be on the ground floor of a new company -- it's just really exciting."
Bloom Energy has been relatively quiet since it first lifted the curtain on its fuel-cell technology at a highly orchestrated news conference in February 2010. But in the year since the company's official launch, Bloom has added customers, more than doubled its staff to 714 full-time employees, and torn down cubicles as it expands its manufacturing footprint to 200,000 square feet. More than 20 former NUMMI employees have found manufacturing jobs at Bloom, and the company currently has 45 job openings, according to the company.
Bloom's customers include Google (GOOG), eBay (EBAY) and Adobe (ADBE). This week, it announced another: the operator of the public ice rink where the San Jose Sharks practice.
Sharks Ice at San Jose, at South 10th Street and Alma Avenue, is the largest rink facility west of the Mississippi River. Keeping its ice cold generates a monthly electric bill of $65,000, according to rink spokesman Jim Sparaco.
"For hockey, the ice temperature is 19 degrees and for figure skating, it's 22 degrees," he said. "We use a lot of electricity, and the Bloom Boxes can be in use 24 hours a day."
The three Bloom Energy Servers to be installed by the end of the year will power four NHL-size ice rinks, as well as administrative offices, an equipment store and Stanley's Sports Bar and Restaurant. The Bloom Boxes are expected to generate about 85 percent of the facility's electric needs.
Fuel cells use hydrogen, natural gas, methane or other fuels to generate electricity through an electrochemical process that produces a fraction of the emissions of a typical power plant. For decades, researchers have tried to perfect solid oxide fuel cells, which operate at temperatures above 800 degrees Celsius and can use fuels other than hydrogen. Bloom Energy says it has solved many solid oxide engineering challenges and that its devices can recycle the waste heat to produce more electricity.
Each Bloom Energy Server -- commonly known as Bloom Boxes -- provides 100 kilowatts of power, enough to meet the energy needs of a small office building. Within each device are thousands of fuel cells that are sandwiched into stacks. Each energy server contains 64 stacks of fuel cells.
In its early days, Bloom Energy was able to make just one energy server a month. Now it's making one a day.
Gary Workman, who spent 15 years at NUMMI before joining Bloom as its vice president of quality, said NUMMI workers were qualified for the new jobs partly because they were trained in the principals of "lean manufacturing," which refers to eliminating waste and putting quality controls in place.
"When you've been trained on mass production there's a real mind-set and a skill set," Workman said. "Everyone has a real sense of purpose."
To date, Bloom has shipped 120 energy servers, nearly all of them to customers in California. That commits the company to manufacturing in the state, Workman said, because each server weighs 10 tons and the cost of shipping them from another state or from overseas would be high.
"It makes sense to build them where we sell them," he said "Our largest installations are at Adobe and Caltech, and we've got a healthy backlog of orders."
Contact Dana Hull at 408-920-2706. Follow her at Twitter.com/danahull.
By Dana Hull
dhull@mercurynews.com
Posted: 04/14/2011 02:21:39 PM PDT
Updated: 04/14/2011 04:44:54 PM PDT
Brad Fields, 39, spent most of his adult career working in production at NUMMI, the Fremont auto plant that shut down a year ago.
Now Fields is production manager at Bloom Energy, the Sunnyvale fuel-cell company that has a bold mission: to make clean, reliable energy affordable to everyone in the world.
"When NUMMI closed, I had a couple of different options. I could have worked at another auto plant, or another Toyota facility," Fields said in an interview. "But I chose to work at Bloom because this is a green job. We are creating the future of Bloom manufacturing, and to be on the ground floor of a new company -- it's just really exciting."
Bloom Energy has been relatively quiet since it first lifted the curtain on its fuel-cell technology at a highly orchestrated news conference in February 2010. But in the year since the company's official launch, Bloom has added customers, more than doubled its staff to 714 full-time employees, and torn down cubicles as it expands its manufacturing footprint to 200,000 square feet. More than 20 former NUMMI employees have found manufacturing jobs at Bloom, and the company currently has 45 job openings, according to the company.
Bloom's customers include Google (GOOG), eBay (EBAY) and Adobe (ADBE). This week, it announced another: the operator of the public ice rink where the San Jose Sharks practice.
Sharks Ice at San Jose, at South 10th Street and Alma Avenue, is the largest rink facility west of the Mississippi River. Keeping its ice cold generates a monthly electric bill of $65,000, according to rink spokesman Jim Sparaco.
"For hockey, the ice temperature is 19 degrees and for figure skating, it's 22 degrees," he said. "We use a lot of electricity, and the Bloom Boxes can be in use 24 hours a day."
The three Bloom Energy Servers to be installed by the end of the year will power four NHL-size ice rinks, as well as administrative offices, an equipment store and Stanley's Sports Bar and Restaurant. The Bloom Boxes are expected to generate about 85 percent of the facility's electric needs.
Fuel cells use hydrogen, natural gas, methane or other fuels to generate electricity through an electrochemical process that produces a fraction of the emissions of a typical power plant. For decades, researchers have tried to perfect solid oxide fuel cells, which operate at temperatures above 800 degrees Celsius and can use fuels other than hydrogen. Bloom Energy says it has solved many solid oxide engineering challenges and that its devices can recycle the waste heat to produce more electricity.
Each Bloom Energy Server -- commonly known as Bloom Boxes -- provides 100 kilowatts of power, enough to meet the energy needs of a small office building. Within each device are thousands of fuel cells that are sandwiched into stacks. Each energy server contains 64 stacks of fuel cells.
In its early days, Bloom Energy was able to make just one energy server a month. Now it's making one a day.
Gary Workman, who spent 15 years at NUMMI before joining Bloom as its vice president of quality, said NUMMI workers were qualified for the new jobs partly because they were trained in the principals of "lean manufacturing," which refers to eliminating waste and putting quality controls in place.
"When you've been trained on mass production there's a real mind-set and a skill set," Workman said. "Everyone has a real sense of purpose."
To date, Bloom has shipped 120 energy servers, nearly all of them to customers in California. That commits the company to manufacturing in the state, Workman said, because each server weighs 10 tons and the cost of shipping them from another state or from overseas would be high.
"It makes sense to build them where we sell them," he said "Our largest installations are at Adobe and Caltech, and we've got a healthy backlog of orders."
Contact Dana Hull at 408-920-2706. Follow her at Twitter.com/danahull.
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