Electricity could be made by Bloom Box which is a fuel cell using oxygen and natural gas. You could have seen Bloom Energy’s Bloom Box on “60 Minutes” Sunday. September 1 is when it is really available. An “energy server” is what Bloom Energy calls the Bloom Box saying it is clean, reliable and affordable power. The stand-alone unit is already used by major corporations. It is used to help conserve energy. Bloom Energy assumes that Bloom Box can take over. There can be no need for transmission lines of the energy grid and even power plants. There can be hardly any sales of Bloom Box unless it can get the price dropped quite a bit.
9 months of using Bloom Box saves eBay $ 100,000
Bloom Box took forever to create. About 10 years were used. In its “60 Minutes” feature on Bloom Energy, CBS News reports that company founder K.R. Stridhar has raised about $ 400 million for the technology. You will find secret formulas on ceramic discs that are in the Bloom Box. One side holds natural gas. The other side actually has oxygen. The power comes when the two elements react and make an electro-chemical response. More power comes with more discs. Just 64 disks in a Bloom Box is enough energy to keep a Starbucks running. 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, according to CBS News, have saved eBay more than $ 100,000 in electricity already.
Is the electrical grid something of the past?
Bloom Box might replace power plants, Stridhar told Newsweek, just like personal computer changed mainframes. He said companies like Google, a Bloom Energy customer, have small servers ganged up in groups of thousands to create huge data centers. Energy farms can do this too with Bloom Box. Stridhar admitted that subsidies are the one thing making the Bloom Box fly now. But economies of scale could bring the price down to about a $ 3,000 investment for a household installation. When volume doubles, price could go down. It will likely go down 10 to 15 percent every time.
The fuel cell market
There ought to 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 indicated that fuel cell costs will go down when demand increases and technology goes up. The price will allow 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
