The Bloom Box is a fuel cell that generates electricity from oxygen and natural gas. You could have seen Bloom Energy’s Bloom Box on “60 Minutes” Sunday. September 1 is when it is really accessible. Bloom Energy claims that the Bloom Box is an “energy server” that creates clean, reliable and affordable power. The stand-alone unit has already been used by major corporations. It is used to help save energy. Bloom Box may just replace power plants and transmission lines of the energy grid, says Bloom Energy. There can be hardly any sales of Bloom Box unless it can get the price dropped quite a bit. Resource for this article - Bloom Box fuel cell uses secret formula to produce clean energy by Personal Money Store.
9 months of using Bloom Box saves eBay $ 100,000
The Bloom Box has been 10 years in the making. Company Founder, K.R. Stridhar raised $ 400 million for technology. This was shown in the “60 Minutes” feature on Bloom Energy on Sunday. The Bloom Box has ceramic discs in them. These discs have secret formulas on them. One side holds natural gas. The other side really has oxygen. The power comes when the two elements react and make an electro-chemical response. The taller the stack, the more power is generated. Starbucks can run on a Bloom Box. All it needs in it are 64 disks. 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. More than $ 100,000 was saved be eBay, reports eBay’s CEO, John Donahoe, who told CBS that the company installed five Bloom Boxes that run on carbon-neutral bio-gas from landfill waste.
Will the electrical grid go the way of the mainframe?
Bloom Box might replace power plants, Stridhar told Newsweek, just like personal computer exchanged mainframes. Google uses Bloom Energy and has servers ganged together to make huge data centers. Energy farms can do this too with Bloom Box. Stridhar said that Bloom Box may only be sold right now because of subsidies. A $ 3,000 investment for home installation could possibly be possible. This is, of course, if you consider economists of scale. He said every doubling in volume brings a 10-to-15 percent reduction in cost.
Market fuel cell
Soon, Bloom box may be demanded more. This is expected to go up. A report about the global fuel cell market by GBI Research published on altenergymag.com said that evolving technology and increasing demand will bring the cost of fuel cells down. 2013 may be when fuel cells could become commercialized. This would be as a result of price drops. $ 975 million can be where demand for fuel cells will go to by 2010, increasing sixfold. This was shown by a 2008 report done by Freedonia Group. In that time, a 41 percent growth rate in those using fuel cells for electricity is predicted.
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