Posted on 02/23/2010 7:40:06 AM PST by dangerdoc
As our Larry Dignan notes, last night’s 60 Minutes featured a piece launching the latest over-hyped energy breakthrough — the Bloom Box.
While inventor K.R. Sridhar was still being coy with CBS, the device appears to be a fuel cell, composed mainly of a ceramic and custom inks (probably containing zirconium), that can produce electricity from any hydrocarbon feedstock at high efficiency.
(The picture is by Thomas Hawk, from Flickr. The man on the left is legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr.)
The official launch is not until Wednesday, but this has not slowed the speculation, or the skepticism.
Sridhar has moved toward his launch carefully, seeding units at places like Google, eBay and Federal Express. This helps him bypass a problem bedeviling EEStor, a supposedly revolutionary battery whose secrecy also invites skepticism.
Another point that stops skeptics is that Sridhar is being shepherded on this journey by Doerr , who lists Bloom Energy right alongside Amazon and Google on his Kleiner Perkins team page, and famously signed Al Gore as a partner in alternative energy back in 2007. With that kind of vetting a lot of dumb mistakes can be avoided.
Sridhar is no inventor-come-lately. He has contracted with NASA and run a lab at the University of Arizona. He lists a Ph.D from the University of Illinois alongside his degree from the University of Madras in his native India.
So what about the Bloom Box?
In some ways this is not revolutionary at all. Fuel cells have been around for years, producing energy and water from hydrogen. But they require platinum and break down.
In some ways the Bloom Energy device is regressive. Any kind of hydrocarbon gas is the feedstock — it can use natural gas or biogas — and one of the outputs is carbon dioxide.
What has sold the initial customers is efficiency and reliability. The early customers say they are saving money, and Sridhar says the units can be made in any size, buttressing or even replacing the current electrical grid.
There remains the question of production cost. The earliest models cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sridhar says mass production can cut that to a few thousand dollars. He estimates $20,000 would do for a residence, but it still needs fuel of some kind. The whole gas infrastructure stays.
Assuming Sridhar’s claims are valid money won’t be a problem. He has ample venture capital investment, and industrial giants like Siemens or General Electric would love to get a hold of it.
So what follows the Bloom publicity boomlet? Production contracts, obviously. Sridhar is proceeding as he is to give himself maximum leverage in decisions like pricing and profit margin. He comes across as a committed inventor with a good heart.
But does he have what it takes to scale production and delivery? What this week’s news says is it’s time to find out.
Sounds like a money-making proposition for the lactose-intolerant....
Yes, but.... it's like those cars that run on used french-fry oil. It's really cheap so long as the demand side stays within the existing production quantities. Once the user base increases, however, the demand for used french-fry oil far outstrips the supply, and prices go up.
Same thing here: the companies in question are almost certainly hooked up to natural gas lines, which take care of heating and cooking needs. That's fine, if you're one of a very few who are doing it ... but once you get thousands of users, the supply chain for natural gas turns out to be completely inadequate and, again, demand outstrips supply and costs go up by a lot.
As the article states fuel cell technology has been around for a long time. The difference with the Bloombox is the main functional component can be produced cheaply and does not use platinum.
If he licenses the tech to companies such as GE and Seimens it could be quickly improved on and mass produced.
It might be time to invest in natural gas.
my main interest is seeing this type of technology introduced into transportation.
In addition to natural gas, they can digest liquid fuels and are much more efficient than the internal combusion engine. I want a full sized 4 wheel drive pickup with towing power that gets 30 mpg.
The design problem for that scenario would be driven by the surface area required to produce the necessary amount of power. That, in turn, translates into volume and mass for the fuel cell. How big and how heavy would the fuel cell have to be, to generate enough power to manage the load you suggest?
Also, you would need to factor in things like requirements for acceleration, different terrain, temperature ranges, and all that. I think those sorts of factors couldn't be dealt with easily by the fuel cells themselves, and would therefore translate into requirements for good-sized batteries, which increases volume and weight requirements.
It may be that, above a certain sized vehicel, the energy density of gasoline or diesel is better suited to direct use in an internal combustion engine, than it is for use in transportation.
NG is the one energy source that is in a growth period. We have abundant supplies and more coming on line every day, and it is getting cheaper. Moving it to areas that presently do not use it is an issue, but nothing major.
I happen to have NG and would be very interested in this if it met my needs. In the midwest & south there are many NG users. They say they can work off various energy sources,
like I said a lot is to be seen.
Yes, but recall the difficulties with NG supplies a few years back, and that was mostly driven by demand in California. The infrastructure implications of large-scale production/use of this technology are pretty severe.
OTOH, if the reports are honest (I'm witholding judgment on that), it's a pretty cool advance, and could serve a lot of niche-type purposes.
SOFC’s can be very power dense. There are other companies that are working on cells small enough and powerful enough to power a car.
The question is whether they will be durable. There is a big difference between a device on a bench and one in a car being driven by a teenager.
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