Posted on 02/22/2010 4:36:25 AM PST by MindBender26
(CBS) In the world of energy, the Holy Grail is a power source that's inexpensive and clean, with no emissions. Well over 100 start-ups in Silicon Valley are working on it, and one of them, Bloom Energy, is about to make public its invention: a little power plant-in-a-box they want to put literally in your backyard.
You'll generate your own electricity with the box and it'll be wireless. The idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines.
It has a lot of smart people believing and buzzing, even though the company has been unusually secretive - until now.
K.R. Sridhar invited "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl for a first look at the innards of the Bloom box that he has been toiling on for nearly a decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
What a dumb@$$ statement! Ever hear of "research and development"?
LCD technology was many years old when we (at TI) decided to market the first electronic watches - with LED displays. (Remember "Push the button to see the time in dim red numbers"?)
We made that choice because the LCD displays in the mid 70's were unreliable, low contrast, ugly crap. We also sold computers with CRT displays...
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Now, LCDs have had the benefit of decades of R&D.
What did you use to push the car (energy consumed) or turn the prop (again, perhaps you own energy, and that isn’t free is it. After a day of spinning the props I bet your body was calling out for calories (energy) in the form of a few beers).
As a business, it killed us.
Sorry to hear that.
But one business does not a national recession make.
In other words, this inventor is pumping up his invention way beyond what its capabilities really are.
You can buy into this company if you want but after watching the segment I believe it's either a pipe-dream or a scam.
I still haven’t seen the show yet so I don’t know what exactly was said. But keep in mind, 60 minutes edited the piece so who know what they left out.
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Nevertheless, the statement,
“If this (meaning his) technology was as great as this inventor says it is then this would have been marketable on a consumer scale years ago”.
(by the ecoubernerd geek nay-sayer?) is extremely ignorant and bassackwards. It was obviously made by someone who has never taken a technology from technical concept to market success (as I have -- several times).
"Consumer scale success" is the very last step in product development. It only comes after long years of developing and optimizing
This product has not even reached 1. Only an idiot would think that because hyper-expensive (and highly subsidized) pilot line models are available, that it should have been consumer-commercialized "years ago".
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Product development simply does not work like that.
The statement is simply bald-faced and bare-@$$ed stupid!
“What did you use to push the car “
Early cars didn’t have batteries... They had magnetos and a crank to start the car. I wasn’t talking about pushing it, although I’ve done that too.
Call me names if it makes you feel smarter but I simply refuse to buy into some inventor that refuses to put a company name on the side of his building and refuses to answer tough questions about his product or actually show scientific proof.
OK, you got me, I screwed up.
What I meant is that a fuel cell is not a heat engine, and thus is not constrained in the same way a heat engine is, as far as max theoretical efficiency in converting the chemical energy of the input fuel and oxygen into useful output electricity.
In a heat engine, you are constrained by the Carnot cycle. The chemical energy of the fuel is used to create heat, and the max theoretical efficiency is governed by the ratio between your high-temperature heat source and your low-temp heat sink. In practical systems, you have a limit to how high a temp your fuel/oxygen mix can generate, and how high a temp your engine can operate at.
In a fuel-cell system, the max theoretical efficiency is 83% versus 58% for a practical combustion engine.
Those are a couple of useful numbers -- thanks!
You're right. The current state of the product is that they've got pilot models that will (allegedly) generate power at a price competitive with grid power, based on the input cost of the fuel. The (probably heavily subsidized) capital cost of the equipment and its associated maintenance and depreciation is unlikely to have been factored in.
What they still need to do is get the production and maintenance costs down to viable levels for commercialization. When that happens is unknown.
The potentially-higher max efficiency means they might be able to get away with higher capital/maintenance costs as long as the added costs are made up for by the increased output per unit of fuel.
I think back-up power would be a good market. Every hospital and federal building in the nation has huge diesel generators that sit waiting for an outage. They require regular maintanence, minimum run times per year and when they do run, are not very efficient.
The piece of info that would be interesting is how long it takes to go from a cold start to rated power output. I’m afraid the number would be named in hours.
may not be scam
We are deeply involved in these types of projects on a daily basis and in our opinion algae goes now where. There are simply too many hurdles to economic development of algae for large-scale biofuels production. Too many to discuss thoroughly on this forum. I can also point you to many recent articles that are waking up to these facts.
We see this kind of hype in press releases ALL the time in the renewable fuels business. It is a business with more than its fair share of charlatans and quick buck artist creating short term jobs based on ill advised investments and free Government grants. Sometimes facilities are even built without the proper forethought and they end up catastrophic failures. As an example, about 50 of the 150 or so conventional ethanol plants built in the past ten years are now bankrupt. We expect another 20 or so to go under even though the ethanol business has picked up a bit. The ones that are failing did not take into account the logistics and other relative features required to provide a competitive advantage for survival. How do you think facilities for cellulosic or algae are going to be competitive when the Capex cost is 5 to 6 times that of a conventionl fermentation ethanol plant. Most cellulosic plants will not be profitable even if they could get the bionmass feedstock delivered to the gate for free!. The economics are just not there.
The most important developments for biofuels will come from improved starch and sugar based crops period. The rest are pipe dreams. The economics of a large commercial scale biofuels facility is much different than a backyard still or some cellulosic technology making fuel in a beaker and a few test tubes in a lab. There are economic realities that pure science can not always address when you attempt to commercialize technology.
Renewable fuels from algae is dead end at this point.
Commercial sized units are proceeding using PetroAlgea technology in Egypt and China. Pilot projects are going forward in India and Indonesia.
Their process utilizes a coker unit similar to the process in a petroleum refinery.
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