Bloom Box Fuel Cell Device is Revealed

http://www.fastcompany.com/1557348/bloombox-bloom-box-fuel-cell-60-minutes-kleiner-perkins-kr-sridhar-green-energy-google

by alexandros • 16 years ago

46 45 16 years ago

fastcompany.com

david927• 16 years ago

I'm really excited about this. But it won't be actually 'revealed' until Wednesday.

bmunro• 16 years ago

The box also produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct--a potential downside depending on how much it generates.

The amount it generates is of little concern - what matters is where the methane (or other fuel) comes from. If the methane is produced from fresh biomass then the box is carbon neutral. But if the fuel comes from oil then it won't be carbon neutral.

pmjordan2• 16 years ago

Also, how much CO2 it generates depends only on the amount and type of fuel it consumes[1] - e.g. 1 CO2 molecule emitted per CH4 molecule consumed - so that statement is nonsensical to begin with.

[1] unless it also produces carbon monoxide, which is unlikely considering the efficiency claims. Other than H2O, I'm not aware of any other possible byproducts of methane oxidisation.

CapitalistCartr• 16 years ago

The amount of CO2 per unit of electricity produced is more the question. That would be a key element of its overall efficiency, although given its claimed efficiency, that number should be pretty good.

IgorPartola2• 16 years ago

>> Other than H2O, I'm not aware of any other possible byproducts of methane oxidisation.

The same was said for the ICE, and now our cars emit all sorts of crud. Ideally, that's all you get: CH4 + O2 ---> 2H20 + CO2. Practically, you get sulfur and other impurities. Specifically sulfur scrubbers (http://www.duke-energy.com/environment/air-quality/sulfur-di...) are often used to reduce the amount of sulfur, but they raise the amount of CO2 byproduct. It's a no-win situation.

Sukotto• 16 years ago

It looks like all the major Natural Gas exploration/development companies in the US are planning to drill like crazy in 2010/2011 which will likely drop the price of NG off a cliff.

So, fuel for this thing will be cheap in the near future (cheap for NG-fuel power plants too).

Not carbon-neutral though for those who are sensitive to environmental costs. For that, you'd have to set one up near a bio-methane plant or methane-capture facility. But really... there's no way a bunch of these things are going to pollute anything near what an equivalent coal-fired plant does. So adopting them would be a net win environmentalwise.

gfodor2• 16 years ago

Yeah I'm very interested in what the path to carbon neutrality is. I'm sure they've thought this through, obviously. Cow dung is probably not the end-game :)

mbrubeck• 16 years ago

According to another story, eBay fuels their Bloom units with methane from "landfill waste": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141568

easp• 16 years ago

Which is a gross oversimplification since we know that biomass production is often anything but carbon neutral. Were petrochemical fetilizers involved? Did they clear land to produce it? How much oil was used to transport it? If it came from a landfill, was anything done to hasten decomposition, if so, it may be releasing CO2 that would otherwise have been locked up for much longer.

I appreciate the idea of getting maximum use from things that have already been produced, but I'm pretty down on scaling biofuels up. I think there are better uses of land and freshwater. In practice, photosynthesis just isn't that efficient, and then the plant takes a big cut for its own growth and maintainence. Finally, there generally multiple inneficient steps for transformation into useful work. It is dismal compared to solar + battery + electric motor.

frankus2• 16 years ago

Where it gets interesting is in colder climates where the waste heat could be used for space heat and domestic hot water production, a.k.a. "combined heat and power".

scotty792• 16 years ago

Is that more effective than burning natural gas in turbine?

EDIT:

In the movie there is a statement that it is twice as effective.

Another question: How much a natural gas turbine of the same output costs?

dbz• 16 years ago

How long is the predicted life on these big boxes though? The thirty years quote was abut how long a fuel cell should last. How long do these ones last though?

Well. It can't be worse than coal.

khafra• 16 years ago

It does seem rather unexciting, given that "ebay has saved $100,000" over 9 months with 5 boxes, and the boxes cost $800,000 apiece--that's a 30 year payback.

sethg2• 16 years ago

How long does it take to pay back the construction of a conventional power plant?

weaksauce• 16 years ago

It's a 15 year payback for ebay. The units were 50% off after subsidies.

pi3832• 16 years ago

I think the fact that you'd need a natural gas pipeline, or a propane tank out back, kind of negates the "disconnected from the grid" thingy.

Also, where does one get the energy to heat the magic box to 1800 F?

cracki• 16 years ago

from the box itself, i'd guess... electric heating elements?

pedalpete2• 16 years ago

electric heating elements to get 1800F? Wouldn't that take more power than this thing would create? I missed the part about heating to 1800.

motters3• 16 years ago

I had to stop watching the video half way though, because I was laughing so hard. To me this looks like a definite energy generation hoax, of which there have been many in the past. A wafer of sand (silicon) painted green is not going to produce much (if any) electricity.

Suspend your suspension of disbelief and engage physics 101.

danparsonson• 16 years ago

I guess the boxes that eBay and Google are using have hamsters inside them instead?

motters3• 16 years ago

The people at Google are no doubt hotshot software engineers, but how many of them are physicists/chemists I wonder. Has there been an independent scientific confirmation that the underlying mechanism of electricity generation is valid, and produces significant net energy gain? I very much doubt that.

Do we have anyone here on HN who can actually confirm that these devices have been installed at Google?

I've taken an interest in various energy generation ideas over the years, and a fair amount of hoaxing has always gone on. Sometimes the hoaxes are quite sophisticated an investors who like what they see but know little about physics end up being defrauded out of large amounts of money. From what I've seen in this article/video this raises all the classic red flags which you could expect from a hoax operation.

krakensden2• 16 years ago

What exactly is it about the words 'fuel cell' that you do not understand- it's not a new energy source, it's like a battery or generator, a local source of electricity.

Seriously, how is methane+heat=>electricity so outlandish?

philf• 16 years ago

"we can use fossil fuels, or renewable from land fills..." "solar?" "we can use solar". Sounds pretty much like a hoax.

conover• 16 years ago

I was watching the interview on 60 minutes and it seems like they edited out something that was said about "solar". As if he probably qualified that answer but the producers decided that it wasn't really relevant.

sethg2• 16 years ago

If you use a solar energy to turn carbon dioxide and water into methane, bottle the methane, and later run the methane through this fuel cell to generate electricity, how much energy is lost in the round trip? (Compared with just using solar energy to make the electricity directly.)

mseebach• 16 years ago

Bloom estimates that a box filled with 64 ceramic disks can produce enough juice to power a Starbucks.

So, how many Starbucks to a Library of Congress? How about not estimating and giving us some useful metrics, preferable based on this newfangled "watt" unit?

ableal2• 16 years ago

I figure about 30kW per box.

Elsewhere in the article, they say Ebay got 100k USD of electric power from using 5 boxes for 9 months. Assuming 10c/kW.h, that's 1 MW.h in 6408 hours, coming out to about 154 kW for all five boxes.

Adjust for actual utility rates and exact usage.

nazgulnarsil• 16 years ago

yeah, but such hyperbole is a classic sign of a con. if they were serious they'd just tell you the I/O.

lallysingh• 16 years ago

Really? that's it?

The fuel cell we used @ VT in 1999 was 20kW and substantially smaller (it fit within a car's engine compartment).

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05032000-1551...

Then again, that was pure hydrogen, not methane.

eserorg• 16 years ago

This is essentially a solid-state microturbine.

You can order a 65-kW microturbine from Capstone Turbine Corp for about $40,000 USD.

Natgas-powered microturbines have commonly been used for distributed power generation in industrial settings (hotels, hospitals, etc...)

See Ingersoll Rand: http://www.ingersollrandproducts.com/IS/Category.aspx-am_en-...

See Captsone Turbine Corp: http://www.microturbine.com/prodsol/solutions/chp.asp

Try Googling for "microturbine".

[edit] Also, "Microturbines: Applications for Distributed Energy Systems" is a good book on the subject. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Microturbines-Applications-Distributed...

frankus2• 16 years ago

This might eventually scale down better than a microturbine (65kW is enough electricity for a large neighborhood (on average), and enough heat for a handful of homes), and I would bet it also operates better at part load.

Microturbines aren't especially quiet either, but it's hard to know how much noise this thing makes without more information.

scotty792• 16 years ago

There is a claim in the movie that Bloom box uses half of the natural gas that would be required to produce same amount of energy in the power plant. If that's true (even if it includes price of energy delivery and income of energy producers) it's really going to be revolution in energy production. Especially considering how much energy is currently produced from natural gas.

Bloom Box Fuel Cell Device is Revealed

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