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Bloom Unveils Its Game Changing Energy Box

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Re: Bloom Unveils Its Game Changing Energy Box

#3
They say that 1 KW will power the average US home, hu? Yeah, so long as all heating is natural gas and no one ever turns on a hair dryer. Maybe they were talking about averaged load? But then they seem to have left out the 4 tonnes of lead-acid batteries you'll need.

Re: Bloom Unveils Its Game Changing Energy Box

#4
post #3

They say that 1 KW will power the average US home, hu? Yeah, so long as all heating is natural gas and no one ever turns on a hair dryer. Maybe they were talking about averaged load? But then they seem to have left out the 4 tonnes of lead-acid batteries you'll need.

I believe the idea here is not that a single 1KW stack would be used to power a home, but that several homes would run off of a single 25KW module, so that you only need to accomodate their collective peak requirements

Re: Bloom Unveils Its Game Changing Energy Box

#5
post #3

They say that 1 KW will power the average US home, hu? Yeah, so long as all heating is natural gas and no one ever turns on a hair dryer. Maybe they were talking about averaged load? But then they seem to have left out the 4 tonnes of lead-acid batteries you'll need.

[deleted]

Re: Bloom Unveils Its Game Changing Energy Box

#6
post #3

They say that 1 KW will power the average US home, hu? Yeah, so long as all heating is natural gas and no one ever turns on a hair dryer. Maybe they were talking about averaged load? But then they seem to have left out the 4 tonnes of lead-acid batteries you'll need.

Agreed. But --- who heats with electricity? (Heat pumps can be a good idea, though.)

Re: Bloom Unveils Its Game Changing Energy Box

#7
post #2

They really blew out all the stops in publicizing this ... Just the facts: http://bloomenergy.com/products/data-sheet/ Seems the 'box' we discussed a couple of days ago does output 25 kW (I had guessed 30 kW, based on a 10c/kW back-of-the-envelope calculation).

Interesting note:

"Includes a secure website for you to showcase performance & environmental benefits."

Re: Bloom Unveils Its Game Changing Energy Box

#8
Could somebody help with some background on the science?

What strikes me as odd is that you put fuel in the fuel cell. One of the examples they give is using these to charge your hyrbid car. So, by the transitive property, aren't you putting fuel into your car?

I guess I'm trained to think of alternative energy sources like sun and wind, so I'm thrown off here. What's the innovation?

I can see that you're generating electricity locally, which I guess means we could get energy to places without running power lines. But reading the article, that doesn't seem like the point of these.

The article does claim that the energy is more efficient than what you get on the grid. But if that's the case, why don't we just put a ton of these onto the grid and push down the cost of electricity for everyone?

Re: Bloom Unveils Its Game Changing Energy Box

#10

Could somebody help with some background on the science? What strikes me as odd is that you put fuel in the fuel cell. One of the examples they give is using these to charge your hyrbid car. So, by the transitive property, aren't you putting fuel into your car? I guess I'm trained to think of alternative energy sources like sun and wind, so I'm thrown off here. What's the innovation? I can see that you're generating…

For your car example:

You would have to put some fuel like natural gas into your car. This would be converted to electricity.

The innovation is it would not be converted from fuel to mechanical energy (motor spinning) to electricity, but rather by a more efficient fuel cell. That is a big game changer.

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