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The Bloom Box: A Power Plant for Your Home

Posted 23 months ago|2 comments|1,774 views

The Monolith itself.

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bloom box , clean energy , bloom energy , fuel cell , bloombox

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Chris D
Seattle, WA

Fuel cells are the future.

It's hard not to get excited by the news coming from a Californian green energy company, Bloom Energy. On Wednesday, they'll be launching a new PR campaign to promote their new product, "the Bloom Box." CBS's 60 Minutes ran a huge puff piece last night highlighting the wonders of the new product, which looks similar to the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The 60 Minutes "Bloom Box" video has really started some talk around the ol' water cooler. If we're to believe the hype, the company is ready to start shipping refrigerator-sized fuel cells. According to the Bloom Box’s creator, one day we'll all have a black fridge in our backyard instead of a power grid.

Even the most critical "green energy" skeptic can't badmouth the concept of a fuel cell-based world. Just imagine the paradigm shift that would occur if the world switched to a hydrogen-based economy (it's easily manufactured through the simple process of electrolysis).

Under President George W. Bush, the federal government spent well over a billion dollars to develop a hydrogen fuel cell for vehicles. In May 2009, the Obama Administration stopped funding hydrogen fuel cell projects, saying that there were more pressing matters. But real innovation usually comes from the private sector. Could the Bloom Box be a route out of the recession?

Watch the clip on the left. Yes, the CBS "investigative report" was basically a buzz-building PR move by Bloom Energy, but that doesn't mean that the Bloom Box isn't incredible.

So what is the Bloom Box, really? The Christian Science monitor dug a little deeper:

It's a collection of fuel cells – skinny batteries – that use oxygen and fuel to create electricity with no emissions.
Fuel cells are the building blocks of the Bloom Box. They're made of sand that is baked into diskette-sized ceramic squares and painted with green and black ink. Each fuel cell has the potential to power one light bulb. The fuel cells are stacked into brick-sized towers sandwiched with metal alloy plates.
The fuel cell stacks are housed in a refrigerator-sized unit – the Bloom Box. Oxygen is drawn into one side of the unit, and fuel (fossil-fuel, bio-fuel, or even solar power can be used) is fed into the other side. The two combine within the cell and produce a chemical reaction that creates energy with no burning, no combustion, and no power lines.
About 64 stacks of fuel cells could power a small business like a Starbucks franchise, according to the 60 Minutes interview.

So far, the Bloom Box is prohibitively expensive – $700,000 to $800,000 – so only huge corporations like Wal-Mart, Google, and Ebay have hooked 'em up. But Bloom Energy hopes to get the cost down to only a few thousand dollars. If they can figure that out, the world as we know it will completely change.

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UPDATE - 23 months ago

A friend corrected me about the price of the Bloom Boxes. The article actually says that the corporate boxes are $700,000 - $800,000. Those are the ones which are meant to run entire factories.

So it follows that the residential Bloom Boxes should be substantially cheaper. Probably not $2,000, but certainly not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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james

23 months ago: If this is a true fuel cell it is wonderful news. But what is it. Electrolisis seperates the H and O in water. The box uses air? To get oxygen? For what I wonder? And how does the multi fuel feature work? It works on gasoline or sunshine? Surely they are speaking of electrical power. So you plug in your electric generater to power it. Sounds like square one to me.

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Altruist
Eugene, OR

23 months ago: If they can get the cost down to a few thousand dollars this would be wonderful. But that is the big question isn't it?

Fuel cells have been around for a long time and were first developed for the space program. Its neat for that because hydrogen and oxygen are used for fuel and you get water and electricity out. In space they drank the water.

The next part of the package would be photovoltaic cells on the roof and a neat safe electrolysis unit.

You can of course just run a couple of wires from your PV cells into a bucket of water, but you want to separate the H from the O2. If you put a bucket over the cathode which is hooked to the negative terminal you can collect the hydrogen gas. If you put a bucket over the anode connected to the positive terminal, the oxygen gas will bubble up into it. If you mix the gases and something sparks, your house will go up in flames.

Then you just need to have a compressor to suck out the gas and put it in separate bottles. In the case of the Hydrogen you might want to put it into a metal hydride so it will be safer.

So the fuel cell would act like a big battery and use your H gas and O2 gas as fuel and produce electricity, with water as a by product. Why not just use batteries?

In the future they are trying to get these fuel cells small enough and cheap enough to power electric vehicles, but you can also use the H gas as a fuel in conventional internal combustion engines. So why do you need fuel cells?

You can of course just buy hydrogen gas to run your fuel cell, but 95% of commercial hydrogen is broken down from natural gas. Hydrogen is pretty expensive so since this is a multi fuel cell you can probably just put natural gas into the cell to generate electricity but then you have Carbon monoxide (poison) and carbon dioxide (greenhouse gas) as by products, so once again you would probably be better off running a generator on the natural gas to make your electricity.

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