{"id":350315,"date":"2010-02-22T07:55:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T12:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/green.yahoo.com\/blog\/ecogeek\/1300\/bloom-energy-should-you-believe-the-hype.html"},"modified":"2010-02-22T07:55:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-22T12:55:00","slug":"bloom-energy-should-you-believe-the-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/350315","title":{"rendered":"Bloom Energy: Should you believe the hype?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The clean tech news of the week is going to be dominated by Bloom Energy<\/a>‘s emergence from stealth. I can hardly believe that it was almost four years ago that I first wrote about Bloom<\/a>. Reading that 2006 EcoGeek article, I’m proud to say that we got got the broad picture right, but the details are still tantalizing.\n<\/p>\n

Bloom Energy’s current product is a relatively inexpensive and versatile fuel cell that can power roughly 100 American homes. The devices cost $700,000 a piece an are roughly twice as efficient as natural gas power transmitted through the grid. They’ve sold a bunch of these boxes (with hefty federal and state subsidies) to a bunch of large businesses in California, including Google, eBay, FedEx, WalMart and Staples. The boxes are busy creating “clean” energy as we speak.<\/p>\n

Bloom has finally opened the doors to its operation to the press, allowing 60 Minutes a walk-through<\/a> of their facility as well as providing interviews with the CEO of eBay and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. But I put “clean” in quotation marks because, despite the fact that the words “carbon dioxide” are never mentioned, Bloom Boxes still pump CO2 into the atmosphere, albeit far less than a traditional grid-scale natural gas plant would.<\/p>\n

Bloom’s energy is certainly cleaner energy, but while they’re busy comparing themselves to solar power and wind, they’re not true clean energy unless they use bio-gas. I applaud them for using bio-gas when they can, but there simply isn’t enough of the stuff to power Bloom Boxes on a significant scale.<\/p>\n

But let’s not spend too much time arguing about whether “cleaner” counts as “clean.” In my book, this is certainly good enough.<\/p>\n

Bloom’s true potential is in super-charging the distributed power system. Bloom (very optimistically) wants to shrink its box (in size and cost) so that every American can have one in their basement for around $3000. The box would power the entire house, basically making a connection to the grid a convenience, not a necessity. This may not seem important until we realize that up to half of the power produced at a power plant is lost in transit.<\/p>\n

Bloom Energy might also help power the developing world without expensive power infrastructure just as cell phones have created a cheap communications infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Bloom’s goals are lofty and it may be that distributed power is going to be a long time in coming if it comes at all, but while they’re doing a great job of making this revelation sound more important than it is in the short term, the chance remains that this could actually be a very big deal.<\/p>\n

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The clean tech news of the week is going to be dominated by Bloom Energy‘s emergence from stealth. I can hardly believe that it was almost four years ago that I first wrote about Bloom. Reading that 2006 EcoGeek article, I’m proud to say that we got got the broad picture right, but the details […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3951,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-350315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3951"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}