{"id":358761,"date":"2010-02-24T14:51:38","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T19:51:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidkirkpatrick.wordpress.com\/?p=6842"},"modified":"2010-02-24T14:51:38","modified_gmt":"2010-02-24T19:51:38","slug":"is-the-bloom-box-the-next-segway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/358761","title":{"rendered":"Is the Bloom Box the next Segway?"},"content":{"rendered":"

That is, overhyped as a revolutionary game-changing technology that doesn’t even come close to expectations? Who knows. K.R. Sridhar is getting plenty of attention and if the Bloom Box comes near to delivering<\/a> on its promise may well become a truly revolutionary piece of technology. The skeptic in me keeps me from holding my breath in excitement. (And yes, that last sentence is dripping with snark even though it doesn’t come through in the writing.)<\/p>\n

From the link:<\/p>\n

\n

The hot energy news for this week comes in the form of a small box called the Bloom box, whose inventor hopes that it will be in almost every US home in the next five to 10 years. K.R. Sridhar, founder of the Silicon Valley start-up called Bloom Energy, unveiled the device on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d to CBS reporter Leslie Stahl on Sunday evening. Although Sridhar made some impressive claims on the show, he left many of the details a secret. This Wednesday, the company will hold a \u201cspecial event\u201d in eBay\u2019s town hall, with a\u00a0countdown clock on its website<\/a> suggesting it will be a momentous occasion – or at least generating hype.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Sridhar explained to Stahl, the Bloom box is a new kind of fuel cell that produces electricity by combining oxygen in the air with any\u00a0fuel source<\/a>, such as natural gas, bio-gas, and solar energy. Sridhar said the chemical reaction is efficient and clean, creating energy without burning or combustion. He said that two Bloom boxes – each the size of a grapefruit – could wirelessly power a US home, fully replacing the\u00a0power grid<\/a>; one box could power a European home, and two or three Asian homes could share a single box. Although currently a commercial unit costs $700,000-$800,000 each, Sridhar hopes to manufacture home units that cost less than $3,000 in five to 10 years. He said he got the idea after designing a device for NASA that would generate oxygen on Mars, for a mission that was later canceled. The Bloom box works in the opposite way as the Mars box: instead of generating oxygen, it uses oxygen as one of the inputs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Update — Here’s the latest on the Bloom box<\/a> from PhysOrg.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That is, overhyped as a revolutionary game-changing technology that doesn’t even come close to expectations? Who knows. K.R. Sridhar is getting plenty of attention and if the Bloom Box comes near to delivering on its promise may well become a truly revolutionary piece of technology. The skeptic in me keeps me from holding my breath […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4050,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-358761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358761","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\/4050"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}