Massive spectacular hype surrounds the upcoming official announcement of the Bloom Box on Wednesday. This is what we know. It creates electricity via fuel cells, can easily fit in a backyard or basement, and will take biofuel, methane, or natural gas as a fuel source. It’s a real product, not vaporware. Google, Fedex, eBay, WalMart and other large companies already have them installed.
The current price is extremely high, but Bloom hopes to drop that something affordable. They also have serious venture capital money behind them with over $400 million invested so far.
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.
This could be a game changer. If we could eliminate a significant portion of that 50% of the energy that never makes to to consumers, well, we just brought our footprint in line with the other industrialized nations, a HUGE improvement. And that’s without even addressing the 40-50% of the energy consumers receive that goes to waste through inefficient use. Serious conservation would mean we could conceivably eliminate coal completely, without building another nuke plant or wind turbine.
Fuel flexibility also makes possible varying solutions for specific geographic realities. A restaurant could use its deep fry fat. Urban areas could use their existing natural gas lines. Sewage treatment plants could help produce the natural gas. Agricultural areas could use manure-to-methane, vastly reducing the impact of livestock production in the process. Homes in a wooded setting (or anywhere you can grow a managed forest) could use a modified dendro approach. And if it will use H2, the possibilities are nearly endless.
This is a “wow!”