Bloom Energy says, Brick-sized device could power a home.
Silicon Valley start-up Bloom Energy has unveiled the Bloom Box, a domestic fuel cell system that it claims will be very simple and inexpensive to operate. However it isn’t expected to be available for up to 10 years.
There’s a massive amount of boasting around the release. On 60 Minutes last night, founder KR Sridhar held up a brick-sized gadget that he claimed could power at least one house. He proposes that Bloom Boxes could at some point take the place of the electricity grid completely.
However with the official release not really until Wednesday, technical information tend to be slim.
The Bloom Box’s catalytic plates comprise of a stack of ceramic plates distributed with an unidentified ‘cheap metal alloy’ – other comparable cells call for costly metals such as platinum.
It could operate on any kind of fuel, states the company, from fossil fuels to biomass, which can be combined with oxygen to produce electrical power, with carbon dioxide and water as byproducts. There is no word on the efficiency of the thing – various other comparable fuel cells can manage up to 90 percent - of the operating costs.
Sridhar states that he created the idea after working on a device for NASA that would be able to produce oxygen for a Mars mission.
The company already has larger-scale versions – priced at around $700,000 – being used at eBay and Google datacenters, where it claims they have saved the companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy expenses.
It says the household models should cost as little as $3,000 and be on the market within five to ten years. However with dozens of other companies focusing on comparable technologies, it’s totally possible that Bloom could possibly be beaten to market.
Bloom Energy has taken eight years to get this far, and has obtained $400 million in venture capital.
