Energy Breakthrough, Bloom Energy - 60 Minutes

[Icewolf]

I saw this on 60 minutes last night... VERY interesting i think...

This could revolutionize the power industry and reduce pollutions from buildings greatly

[Del Valle]

I don't get this. They say that it produces no emissions, but it produces electricity with the combination a fuel and oxygen, essentially combustion. Also, since these things run on fuel (btw I don't recall any mention of fuel efficiency in the video), wouldn't that mean that a person would have to be constantly buting gasoline or natural gas or some other fuel to power it, essentially destroying any sort odf energy independence it might have.

[Sphere]

Its just a hydrogen fuel cell, they have been around for 150+ years. They have even been used to power houses before so this is nothing new. In the end it has the same problem of all hydrogen fuel cells; where do you get the hydrogen and how do you transport it? The only practical way to produce hydrogen in large quantities right now is to crack down hydrocarbons (i.e. oil/gas) and the only way to transport it is in high pressure but still rather low density pressure tanks. It does seem that this guy has produced a small and perhaps affoardable fuel cell without the need for the precious metals that most employ, but its still highly impractical as it solves non of the problems of using hydrogen as a fuel in the first place.

If on the other hand it is only going to be using natural gas, that is an even worse proposition. Natural gas is the least abundant fossil fuel and the most difficult to distribute, and as Del Valle notes, does produce emissions. If every home in the US did have one of these as its power source, natural gas would become very scarce and astronomically expensive.

Decentralized power sources are a good idea in general, and must be part of our energy future, but there is no way they will be able to supplant the backbone that is the electrical grid.

[Icewolf]

i remember hearing that (assuming this is for real and not propaganda or what have you) that these would reduce emissions by up to 50% (give or take, this is by memory too), there is a part in the 60 minutes report where a company saved $200,000 in energy bills after having it powering one/several of their buildings for a year or so...

[Martin N]

I have an idea, why not use wind power, or solar power ? or geothermal power ? which uses nothing to produce, produces no emissions, and would literally power the earth forever ?

Geothermal would only need water to produce energy, wind is free, so is the suns light, whats interesting is that we know about the potential of these, in 2007 the DOE admitted that if wind was utilized in just 3 states across america, it would power the nation.

So why wont we use this ? No profit, and the competition with the established energy monopolies.

[Denny Crane!]

I'm a lot more interested in MITs self growing solar cell or in Cambridge (UK) ultra cheap solar cell thin enough to coat anything and its dog basically meaning we're a matter of a decade from an almost total electric economy with little need to update to smart grids beyond the economic benefits.

[Aetius]

"Are we really falling for this again? Every clean tech company on the planet says it can produce clean energy cheaply, yet not a single one can. Government subsidies or mandates keep the entire worldwide industry afloat... Hand it to Bloom, the company has managed to tap into the hype machine like no other clean tech company in memory."

-Jonathan Fahey of Forbes

[Denny Crane!]

"Are we really falling for this again? Every clean tech company on the planet says it can produce clean energy cheaply, yet not a single one can. Government subsidies or mandates keep the entire worldwide industry afloat... Hand it to Bloom, the company has managed to tap into the hype machine like no other clean tech company in memory."

-Jonathan Fahey of Forbes

While this is certainly true of a lot of green tech and I suspect this one, there is plenty of good quality tech being created, and simply to much investment from smart venture capitalists who are looking for a big return aside from government subsidies.


Aside from the good work being done at Cambridge and MIT there is also the STAIR battery at St Andrews, first solar, nanosolar and a whole host of others who have solar that is virtually competitive right now with oil and that will rapidly improve but being new their production capacity is so limited they've sold out for a minimum of a year until new factories come online.

Personally I don't think the investments are that wise, because thin film solar is looking redundant in the face of new advances...

[Martin N]

A wind farm opened in the uk, apparently 100 turbines will power 250,000 homes with no waste to dispose off, at a cost of £700m, what was that about expensive and inneficient ?

[Denny Crane!]

A wind farm opened in the uk, apparently 100 turbines will power 250,000 homes with no waste to dispose off, at a cost of £700m, what was that about expensive and inneficient ?

I'm actually pretty wary of wind turbines as our subsidy system is so murky that you never know the true costs.

But as you say no waste, a lot smarter than Nuclear power so I'd settle for a massive investment in them where on a windy day we could power up to 75% of the country quite easily, the spare capacity can be made up in storage (some appropriate solutions out there more are coming), tidal dirges, micro generation and coal and gas will of course still play a part for time to come, so long as there is a lot more investment in renewables than coal and gas.

Feed in Tarrifs were a good move, now British Gas will take a lease on your roof for 25 years and install panels on them at no cost allowing you their use and trading off the fed in electric.