Merged Bloom Box fuel cell system

[TheDaver]

In theory, sure. But for the next couple of years I think a good old-fashioned UPS or generator would be more practical.

 

[r-j]

If this works it would mean the pig poop could be turned into power.

 

[Dog Town]

Michael Kanellos has a few questions.

--The Bloom box emits carbon dioxide. How much per kilowatt? How does it compare to power plants? Do you get twice the power for the same amount of carbon dioxide?

--Some of Bloom's patents talk about how its fuel cell can take the carbon dioxide, water, and some of the electricity produced by the first reaction and run it through the fuel cell again to produce oxygen and a methane-like fuel. The idea came out of research conducted at NASA to develop a box that could produce oxygen to support life on Mars. Is the company still pursuing that model? Or is that currently too much of a challenge? Converting carbon dioxide into a fuel with energy from a reaction that created the carbon dioxide in the first place pushes the laws of thermodynamics.

--What are the catalysts made from? K.R. Sridhar, the founder and CEO, says it isn't platinum. The patents mention zirconium. On the show, Sridhar showed off some dyes but didn't say what was inside.

--How does the cost of the box compare with solar, wind and standard power? The incentives are great: the federal government gives buyers a 30 percent tax credit and California buyers get a few dollars per kilowatt of the price back from the state. Plus, owners can sell excess power back to the grid in the state. Still, how does it compare?

http://www.greentechmedia.com/artic...m-box-lands-and-the-unanswered-questions-are/
Found the comments section quite interesting, as well.

 

[Scott Haley]

If I were really wealthy, I'd have a little one made and stick it in a Tesla car.

 

[Modified]

Does that 10% include transmission losses?

No. The highest claimed electrical generation efficiencies I can find for an SOFC system that has been running for a while is 50% for the SOFC part and 56% total. Efficiencies over 65% for SOFC-only are claimed for newer technologies. There are also systems at 40% efficiency showing essentially no degradation after several thousand hours.

 

[portlandatheist]

--The Bloom box emits carbon dioxide. How much per kilowatt? How does it compare to power plants? Do you get twice the power for the same amount of carbon dioxide?

The more efficient something consumes natural gas, the more CO2 it will emit per kilowatt, the less efficient, the less CO2. In fact, this is how efficiency is measured in the case of gas furnaces. Cars back in the early 1900's that had a terrible miles per gallon rating produced much less CO2 per gallon and instead produced more byproducts of an incomplete/inefficient burn such as carbon monoxide.

 

[kedo1981]

What’s really important is that multiply people are attacking the clean energy issue from many directions, someone will crack it, reason will solve some of the problems we having or that are on the horizon, science will prevail.
I would like this "the bloom box" to work, it does work, but I doubt the economics of it.

 

[technoextreme]

eBay have been running several of them for the past 5 months. I think they might have noticed by now if they didn't actually work.

You do realize that they have no clue how to evaluate how well the fuel cells work do you? You do realize that the major problem isn't building a fuel cell that works for a short bust of time do you?

Well it's not magic... it still needs a fuel and oxygen intake, as well as plates with a secret double-coating that I assume are going to need periodical replacing.

Congratulations. You just stated the number one problem with all fuel cells.

 

[Free Thinkr]

The more efficient something consumes natural gas, the more CO2 it will emit per kilowatt, the less efficient, the less CO2. In fact, this is how efficiency is measured in the case of gas furnaces. Cars back in the early 1900's that had a terrible miles per gallon rating produced much less CO2 per gallon and instead produced more byproducts of an incomplete/inefficient burn such as carbon monoxide.

Mmm, this sounds well and good for "efficiency" of converting gas into heat, but not so much for converting gas into electricity. How effectively the gas is burned is only half the equation with power generation; there's also how effectively that heat is transformed into electrical power.

Presumably, in both cases the gas would be burned very effectively.

 

[BenBurch]

This thing dumps a lot of heat to the environment.

To be actually efficient you need to have a bottoming cycle to use that heat.

In a residence, this can be water heating or domestic heat.

In an industry process heat or a Rankin or Stirling engine to drive a generator.

In any case, using a fuel cell efficiently requires complication and increases first cost and operating cost and downtime significantly.

 

[r-j]

Compared to what?

 

[Horatius]

Here's some links to what look like the patents and patent applications for this device:

US20090269626 Method of optimizing operating efficiency of fuel cells (that one also looks like it's patent #7575822)

US7572530: SORFC power and oxygen generation method and system


They also seem to have a lot of patents on other similar technologies. I found 33 patents or applications with the name K.R. Sridhar as inventor. Some of those are duplicates (applications that became patents) but they do seem pretty serious.

 

[Cuddles]

they do seem pretty serious.

I don't think anyone's arguing that they're not serious. They don't appear to be claiming anything impossible, they simply claim to be the first ones to get a practical, small-scale fuel cell array suitable for home use. The question is not whether that's possible, it's whether this particular system is actually as practical and cost-effective as claimed.

Even assuming everything said about it is true, there are still two big problems. Firstly, fossil fuels. There may be efficiency gains, but this still uses methane, and therefore has all the same problems with supply, pollution and so on that any other methane powered generator has. The whole point of fuel cells is that they can run on hydrogen, which can be produced in any number of sustainable ways. Making them run on fossil fuels may be easier in the short term, but completely defeats the object of having the in the first place. The really sad thing is that they seem to be using the fact that it runs on fossil fuel as one of the major selling points, rather than a serious hurdle that will have to be overcome in the future.

Secondly, the grid. The national grid, or whatever your country's equivalent, is not something you can simply plug stuff into at will. There's a lot (really a lot) of technical management that has to go on to keep it all working at the right current, voltage, frequency, phase, and so on. This is not too hard when you have relatively few centralised power stations, but the more spread out generation is, the more difficult it becomes. One of the big problems with things like wind power is that most grids won't actually be able to cope with a large amount without significant upgrades. It's something that's not often mentioned in the PR, but the UK's plans to have 20% of our power generated by wind power are simply not possible without some major expenditure getting the grid to cope with it, on top of the cost of actually building the wind farms.

And wind turbines are pretty big things in the MW range, built in carefully chosen locations and managed by power companies. Now imagine that instead of a few hundred of those you have a few hundred thousand much smaller generators scattered randomly all over the place in various states of repair.

This is the problem with any distributed generation, whether it's fuel cells, solar, wind, or whatever. As soon as for than a few people start using it, you need to start making massive investments into power infrastructure and active management. It's certainly possible, and if something like the Bloom Box could make residential power generation practical and economic then it may well be worth making the effort. But we can't just suddenly all go out and buy one and expect everything to carry on working the way it does now.

 

[r-j]

Bloom allows you to save money first. The efficiency built into Bloom's fuel cell systems allows a typical customer to achieve a 3-5 year financial payback making it an easy and economically sound choice.

But the economics aren't the only story. Customers can also cut their CO[SIZE=-2]2[/SIZE] emissions by 40%-100% compared to the U.S. grid (depending on their fuel choice) and virtually eliminate all SOx, NOx, and other harmful smog forming particulate emissions. Installing Bloom Energy Servers allows you to dramatically reduce your carbon footprint, but not at the cost of your bottom line.

When operating on pipeline-delivered natural gas, Bloom systems efficiently and electrochemically convert that fuel into low-carbon, baseload electricity. The same Energy Servers can also provide a carbon neutral generation solution operating on renewable fuels such as biogas. Bloom's fuel flexibility allows customers to choose the solution that is right for them.


http://www.bloomenergy.com/benefits/save-money-and-the-environment/

 

[BenBurch]

Quite simply, if this has no bottoming cycle, it cannot be more than about 55% efficient. Period.

If, however, they also have a novel bottoming cycle, and that is competent, they can get to around 90%.

 

[Dog Town]

Bloom allows you to save money first. The efficiency built into Bloom's fuel cell systems allows a typical customer to achieve a 3-5 year financial payback making it an easy and economically sound choice.

I would like to see some evidence for this, above quote.

-4 units cost 3.2 mil, and they have claimed a savings of 100,000,
in a few years.

-A definition for their typical customer, would also be in order. Did I miss it?

 

[Dilb]

This thing dumps a lot of heat to the environment.

To be actually efficient you need to have a bottoming cycle to use that heat.

In a residence, this can be water heating or domestic heat.

In an industry process heat or a Rankin or Stirling engine to drive a generator.

In any case, using a fuel cell efficiently requires complication and increases first cost and operating cost and downtime significantly.

If you count the heat they produce, that's not a bottoming cycle, that's cogeneration. Any power generator is near 100% efficient as a cogenerator as long as they are inside the building they're powering. A fire is nearly 100% efficient as a cogeneration system.

In any case, fuel cells aren't thermal generators, they're (essentially) batteries. They aren't limited by Carnot efficiencies, just by the entropy of the reactants and products. In theory they could be around 80% to 90% efficient at converting chemical energy to electrical energy (depending on the fuel and temperature of the cell). In practice, fuel cells suffer from enough losses that they're usually around 50% to 60% efficient, but that could change. If someone stumbles on a much better way to build the electrodes fuel cell efficiency could conceivably shoot up dramatically.

I'm guessing Bloom thinks they have essentially figured out how to build a better electrode, or figured out how to avoid using platinum. I doubt they will actually get it to work as well as they think they can, but it's not impossible that they are producing something legitimately worthwhile. Their website doesn't inspire much confidence, with sections like

Bloom Energy delivers Better Electrons™
All electrons are not created equal. Bloom Energy delivers electrons that are clean and reliable and affordable… all at the same time… and just for you. That makes them better electrons.

 

[blutoski]

Their website doesn't inspire much confidence, with sections like

Ouch.

Well, that's marketingspeak for ya.

The trick is to sift through the [collateral] for nuggets of facts. The website is pretty scarce on facts. I think that's what's triggering the skepticism here.

I'd be curious to see what arrangements are in place for the corporate sites. eg: my employer operates a lot of 'green' technologies and strategies... at an economic loss. It's a marketing investment to give the appearance of being green. I can see eBay and Google taking a small hit in operational costs to get some green cred.

For all we know, Bloom Box is paying these companies rent to operate as a 'test site' and nothing actually functions onsite yet.

 

[Cuddles]

Customers can also cut their CO[SIZE=-2]2[/SIZE] emissions by 40%-100% compared to the U.S. grid (depending on their fuel choice)

No they can't. From their data sheet page:

Fuels Natural Gas, Directed Biogas

Fuels cells that run on hydrogen can reduce CO₂ emissions to zero, those that run on methane can't.

Another point I noticed, from their products page:

2. High electrical efficiency – we can convert fuel into electricity at nearly twice the rate of some legacy technologies

That is not what efficiency means. It doesn't matter how quickly you burn the fuel, the efficiency is a measure of what proportion of the energy released is actually used.

The website is pretty scarce on facts. I think that's what's triggering the skepticism here.

Indeed. And it's not just scarce on facts, but frequently misleading or just plain wrong. I think there's little argument over whether a fuel cell system could provide relatively cheap, efficient, distributed micro-generation, the question is whether this particular system actually does so. From the way it presents itself, it appears that there's a lot of unsubstantiated marketing hype, but very little in the way of evidence to support the claims being made.

My opinion is that these things very likely work as generators, and may well be useful on an industrial or commercial scale. But they're probably of little use to the average home owner and have nothing like the efficiency or environmental credentials they try to claim.

 

[ksbluesfan]

In "What's New", Bob Park says "The pitchman, K.R. Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy in Sunnyvale, is not your typical scam artist, but an artfully understated business executive."

He also says the fuel cell isn't anything new and is not the future of energy production.