Bloom Energy – “Powerhouse in a Box”, Powers your Home for a Year

Bill Gates pointed it out at TED, that we need revolution in Energy, batteries more than anything else. He talked about building advanced Zero emission Nuclear reactors that would feed on today’s Uranium waste to power the world for decades.

Google with it’s Google Energy, is trying a similar approach.

Update: BloomEnergy is now Live, details at the end

The future is all about generating your own cheap electricity in greener ways, and a US startup believes that they have found a solution – “Powerhouse in a Box”.

Bloom energy, formerly “Ion America”,  comes-up with something that is truly powerful, and revolutionary. K.R. Sridhar has built what he claims to be a fuel cell that can power a typical US home for a year with zero emission. This equals 2 European and 4 Asian houses 24/7 x 365 days, that’s alot of energy.

KR had worked previously with NASA to build a handy device that could actually produce Oxygen for Mars. But the idea was dropped by the agency, and KR reversed the invention to make it a fuel cell.

Currently, these boxes cost $700,000-$800,000, but eventually in 5-10 years, there will be one in every home – and Sridhar thinks he can get the cost below $3,000 for a unit to make that happen.

Two of these boxes combined together makeup to a size of a brick, and they need to be surrounded by a larger unit that takes in an energy source (such as natural gas)of upto size of refrigerator.

The fact  is that they’re already installed at datacenters in companies like Google, eBay, FedEx and others. Four of these Bloom Boxes have apparently been powering a Google datacenter for the past 18 months. eBay says their five boxes have saved them over $100,000 in electricity costs over the past 9 months.

Watch the Video Coverage from CBS:

The technology will be unveiled to public on wednesday, 24th feb, the countdown is already clicking on their website. Stay tuned for the unveiling, we will keep you updated @taranfx.

Update: BloomEnergy is now Live

Energy Saver: Built with our patented solid oxide fuel cell technology, Bloom’s Energy Server™ is a new class of distributed power generator, producing clean, reliable, affordable electricity at the customer site.

Fuel cells are devices that convert fuel into electricity through a clean electro-chemical process rather than dirty combustion. They are like batteries except that they always run. Our particular type of fuel cell technology is different than legacy “hydrogen” fuel cells in four main ways:

1. Low cost materials – our cells use a common sand-like powder instead of precious
   metals like platinum or corrosive materials like acids.
2. High electrical efficiency – we can convert fuel into electricity at nearly twice the
   rate of some legacy technologies
3. Fuel flexibility – our systems are capable of using either renewable or fossil fuels
4. Reversible – our technology is capable of both energy generation and storage

Each Bloom Energy Server provides 100kW of power, enough to meet the baseload needs of 100 average homes or a small office building… day and night, in roughly the footprint of a standard parking space. For more power simply add more energy servers.

At the heart of every Energy Server™ is Bloom’s patented solid oxide fuel cell technology.

Each Energy Server consists of thousands of Bloom’s fuel cells. Each cell is a flat solid ceramic square made from a common sand-like “powder.”

Each Bloom Energy fuel cell is capable of producing about 25W… enough to power a light bulb. For more power, the cells are sandwiched, along with metal interconnect plates into a fuel cell “stack”. A few stacks, together about the size of a loaf of bread, is enough to power an average home.

In an Energy Server, multiple stacks are aggregated together into a “power module”, and then multiple power modules, along with a common fuel input and electrical output are assembled as a complete system.

For more power, multiple Energy Server systems can be deployed side by side.

In addition to Bloom’s unmatched performance, this modular architecture offers…

• easy and fast deployment
• inherent redundancy for fault tolerance
• high availability (one power module can be serviced while all others continue to operate)
• mobility

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