Bloom Energy
by Handsome Matt
If you haven’t seen the news surrounding Bloom Energy: Take five minutes and Google it immediately.
Or click this link right here!
Fuel cells have been a bit pie in the sky since they were invented. They weren’t cost effective for mass production, and were relegated to such boring, menial tasks as powering NASA missions.
Until Bloom Energy came along.
Bloom Energy has improved the costs and efficiencies of fuel cell technology. The ability to power a hundred homes is now housed in a single parking space and is incredibly efficient and clean.
What this means is we now have the ability to generate clean power cheaply and deliver it more efficiently (owing to the shorter transmission distances). This also means that more efficient delivery systems, like superconductors, which are prohibitively expensive in large scale applications, could be used in smaller settings. We’ll see.
The question now is whether or not this will be implemented. Or if this is another amazing technological advancement that will never be implemented.
Conservance 
Not about fuel cells, but on the topic of improvements in clean energy:
http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13325
[…] See the original post: Bloom Energy « Social, Economic, Environmental Responsibility […]
Apparently this is, strictly speaking, only ‘clean’ energy when the cells are run on biogas (ie: methane). The cells are carbon-neutral when run on methane, but produce over 700 lbs of CO2 per MW-hr when run on natural gas.
The problem with that? There’s presently little to no infrastructure for bringing methane to the consumer, which means that this is still a long way from ‘self-generation’.
With eBay and Wal-Mart lapping this up and planning to run it on biogas, though, maybe that will be the spark needed to motivate putting some infrastructure in place.
Short of that, maybe it’s a good thing I married into a family of dairy farmers. 😛
Thanks for the info Matt. This is very interesting technology. I agree with Dan. For the most part this is little more than a glorified natural gas powered generator. The savings pretty much come form not having power transmission lines to your building since the generator is there. There are significant energy losses (therefore CO2 emissions) associated with power line transmission. It is nice to have the technology to generate on a small scale just as clean as large powerplants are now capable of.
This is a good example of how products are not quite as green as their marketing departments would have you believe.
I think the best promise for future energy potential is energy storage. A big discovery in this area could really increase the effectiveness of things like wind and hydro – where we don’t have control of the timing of energy production.
You’re absolutely right about storage, and I would also add that transmission could stand to have a break through as well.
It’s worth noting that if people can generate power on-site, or reasonably close by, then rather than making super-conducting delivery methods more feasible by virtue of reducing the scale, we actually remove the need for them altogether.
The sort of losses that occur due to long-range transmission of power via conventional wires are negligible on house-lot or city-block scales, and several of the methods used to overcome those losses today could also be toned down or dropped altogether opening up other means of efficiency: for example transmission voltages can be reduced — thus reducing or perhaps removing the need for step-down transformers and DC-AC conversion.
Ostensibly, there’s a lot of future infrastructure and resources that could be saved even without the reduction of carbon footprint.
And that infrastructure saving would reduce carbon footprints. Also having the power generation near by, means any issues in noise or pollution will be fixed much, much faster.
Out of sight, out of mind applies more so to pollution than anything else.
Since the P=E^2/R the reason voltages are high is because to get the same power if you increase the voltage the amperage drops and the resistance is lowered exponentially. So if you multiply the voltage by 10 times you decrease the resistance by 100 times. That is why million volt power lines used for long range have very few losses. Residentially, the reduced losses more than make up for the cost of the transformers. The whole system would be come very inefficient if transmission voltages were reduced. The system is pretty darned efficient using the materials we have available. Matt is right that the way to improve is to discover transmission materials that are superconductive. Until we discover those materials, there is not much savings in the transmission systems.
You must mean P=V^2/R, but yes, that is precisely why long-distance transmission lines are run at very high voltages.
If you look at the literature you’ll note that, already, there is a marked step down in voltage from transmission lines to distribution (short-range) lines. So it’s not even really my idea — but even in those cases the power routed from substations still travels much further than it would in the case of these on-site generation setups.
Voltage isn’t the only way to control dissipative losses, though it is the strongest. The resistance of a line is linear with respect to its length, meaning P ~ 1/L, so reducing or perhaps even eliminating the need for long-distance transmission will absolutely provide an economical advantage in its own right. That’s setting aside the gains from salvaging material from the current grid and those from no longer having to construct or maintain them.
I think that superconducting power infrastructure is still slightly over the horizon, since the warmest one that I can think of would still need a liquid nitrogen bath to be maintained below the right temperature at all times. Certainly it would not be practical for long-distance transmission anyhow, so it’s not really a meaningful alternative to on-site generation of any kind as far as that goes.
I miread your original post. I thought you were advocating lowering voltages to eliminate transformers. I see now that you meant if we generate locally, we can avoid transformers. We are in complete agreement on this issue.