Is Bloom Box the Future of Energy?

[rootX]

Would have been nicer simply sticking to the wireless part :). He is trying to go for two targets at once and neither of them are commercially feasible yet. We need improvements even in smart grid.

 

[rewebster]

Would have been nicer simply sticking to the wireless part :). He is trying to go for two targets at once and neither of them are commercially feasible yet.

I would have hated to buy a computer in the 1960's

 

[rootX]

I would have hated to buy a computer in the 1960's

No, it would be like buying computer in 1940s/

 

[Proton Soup]

I suppose the bulk cost of the Bloom Box are the cells. But fuel cells can get clogged up with impurities that are in natural gas. And hence the efficiency of Bloom Box would go down over time. Factoring in long time needed to pay for itself, it will need maintenance. And if the maintenance is replacing expensive cells, then that defeats the whole purpose.

i would put money on that being the cheapest part, and probably why he's been able to get so much interest: doing it without platinum. if you can knock out the cells cheaply, then you can afford to replace them at regular intervals with sufficient markup (which they seem to have established, already).

 

[russ_watters]

What is wrong with that ? Suggesting that american people use too much power, and implementing a reasonable reduction in the design of his box looks to me like a very good idea.

The huge box was not for a private house obviously.

I think you misunderstood the objection: It isn't about the comparison between the US and Europe, it is holding up a small cube and saying this can power a house, when in reality you need a box the size of a refrigerator (probably). It is unnecessarily showy. It makes him look like a fraud when he plays games like that.

There is actually a secret, you do not know how the coating is manufactured.

I'm sure, but in order for this product to be anything more than a failure, they need one or both of the following:

1. To be a lot cheaper than other similar products. He claims he can, but right now he isn't. And given how much money he's spent, he'll need to sell a lot of these things at a high price to break even financially any time soon. This is the more important.
2. Higher efficiency than other similar products. If he gets 40%, that'll be enough to beat a gas turbine generator, but only if his prices drop by an order of magnitude.

 

[russ_watters]

that's minimalizing it---that is what makes a breakthrough...

like, instead of using burnt bamboo, to tungsten

That's overstating it. If his different material doesn't make it a lot cheaper or a lot more efficient, it's like comparing one steel alloy to another. Just being different does not imply better.

 

[russ_watters]

I do not really disagree with you, at least I think I understand, but I believe no matter how we approach this, it will remain pure speculation. All this noise...

That's just it - what is the point of all this? Why not just tell us what the efficiency is? Why the used-car salesmanship? That makes me not trust him.

...only leads me to one conclusion : the success or failure will be driven by commercials and communication rather than facts from the data sheets, and as they say : there is no such thing as bad advertising.

Completely wrong. This is a product that in order to succeed can't just be a niche product for a handful of hippies who want to look cool. It has to be truly commercially viable. Unlike a Seguey, hype alone won't sell it because it's only real goal is to save you money. It is far too easy to do a payback calculation to determine if you should buy one and far too expensive to not check the economics before doing so.

 

[russ_watters]

Here's an interesting tidbit from the wiki: "On 24 February 2010, Sridhar told Todd Woody of the The New York Times that his devices are making electricity for 8–10 cents/kwh using natural gas..."

Natural gas costs about $12/million BTU (residential) or $.041 per kWh. So based on that claim, it would appear to have an efficiency of 41-51%.

 

[Bystander]

Titanium oxide ceramics were going to keep countertops sterile, reduce mold and mildew, and yield self-cleaning paints (photocatalytic oxidation of organic compounds) a couple years back; there have been odd ads in the past year about paints (can't find anything right now), and vague impressions of self-cleaning indestructible kitchen gadgets being marketed (again, nothing specific from Google searches).

So, the kid comes up with a porous sintered kitchen tile, dopes opposite sides with transition metal oxides (or, oxide-powdered metal mix), cooks the glaze into the tile faces and presents us with the air-garbage fuel cell. Purities, dopants, and doping levels remain proprietary --- but, the costs don't drop since titanium dioxide is already commercial in million ton per year quantities at the purity required for paint fillers, and the purity and particle size range he needs for his tiles look to be rather product specific, and therefore, permanently expensive.

Does this thread need to be appended to the Bloom thread in Gen. Eng.?

 

[Cyrus]

FV96eLggmD8&playnext_from=TL&videos...rec_index[/youtube] Ran across this today.