Interesting 2 minute video. Saw the 15 minute interview a few weeks ago on 60 minutes and was very impressed. From what I gleaned from it this Bloom Box device could eventually take your natural gas feed and turn it into electricity thus removing your need for the Electric Company. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
I found it mildly interesting. It's basically a generator. You still need something to fuel the Bloom box. When I saw the tease on the story I thought it used solar power or some clean, renewable source of energy.
ReplyDeleteYou'd still be on the the grid (or pipeline), just a different grid. You'd still be generating CO2. I'm not sure what the huge advantage is of generating your own electricity versus have the electric company generate it. I guess the savings their commercial customers have seen are because their fuel costs to run the Bloom Box are less than what they were paying the electric company.
Brian's exactly right. It runs on natural gas, so the economies for a big company are in the ability to switch back and forth as prices fluctuate.
ReplyDeleteI'd be more than a little surprised if the tiny box converts the natural gas to electricity more efficiently than a large-scale generator, but if it does it could win the battle. The big add we get from a power utility is that they pay to keep electricity reliable, but all that reliability is expensive too.
The big negative for consumers is the added expense to make sure their BloomBox doesn't kill power workers by backfeeding electricity into the grid. They need to either come off the grid completely (hope the box and fuel supply are both ultra-reliable) or use an expensive transfer switch to make sure the box never feeds back to the grid.
The other rub is whether the home owner can feed power into the grid for cash, essentially helping the local utility for fair repayment. These "smartgrids" are being deployed in pilots all over the country right now, but require some pretty technical setup to work.
I was afraid the guy was promising to run on water or something, but it looks realistic.
More interesting to me is something like wind power where I can really generate my own electricity (without the need to buy fuel).
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