The Bloom Box: a power plant for the home

In the world of energy, the Holy Grail is a source of energy that is cheap and clean, without emissions. More than 100 new companies in Silicon Valley is working on it, and one of them, Bloom Energy, is about to make public his invention: a low-powered plant in a box literally want to put in your backyard.

You generate your own electricity with the box and will go wireless. The idea is to replace large power plants and the network of transmission lines, the way they moved the laptop to the desktop and mobile phones to landlines supplanted.

Two boxes can power the average home of high consumption and a table can power the average home consumption low, at least that's the claim being made by KR Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, in 60 minutes show on CBS. The original technology came from an oxygen generator for a scrapping program for NASA's Mars has become, with the help of an estimated $ 400 million in private funds in a fuel cell.

Design Bloom oxygen is fed to one side of a cell, while (natural gas, biogas from landfills, solar, etc.) is supplied to the other side to provide the necessary chemical reaction for power. The cells are inexpensive ceramic discs painted with green ink a secret, "" on one side and a black "ink" on the other. The disks are separated by a cheap metal alloy, instead of more precious metals such as platinum, and stacked in a bucket of different capacities - a stack of 64 can feed a small company like Starbucks.

Now get this, skeptics and there are several corporate customers using refrigerator-sized boxes Bloom. The cell size businesses a cost of $ 700,000 to $ 800,000 and installed 20 customers have already heard of like FedEx and Wal-Mart - Google was the first to join this group of green power, using his Bloom boxes to power a data center over the past 18 months. Ebay has its boxes installed in the front yard of his San Jose location. Is estimated to receive nearly 15% of its energy needs, Bloom, saving about $ 100,000 from the installation of the five boxes of 9 months - an estimate we assume that ignores the millions Ebay paid for the boxes themselves. Bloom for about a box a day at the moment and believes that in 5 to 10 years can lower the cost to about $ 3,000 to make it suitable for domestic use, that sounds very expensive. However, Bloom Energy will make public details on 24 February.
Contribute a better translation.

Tags:bloom energy, bloombox energy, bloom energy fuel cell, bloom box energy, 60 minutes