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| Science & Technology |
| The Register: Silicon Valley hypegasm for miracle shoebox powerplants |
| 2010-02-24 |
| Mostly the pilot Bloom plants - larger, fridge or car-sized units intended to power large buildings - run on ordinary fossil-fuel natural gas, but some users intend to use gas sourced from landfills or other more eco-feely sources. Benefiting from lavish Californian eco-subsidies - much though there's nothing particularly eco-friendly about making electricity out of fossil fuel - and the known fact that a kilowatt-hour of gas is much cheaper than one of grid electricity, the Bloom units are reported to cut into a building's electricity bill quite substantially, as one would expect. A prominent investor in Bloom is John Doerr of Netscape and Google fame, who thinks that homeowners may choose to install Bloom boxes: even that power companies may place larger ones in substations. Sridhar, a one-time NASA engineer, considers that small, affordable units could be a boon to customers in developing nations without access to grid electricity. If the Bloom cells are as cheap and reliable as the firm suggests, the tech may indeed become very popular. But, contrary to the company's spin and the rapidly mounting hype, this would ultimately be a disaster in terms of carbon emissions and energy security for the Western world. Properly carbon-busting fuels like garbage gas are never going to supply a big fraction of a developed nation's power - a few per cent is a likely maximum. As for ethanol, the only way this can be produced in a vaguely green way is as biofuel from food crops - and this equates to starvation for the world's poor plus accelerated deforestation with associated eco-evils. Basically, they work and appear profitable because the politicians haven't screwed up the market for natural gas the way they have for oil and for electricity. YET. |
| Posted by:Thing From Snowy Mountain |
| #4 "Yet" But they are working on it I'm sure. |
| Posted by: Kelly 2010-02-24 20:30 |
| #3 My "Bullshit" alarm is clanging away Loudly. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2010-02-24 20:07 |
| #2 Longer Video |
| Posted by: Mad Eye Angaque6229 2010-02-24 13:16 |
| #1 A look under the hood of the "Bloom Box" |
| Posted by: Mad Eye Angaque6229 2010-02-24 13:08 |