I was amused at the comparison to NASA. There are some major differences:
1) bloom uses cheap materials 2) bloom doesn't use aerospace quality fuel.How long before the unit cruds up to the point where it will no longer operate?
Until somebody provides this data, bloom can be safely ignored.
That was the number ransley posted, anyway...perhaps commercially-produced units can have a payback, hard to guess from essentially no hard facts. And, of course, there's still the question of just what is the material balance of the process. If it's using NG, the C has to go somewhere. Is there air involved? If so, that's NOx also one would presume. And, again, imo, using NG for stationary power generation in large quantities is simply an asinine waste of it in comparison to its value as chemical feedstock, etc., etc., going into the future.
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It's exacted out of hundred dollar bills.
Yup-- made me find the transcript.
But I don't see where it says how many boxes they used. Sheesh- lousy reporting, or purposeful obfuscation? They show 5 on a lawn-- but who knows if that's Ebay's or Google's lawn.
this time I heard the Ebay guy say; "When you average it over seven days a week, 24 hours a day, the Bloom box puts out five times as much power that we can actually use."
So did it make $500-600K worth of power in that 9 months? Or is everyone just pulling numbers out of their wazoo?
Jim [Here's the video link if anyone hasn't seen it yet-
Wasn't that compared to the PV array on the roof? Considering cloudy days and the number of hours of direct sun on non-cloudy days, that's not a surprising number.
The $750K unit was the larger, refrigerator size commercial units being used by FedEx, Ebay, etc. And they are hand-built prototype units for testing, not mass produced units. Let's say the $750K unit is 10X the size of a home unit. So, the price of a similar prototype home unit might be $75K today. When you get to volume production, dropping that $75K to the forecasted $3K isn't really that unreasonable. For example, look at plasma TVs. The first actual production units sold in stores went for $45K. Today you can get a bigger, better one for less than $2K.
Robert Neville wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
if it's outputting so much power(more than what your home uses),it can go back into the grid and you would receive income for the surplus power. Of course,you will be consuming propane/CNG 24/7 to produce that power
24/7.Oh,and you'll need to match phase and freq with the power company. and you still need to dispose of the carbon it produces. (using hydroCARBON fuels)
TANSTAAFL.
Could well be. It does make the sentence more grammatically correct.
Still boggles my mind that since the first thing any reasonable person does is figure out what the payback would be- it seems like 60 minutes could have hinted at it.
Jim
ote:
Life expectancy cant fully be known yet, just tested and guessed. So they have to be cheap, which they wont be. It cant be ignored as thats the way alot of new tech things are.
Its used all the time for "peaker power plants" here in Midwest.
Have two friends who work at one. Several jet turbines powered by NG
do you have a point to make, other than showing a stupid animation of somebody doing a google search for "fuel cells" "connecticut"?
Well, if you were just a teeny tiny bit smarter than dirt, you could have followed that serch result and found a plethora of information about hydrogen fuel cells currently in use. You would even know where they get the hydrogen.
But, you'd have to be at least a teeny tiny bit smarter than dirt...
Yes but that doesn't mean it's wise usage of NG. Expedient in short term, yes; given difficulties raised in the alternatives has often been essentially only alternative left... :(
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snipped-for-privacy@optonline.net wrote: ...
Maybe, one can only hope and wait and see...
If it's really real one (at least I w/ 30+ yrs in commercial power R&D do) wonders why they've not been interested in working w/ those who have inside track w/ the generation folks...
I can't think of any other alternative technology that has become commercially viable (even counting the subsidies in place for "green") that hasn't been that route.
Maybe the guy has something but it's hard (spelled "impossible") to tell at the moment just what that is and how real it might be.
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It could just as easily be an awesome use of NG. maybe the thing uses very little gas efficiently to produce a lot of power.
Supposedly there are vast untapped reserves of NG under the U.S.
All irrelevent, asshole.
The problem is that hydrogen isn't a fuel source. It is an energy transfer medium and a really shitty one at that.
Dirt was all you had to beat, and you just couldn't do it.
"Maybe" and "supposedly" are key words here...
_IF_ (that's the proverbial "big if") this thing were to turn out to be very efficient that's a possibility, granted. It certainly hasn't been demonstrated to be so yet. Cold fusion was apparently great until it was attempted to be replicated elsewhere and shown to be an experimental error at best or hoax at worst. Jury is still out on this...
I continue to think NG is definitely not a judicious choice for extensive stationary generation in present form of either gas turbines or in gas-fired boilers compared to the alternatives.
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