The Bloom Box

The Bloom Box promises a low cost electrical service to the individual home-owner in the next 5 to 10 years.  It is described as a $3,000 “grapefruit-sized” device that can be installed in the home.

Skeptical?

I don’t know about you, but when new technologies are promised but the under-pinning details are kept hush-hush, I get skeptical. Undoubtedly there must be a patent protecting the intellectual property? If so, there is no need to keep quiet.  If not, well I guess that is a business model too, just a bit riskier.

First of all let me make it clear that I’m writing this one day before the big announcement, so I might be missing important information. From what I’ve been able to determine, there are several industrial strength Bloom Boxes already in service at companies like eBay and Google and others.

How it Works (with little available information)

The box uses atmospheric oxygen and a user supplied fuel to generate electricity.  We’ve been told it hits about 1,000 C on the inside.  Sounds like a high efficiency, solid-state heat engine? The developer has shown us ceramic plates and a conductive material (clarified as “not platinum”) that when combined with a special ink on the surface of the ceramic provide the guts of the device.

The user provides fuel – we were told that it could be a range of different fuels like methane, biofuel, diesel, etc.  What comes out is electricity and of course some combustion products like carbon dioxide.  So it is not zero emissions – there were emissions associated with producing the fuel, and there are some emissions associated with combining the methane and oxygen.

One promise is high efficiency.  The systems currently out there run between $700,000 and $800,000.  These are NOT the one intended for individual home use. Those don’t exist yet.  They are projected to cost around $3,000 when ready for commercialization some 5-10 years from now.

It’s Not The First

eBay installed 5 of these boxes about 9 months ago and says they’ve saved $100,000 on energy since then.  So we could extrapolate to saving $125,000 in a full 12 months for the five boxes.  The cost of installation of 5 boxes was between 3.5 and 4 million dollars.  That means it will take between 28 and 32 years to recover the cost.  That is a slow return on investment.

eBay also said that the 5 boxes generate more power than their 3,000 solar panels.  I don’t know the details of eBay’s panels, but they’re probably around $200 per panel, then need installation, so figure between $600,000 and $1,000,000. The solar cells cost 5 times less, but produce less electricity.

The Good

The Bloom Box might be a genius idea.  A high efficiency, solid state heat engine would be a great thing.  The Bloom Box might be the right one. Then again, if this is as good as promised, once the technology is revealed we can expect all the big energy suppliers to jump on the band wagon and develop improved systems with reduced costs.  And that would be good for the world, if not so good for the Bloom Box.