Bloom Energy Server Could Bring Microgrids Online

I'm seeing news everywhere about Bloom Energy's announcement today of its Energy Server, a new kind of fuel cell that can generate clean energy. So I did a little poking around and here's what I found.

First, just a refresher: You may have heard about hydrogen fuel cells, which use hydrogen as fuel. (California has a whole Hydrogen Highway project to develop this energy for transportation.) When the hydrogen mixes with oxygen, it produces a chemical reaction that generates a charged particle. That charged particle is captured in a battery and can be used to power a car.

But there are a few problems developing hydrogen fuel cells. It takes energy to produce hydrogen. And to get the most bang for the buck, you need to very expensive precious metals, molten materials that are unstable or dangerous corrosive acids.

Bloom Energy says it has a fuel that steps over these problems to produce clean energy 'round the clock.  For starters, their fuel cell doesn't use pure hydrogen as a fuel. It uses a hydrocarbon fuel, such as ethanol, biodiesel, methane or natural gas. Yes, some of those are fossil fuels or otherwise used in combustion engines. But with a fuel cell, there is no combustion and therefore no combustion-related emissions. Keep reading.

The fuel cell has three layers: an electrolyte sandwiched between an anode and a cathode. There's a pretty good, simple and short animation that describes how it works. I'll just give you the basics. Air passes through one layer, fuel enters the other and a chemical reaction occurs that pulls the charged particles through the middle, which is a solid, ceramic layer made from a common sand-like powder.

That produces electricity, water and small amount of carbon dioxide. When running on a hydrocarbon fuel, the system is approximately 67 percent cleaner than a typical coal-fired power plant.

According to the company, each Bloom Box provides 100 kilowatts (kW) of electricity, enough to power approximately 100 average U.S. homes.

60 Minutes did a report on Bloom Energy and you can watch that here.

Planet Green has a video that gives a good over view of how it works, and props to Gizmag for their great write-up. 

I'm not sure about a so-called new form of power generation that is not 100 percent clean.  But when I was reading about Bloom Energy, I was reminded of this article I saw in the New York Times today, which talks about micro-grid power. If you had a system to generate your own electricity, either for your house or for your small business, you could get off the grid or better yet, you could generate energy that you sold back to the grid for a profit.

The idea is that a distributed network of small, energy-generating stations would help utility companies with "grid stability and integrating distributed generation sources like rooftop solar panels into their renewable energy goals."

So far there aren't many energy generating machines that are making this happen. But something like the Bloom Box could bring up the distributed energy market.

Photo: Bloom Energy