Power Plant in a Box
|
Residential and commercial-scale bloom boxes
What’s bigger than a bread box and puts out a lot of power?
K.R. Sridhar’s “Bloom Box” fuel cell, widely reported since premiering on CBS’ 60 Minutes last Sunday, is being called the “Holy Grail of clean energy.” Fuel cells convert hydrogen and oxygen into water and produce electricity in the process—quietly, without harmful emissions. Sridhar’s innovative technology does it in the size of a refrigerator, with a payback of only three to five years, so it could do to the power plant what the laptop did to the desktop computer by making energy small, portable, and affordable. Ladies and gentleman, iPower has arrived.
Google, eBay, FedEx, and Wal-Mart already have ordered commercial-scale versions for their offices, and Sridhar wants to put one in every American home over the next decade. The Bloom Box is just the latest concept for clean point-source power, or “distributed generation,” which eliminates emissions but also eliminates the grid itself. Producing power on-site saves energy by avoiding the inefficiencies of sending electricity through miles of cable and saves costs by eliminating the utility infrastructure.
But distributed generation also cleans up communities in many ways, by removing unsightly power lines and poles (and their resulting electromagnetic waves) and entire power plants, which often cut communities off from natural amenities such as rivers, lakes, and lower real estate values in surrounding neighborhoods. On-site energy, then, actually can alleviate urban blight. We can save energy and emissions and save communities at the same time.