What's Been and What's Ben

60 Minutes recently ran a piece on Bloom Boxes. They are heralded as a device that can replace the electrical grid. Do not get excited. These fuel cell devices are nothing special. I do not trust the man in charge of the company one single bit. This, to a more muted sense, is the general reaction of engineers.

“You can even use solar” was his answer when the interviewer asked if you could use solar energy to fuel a bloom box. No. You can not. Solar energy is light falling on us after travelling millions of miles from the sun’s perpetual nuclear furnace. I will bet every dollar I have in the bank against a penny that you can’t use solar. He was placating the interviewer. Fuel cells convert fossil fuels into electricity using a more controlled combustion that happens inside stacks of catalysts instead of a typical less controlled explosion in your car/lawnmower/etc. So this man’s vision of the future is that everybody will be “off the grid” because they will have a generator in their back yard. We still need fuel that will still release chemicals into the air.

Hydrogen power is a myth created by vested petrochemical interests. Yes water comes out, but we have no source of hydrogen. Roughly half of the atoms in your body are hydrogen, but those are tied up in water. Water (H – O – H) is like rust for hydrogen. To get them out of water would use, at best, slightly more energy than you get from recombining hydrogen with oxygen. To boil it all down: the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen, do you want to drive that around and deal with auto accidents.

What he is doing is not revolutionary. His little bullshit song and dance about nicely colored green and black wafers annoys me to no end. It reminds me of why people are supposed to get degrees from schools before they talk about technical matters with authority. Bloom energy is the name of the company that I can at least know will likely be bankrupt in a few years. The man in charge has an okay vision and a great ego about his work. I ran some back of the envelop calculations and it would be cheaper to just go to home depot, buy a generator, and use that instead of the upfront costs of a Bloom Box. The final nail in the coffin: these things do nothing to help global warming except offer a slightly more efficient generator than you would get for your remote cabin or work site.

P.S. The implementation of hydrogen fuel technologies has never been about the engine, but about the fuel itself. You could modify your engine to run on hydrogen fuel relatively easily (<$100). The problem is where does hydrogen come from? There is no free lunch. The best we have are all nuclear solutions from either sunlight, fission (Thorium), and fusion (see future?).

Beware of false prophets.