Bloom Energy had been teasing the world with a countdown to the launch of their new product. The bloom box, or bloom energy server takes up about the size of a parking space and can generate 100kW of power. Day and night. It’s a fuel cell and if you need more capacity you simply add another unit, or another or another. 100kW they describe as enough power to supply about 100 houses or a small office building. Of course, your coverage will vary depending on actual consumption.

It’s not a cheap box mind you, but the companies that have tried out the units they claim to be saving on their power costs. Companies like Ebay, Google, Coca-Cola, Fedex are among those that have been trying out the device. Google I would imagine (along with any other companies needing data center space) has more of a reason to look for cheap electricity. Power costs are high when you run a datacenter of hundreds of computers. Finding a cheaper way to power them will translate into more money for companies like Google.

What’s further exciting is the promise that within a few years, they will have a device about the size of a brick that you could purchase for what they estimate will be around $3000 that would be enough to power the average house. Again, your mileage will vary. Some houses consume more electricity, some less. Still, the promising of combining multiple units means that you have flexibility to scale up your “energy servers”.

In some ways this could make it more possible to truly be off grid, although I think the availability of the grid is probably an important thing. This winter we lost power to a large snowstorm and were without power about 3-4 days. Heat is our main problem with winter power outages because we need electricity for most of our heating options. A generator is relatively cheap, but impractical to keep running for the amount of time that we need heat. Devices like this could mean that we would never notice an outage from a major storm.

There are lots of other reasons to envision keeping the grid even if more and more houses are their own energy production plants. There will always be times that you will use a bit more power than you expect and for those times you can draw power back from the grid. For that matter, there are also times that you use less power and THAT can be SOLD back to the power company. For our national security I see many advantages to a more diversified power generation structure like these devices could produce.

You should realize though that these energy servers do consume something to create energy. Biofuel is possible, but the more likely fuel at the present is Natural Gas. These fuels will combine with oxygen within the fuel cell to generate electricity. The fuel cell itself is made from one of the more abundant substances you could think of…. sand.

PCWorld has a writeup on the product launch as well as a pretty good wikipedia article on the bloom energy server.

But, I don’t want to proverbially turn the keys over to the power company to switch things off when they think demand is too high. I’m sorry, that’s not their business. Their business is supply, I’ll take care of controlling my demand and if someone else doesn’t, then they’ll just have a high bill to pay won’t they?

Now, like I said, this is voluntary (for now) and there are limits on the peak hours they’ve defined. (And you can pick 2 calendar dates to opt out of the switching off and weekends aren’t covered….) I imagine the terms could easily change (and continued use means you agree to the changes just like with everything else these days.)

It kind of reminds me when Progress Energy wrote to us and gave us this great offer…. Our power bill ranged at that time from around 60 a month to 90 a month depending on the season and weather when we received an offer from them to never have a surprise in our power bill again by prorating our power bill we could pay the same amount every month. Their magic number that they had calculated for us was $92 a month for 12 months and then if it turned out our usage was different we could get an adjusted rate for the next 12 months (up or down). What was amazing to me is that their total was just a shade larger than our largest bill in the last 12 months had been….. nice racket in the power business isn’t it?

Well…. this has all had me thinking about the incentives to really go off grid. Who knows, at some point power companies may not make such things as shutting off your appliances in peak periods an option. It may sometime become a mandatory agreement. With all the power options these days for alternative energy, solar panels, geothermal heating, some people can take advantage of wind or microhydro power as well… it just makes me think that the massive power grids days may be numbered. I’d like to look at all the tax incentives and see if there’s any difference in claiming them if you’re connected to the grid or not, but the coming years may see an explosion in off-grid power installs!

Along these lines I saw that researchers at UC-Berkley I believe had come up with a material that could be as much as 10x cheaper than silicon for solarvoltaic panels. There are now several companies that are doing similar, cheaper approaches to photovoltaics I’m REALLY looking forward to seeing more of these become publicly available. (So far, one company I know of is/was under military contract and their products were not available for sale to the public.)

Oh… one other thought on progress energy’s energy wise program…. according to their Florida website they say most people that have joined say that they don’t even notice when the interruptions are. Personally…. I notice that “most people” aren’t home much during the day/evening…. I wonder if they polled people that work at/from home?

Appalachian Energy started out in 2003 and operates a small hydroelectric dam in Madison County which powers around 600 homes. As I understand this solar install will be in the Fletcher Business Park.

No moving parts, not weapons grade fuel, according to the article a Chernobyl style leakage is “impossible”. This is apparently technology from Los Alamos laboratories and the United States government has licensed the technology to a New Mexico based company called Hyperion. They say they currently have more than 100 orders and have plans to up their production potential. They’ve got a six year backlog.

This box could be delivered on a truck, “smaller than a garden shed” is how the Guardian has billed it. Mass production is expected within about 5 years. The units would be encased in concrete.

Other companies are known to be designing micro-reactors. Toshiba has been testing 200KW reactors measuring roughly six metres by two metres. Designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for longer, they could power a single building for up to 40 years.

A fungus that lives inside trees in the Patagonian rain forest naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel, biologists announced today. And the fungus can grow on cellulose, a major component of tree trunks, blades of grass and stalks that is the most abundant carbon-based plant material on Earth.

“When we looked at the gas analysis, I was flabbergasted,” said Gary Strobel, a plant scientist at Montana State University, and the lead author of a paper in Microbiology describing the find. “We were looking at the essence of diesel fuel.”

What’s fantastic about this is that it could basically synthesize diesel fuel from any cellulose matter (the waste matter from corn plants for example) allowing us to make use of the OTHER components of plants for food or whatever other purposes we need.

Amongst the impacts and bottom line to take out of this: 1) no ideas yet as to production scales of this 2) essentially make diesel a (hydrocarbon) from cellulose, 3) is petroleum then REALLY a “fossil fuel” or could it be produced from a similar process… 4) the ultimate benefit of this may come from the genome research that’s already started on this fungus.

Currently yields of the crop have been quite variable. In other words from one year to the next they are not getting consistent output. More troubling though is the toxicity of the plant and the labor intensive harvesting. Harvesting must be done by hand because the nuts ripen at different times. The nuts and leaves are toxic and require careful handling by farmers and I assume those that have been hired to pick the nuts. Also, processing plants will need to take special precautions in part due to the toxic fumes or vapour created when crushing the nuts. GREAT! sign me up for that! No, seriously. It sounds as though in several years the Jatropha nut may be a viable biofuel source but we will need to be certain to keep in mind safe handling and processing practices. Taking ALL of that into account it makes me wonder if the price of making this biofuel wouldn’t be too expensive to be competitive.