Bloom Energy – Could This Be Your Next Power Company?
Bloom Energy held its big coming out party last night on 60 Minutes. And while founder K.R. Sridhar went over the potential and promise of the company’s Bloom boxes, he got a little vague when it came to what makes it tick.
The system converts methane or other hydrocarbons into electricity by mixing it with oxygen and then passing the gas mixture through ceramic plates coated with proprietary inks at high temperatures. What are the inks made of? He wouldn’t say.
A U.S. patent filed in 2006 and granted to Bloom in 2009, however, seems to indicate yttria stabilized zirconia. Do I know what that is? No. But the invention described in the patent seems to describe the box that Bloom wants to make. The patent application also calls for electrodes comprised of platinum family metals. Platinum, one of the world’s more expensive metals, has been the bane of fuel cell makers. It simply raises the price too high. Platinum is also an element in catalytic converters. Start-up Nanostellar has come up with powders that help get around the problem for the car industry. Some of Nanostellar’s powders contain gold, but the powders are cheaper than standard platinum, CEO Pankaj Dhingra tells us.
If this works, this would mean that the Bloom box could produce power on demand with almost no emissions. However, transforming carbon dioxide into fuels isn’t easy and neither is conserving that energy from the first reaction to run the second one. The Department of Energy is funding several cutting-edge start-ups to see if they can come up with ways to do that. Energy for the reaction could be helped by solar panels. Perhaps that is what Sridhar meant when he talked about the box working with solar panels.