Bloom Box

[trax1]

Lots of claims but still no numbers other than tossing out the kilowatt term. I also found this to be rather intriguing. They claim it will run on any hydrocarbon based fuel and say they are running it on methane from landfills. That's nice but how does it run on liquid hydrocarbons then (oil, gasoline, veggie oil)? Does it have to be gassified? What happens to the residue? How does solar then come to be a hydrocarbon fuel for it? Take a look as they claim it will run on hydrocarbons or solar. Exactly how are they gassifying solar to hydrocarbon fuel???

What are they going to do about finding and storing hydrogen for the fuel if they want to run it that way? It takes more electricity to break down water for hydrogen than the hydrogen can provide energy as fuel. Methane is renewable certainly but it's also very limited. There isn't an infrastructure in place to move it from the land fill (with limited production) to the use point.

I want to see numbers, verified by independent labs, before I'm going to accept any of their hype as containing truth. Until they can provide the output under load conditions it isn't viable.

Claiming 8 cents cost per kilowatt for electricity makes it even with several places retail cost for power from the power company. I wonder how they arrived at that cost. Was it based on free fuel? How about gasoline at $2.65 a gallon? Veggie oil at $3.00 plus a gallon? Without real numbers for operating costs per output in real world conditions it's too much like pie in the sky for me.

Well what ever it runs on, or what it cost Google claims that since they installed Bloom Boxes at one of it's buildings they've saved around $100,000 in electricity.

[Maverick]

They could make the same claim if they installed  massive generators for their buildings too. All they would have to do is not claim what the fuel cost for making their electricity. They could claim they saved tons of money in electricity bill costs from the grid.

Right now the Air Force is installing hundreds of solar panel installations on all of the quarters they are building. They are tearing down all of the housing from the 50's and putting up new quarters including multi story family houses. They are also putting solar panels on all of them. Some are pointed South, some East and others West. All are fixed in place and do NOT track the sun. Even the long solar farm on the South side of Golf Links RD for almost the length of the base there is fixed. They are spending millions upon millions of dollars for solar farms and roof installations to save hundreds in electricity. Those solar panels will never ever recoup the cost of putting them up or maintaining them given the installation plan they are using.