Demystifying the Bloom Box

a little listener mail. This listener mail comes from Jeremy. Jeremy says, Hi, my name is Jeremy, and I'm a big fan of the show. After listening to the one on plasma waist converters, I'm baffled as to why we have not fully embraced this amazing technology. I was wondering if you guys could do a show on something called a bloom box. I don't know a lot of about it, but I think it's about the size of an ice chest and can power a home running off of natural gas.

It seemed almost too good to be true. Hopefully you can talk about and keep up the good work. Thanks well, thank you, Jeremy. We've decided we're going to start a new series, not a new podcast, but a new series within our podcasts, because we like to do that. This was suggested by Mr Pellette himself. Indeed, it's demystifying the blank. So in this case, we're demystifying the bloom box. Awesome. Um, for a second there, I thought we were playing match game.

I thought we were playing a puzzle game, computer puzzle game, graphically driven. We were de missedifying the bloom box. So the bloom box, yes, actually bloom box is Did you go to bloom Energy's website. Yes? I did, Yeah, so, and I printed out the data sheet, which is apparently printed on recycled paper, because it says that when I printed it on it, Wow, I thought that was funny that they included it. Anyway, So it is printed on recycled paper. Yeah, they put it on the thing. But

how how do they know? I know, it's it's amazing, it's a fantastic but no, they This has been something that's in the news. I actually wrote a blog post about it a few months ago. Um, because they sort of hit the scene at the right time. As a matter of fact, there was a thing on sixty minutes the TV news show here in America. UM about it not too long before I wrote that, and it's sort of been a buzzworthy topic, but in a way it's

kind of not new. Yeah. First of all, let's let's go ahead and say that that bloom Energy refers to them as bloom Energy servers. Yes, they're not bloom Boxes, at least not on the website. I didn't see a direct reference to bloom box from their corporate message. That was sort of the media name I saw. Yeah, I think people have It's sort of like the we mote as you are, I want to call the we remote

by Nintendo. The Nintendo put the kai bosh on calling it the we moat before its actual release, but people still call it that anyway, especially Jonathan. They probably felt we morse about it. Oh so anyway, Yes, bluem Energy calls the device the Energy Server, and there are a couple of different varieties. The one that that you were talking about, Jeremy, is not the one that they've already

released and isn't used by people. What they the data sheet eye downloaded is for the corporate version, which is the e S five thousand Energy Server, and it is a much larger device actually takes up uh reportedly about the size of a parking space, hopefully it's not the one parked in the CEO slot. It weighs approximately ten tons, so this is a hefty piece of machinery. Yes, it does in fact run on natural gas, although it can

use other biogas. UM. It does require some water, about a hundred and twenty gallons of water force startup UM. It can output about a hundred kill the lots, which is pretty significant UM and that could be used to power several homes yep as well. So UM, I'm sorry you're still giving some specs. Well, I was looking for anything else that that folks might be interested in, and I would encourage you, if you're really interested in in the bloom box to to download the data sheet because

they really made it very easy to to understand. It can't operate in a grid, which is interesting too because for large buildings like for example, warehouses where you might need a whole lot of power, or data centers for example, where you need lots of air conditioning to cool the computers inside. UM, you can operate them in a in a grid. UH. You can have your own local grid

if you will to power your industrial applications. Yeah, and that was sort of the big news about the bloom Box was that this was a device that could theoretically allow people to get off the power grid entirely and power their own homes with this little People were calling it like essentially a portable power plan, yes, or a a pint sized power plant. Um, it's a little more complicated than that. Chris said that the idea itself was

pretty old. That's because the idea of the bloom box is essentially it's a fuel cell or it's really a stack of fuel cells. Yes. Um, that's sort of like a battery. We didn't really discuss this in our batteries podcast, but a battery is a group the cell individual cell a battery is made up of, you know, can be made up of several cells. Um. So in this case, yes, it is like that in which it's got several cells inside. Yeah. So fuel cells and batteries share a lot in common,

all right. They both use chemical reactions to generate electricity. However, with a battery, what you get is, generally speaking, you have this chemical reaction that takes place withinside the inside the battery generates the electricity, and eventually the chemicals run out inside the battery, they convert into inert chemicals, at least as far as electricity is concerned, right, and and as far as even the rechargeable batteries have a limited lifespan.

There's only so many times you can put it through a charge cycle. You know, you charge it, discharge it, and it's it's eventually the chemicals inside are going to wear out and you will have to recycle the battery. Now, fuel cell is well, this is where the word fuel comes in. You actually have to fuel it. You put fuel into the fuel cell. It will use a chemical reaction to generate electricity, but eventually that fuel will run

out and you will have to replenish it. Yes. Uh. Now the fuel cells that a lot of us are familiar, whether hydrogen based fuel cells. That's the kind that you hear of for hydrogen powered vehicles, yes, and for for other devices to I mean, we've we've talked about portable fuel cells which can run on on hydrogen and other fuels. And of course the big draw of hydrogen based fuel cells is that the only emissions they create our heat and water or water vapor um. The fuel cell of

the bloom Box is slightly different. It is it is not a hydrogen based fuel cell. It uh, it's actually kind of fuel cell. It's called a solid oxide fuel cell. If if you've listened to our fuel Cell podcast, you probably remember that we did talk a little bit about solidoxide fuel cells. Solid Oxide fuel cells are well, they're problematic. They can they can produce a lot of energy um.

They have that that potential, but they have to operate at high temperatures in order to Most fuel cells have a range of temperatures at which they can operate um. And then outside that range they start to the efficiency starts to decline, and then you get a certain temperature where it just drops off in the fuel cell is not gonna work for solid oxide fuel cells. That temperature

is quite high. UM. So that was a big problem, is that how do you create a some sort of facility or some sort of ice that can get energy out of a solid oxide fuel cell um without having to require too much energy to get it heated up or make it dangerous for humans to be around. And Bloom Energy says that they've cracked that nut. It still operates at a pretty high temperature, but it's not at the you know, incredibly high temperatures that other pretty earlier

solid oxide fuel cells used. And it's kind of interesting the if you were to, first of all, I guess we should kind of describe what bloom box looks like. It looks like a it looks like a big, kind of industrial sized refrigerator. You know. Now, if you were to open up that refrigerator and take a look at what was inside it, chiefly what you would see would be stacks of tiles. These tiles are ceramic tiles, and they are coated with two different what what bloom Energy

calls inks, a green ink and a black ink. And uh, it's interesting because that's actually the anode and the cathode, which if you listen to our battery episode you've heard those terms before. And Blue Energy actually has a cute little animation. Did you see that how it works? Yeah, it's actually pretty helpful, So if you go to blue Energy you can watch this animation. But essentially, the way it works is that the bloom box has to heat up.

Once the temperature reaches a certain point, it starts to draw oxygen in, which is attracted to the cathode side of these tiles. Which is the black ink side. UM. Then you have to pump fuel into the bloom box. That fuel will mix with steam to become this reformed fuel, which will get attracted to the anode side. The oxygen from the cathode side will become ions. That means they lose their electrons, and the electrons that that's what ends

up being the electricity. That's the electricity that flows out of the bloom box into your home or your business or whatever. And that oxygen will recombine with the reformed fuel to form water and carbon dioxide a little bit of carbon dioxide essentially, I think it was like one part carbon dioxide to three parts water. The water would then become the steam used in that in that that fuel UM the creating the reformed fuel, that's what you

know that that water will just become steam. Again, more fuel would come in and that would become the reform fuel UM and the heat generated from this chemical reaction would help sustain the bloom box, which is so the h and twenty gallons of water that you talked about it start up, that's what you need because you haven't started the chemical reaction yet. Yes, so you have to have some water to to get this started, and then once it started, it should perpetuate itself as long as

there's more fuel coming into the system. So that's important to remember. You have to have fuel of this to work. If you don't have fuel, then, uh, then nothing happens. So um, if you're using natural gas or biogas whatever to fuel it, then the only emissions you get are water and carbon dioxide and heat. And the reason for that is because there's no combust combustion taking place, right

it's not igniting the fuel. It's there's a chemical reaction, and that's why it's so much cleaner even though it's a fossil fuel. You know, it's not like you're burning coal to achieve you know, the the generation of power, so you still have a carbon footprint, but it's much smaller than using traditional coal based power. And I think that's why the the Bloom Energy Server is such a hot topic, if you will, um, is that it seems to be a much greener source of electricity than you know,

uh than other sources of electricity. And the thing is to um, it seems to be uh, the you know, the thing that we have all been striving for since fuel cells were created more than a years ago at this point. I mean. Another point that Bloom likes to make is the fact that older fuel cell technology is required hard to find an expensive metals to run, where Bloom Energy is essentially using sand creating ceramic from sand

rather plentiful, insensive, no shortage of that. Yes, um, the Sahara is missing several refrigerator sized uh events of sand. I figured they just went down to the local hardware store and picked up a few things at playground sand and yea anyway, No, but no, I mean assuming and of course it's one of those things like hydrogen fuel cells and cars. You know people people were so excited about that, like, oh this is this is great. It's just you know, water vapor and in five years will

all be dry having these cars powered by hydrogen. While it's not that easy because you have to find the source of the hydrogen, which is extremely challenging to do on a cost effective basis. There's actually three main challenges. One is that you have to find that hydrogen or you have to purify it, so that requires energy just going into it. The second is that the precious metals that you referred to, many of these fuel cells require platinum,

which is not very plentiful or is it inexpensive. It's quite expensive. And the third is the the fact that there's no real infrastructure to support a fleet of hydrogen powered vehicles. Right, You can't pick up another tank of hydrogen in your local fill up station. Yeah, not for most of them anyway. There are a few hydrogen stations, but there are very few and far between. UM So

you have to build out that infrastructure. You have to find a maybe not cheap, but at least financially reasonable way of getting at hydrogen, and you have to find a way to um create electrolytes that don't necessarily rely on on the precious metals. So, yeah, that's interesting that the ceramic tile itself acts as the electrolyte. Yes, uh, the ink acts as the anode and cathode, and the ceramic tiles the electrolyte. That's to me, I think that's

the real breakthrough. And they used metal plates to separate the various tiles from one another, but they were really cheap metal alloys. They didn't need it because this was just a separator. It wasn't an electrolyte, so they didn't have to get like a platinum sheet. Uh. That being said, these energy servers are not cheap, No, but they're not. They're not so exorbitantly expensive that companies have not been

installing them. I've seen a cost. I've seen a couple of price points for these energy servers, the lowest being eight hundred thousand American dollars I've seen I've seen seven eight hundred thousand dollars, although I've also seen reports that they are more than a million dollars each. So I've also heard that within within around five years, they pay

for themselves from energy savings. That's the other thing we should point out is it's not just that it's a greener technology, but it's also cheaper depending upon fuel prices. Because remember, you do have an ongoing expense. You have

to keep buying fuel to refuel the bloom box. So as long as the fuel prices are lower than the the fees you would pay the power company for electricity, it makes financial sense to make this investment, especially if, uh, you know, you don't have to if you have a renewable energy source, because I have read reports that it could use solar power to provide the power needed to fuel the fuel cell. I don't know how that works.

I tried finding out where this comes from, because I honestly do not understand how you could create the fuel that has to reform with the water vapor. I doesn't understand how that works with solar power. But supposedly it does, at least that's what the founder who went on seexty minutes said. Um, that that really perplexes me. I honestly don't know the answer to that. Well, Um, this is uh, this is something that's been in development for about eight years,

nine years or so. Um, it's interesting how he came up with the idea. Yeah, yes, I'd forgotten about that. Yeah. The the fellow who who came up with this technology was originally working on and it's a KR. Sridhar. Yes, And I probably butchered that name, and I apologize because again I have terrible times with names. But he was working on a project with with NASA, was a Mars project, you know, trying to figure out the technical problems around

getting a human being to Mars. And one of those is how do you carry enough oxygen to last for the entire trip, and more importantly, how do you continue to make oxygen once you get there. So he huge problematic, right, So he was working on a way of generating oxygen. When that project fell through, he decided instead of just saying, oh well, that was a waste of time, he looked at his research and then said, what if I reversed

this process. So instead of generating oxygen, you know, using energy to create oxygen, what if I try and create energy by using oxygen. And so the Bloom box is reportedly just essentially a reversal of the process that he had been working on for this Mars mission, which I think is pretty interesting. It's a nice repurposing of technology. Certainly, um and uh, they've already got some some pretty high

end customers to one that rhymes with Google. Yeah, it's also one that rhymes with Schmi Bay um now, Staples, FedEx, Coca Cola, eBay, Google. These are all Walmart apparently is working on powering stores with with the bloom energy server. Reportedly, Google was the very first customer purchasing for of these servers for one of their data centers. And I have not heard anything negative about the outcome. Of course, that may be the effect of a very powerful pr effort,

but I don't I don't know. I haven't heard anything positive or negative saying these are the greatest things since uh, sliced bread. Um. I haven't heard anything saying, you know, these things are a piece of johnk either. So it seems that the experiment, if you will, is off to a decent start. Yeah. I think it's as long as we remember that. Um. The important thing I think to remember in this case is that the fuel. Yeah, it is.

It is based on fuel. It's not some people were thinking about as some sort of weird free energy device, like there was just this box. You would hook it up to your house and it would magically produce electricity. Um. And and that just comes from a misunderstanding of how fuel cells work. It's it's ignoring the fuel in you'll sell. So keeping in mind that this is something where you have to refuel it, either with natural gas or biogas um or apparently solar power, though I still don't understand

how that works. Uh. If you keep that in mind, then it may very well be a a nice step. It's still not. It's not. It's not necessarily as green a response is, say, finding a renewable energy source empowering your business with that. But even that has its problems, right, because these renewable energy sources, the source is clean, but the devices we use to harness it are not. Because we've talked about that with solar panels and with even

the turbines that we use to gather wind energy. These rely on very scarce materials, some of which are toxic in nature. So it's um, you know, this is this is one of those tough things, right, you know, just sit there and try and figure out what's the best option out of all the things that we have available

to us. Yeah. Not everyone can park their giant data center on the shore of the on the banks of the Columbia River and harness the water power or plan a water born data center that harnesses the tides itself to create power. That's pretty nifty. You haven't uh, the the the the patent for that Google file, the patent

for that floating data center. It's actually really kind of fascinating. Yeah. Um, I'd like to think of the I T specialists station on there is walking around with peg legs and saying, are uh patchy, get down there and swap out this hard drive. Um, sir, this this here server needs a patch o. UM. So but yes, that's that's what they've

they've started with. Although UM I did find an article in Fast Company from September twenty this year by Ariel Schwartz tech journalists and um Ariel said that Bloom Energy is in fact working on a home version of the unit, which I I had I remember hearing, but I'm glad I found a source for it. It would cost, according to miss Schwarts, about three thousand dollars UM and they expect to release it in the near future. I don't know what the near future specifically means, but I do

believe that they are working on something. You could use this uh uh you know, a larger box the ones that that uh power the uh industrial facilities to to harness that in a local setting, but if you wanted one to hook up to your house, you know, there is an option for that supposedly coming in the future. And by the way, UH Bloom Energy refers to this as distributed generation, and they're saying that this is a

much more UH secure method of generating electricity. Of course, the power outages in the grid in the Northeastern United States illustrate the problems that can come from relying on such a widespread grid. There have also been some very famous ones in California. Oh yes, yes, Um, so this could be a kind of an answer to that. Yeah, if people adopted and if it if it's as successful and and as efficient as it seems to be. Yeah, And the executives that Bluem Energy have even said that

the power companies themselves might invest in this. And as you were saying, create neighborhood networks where each neighborhood has its own bluem Energy server that's owned by the power company. So you're still getting your electricity from the power company, it's just instead of getting it from a coal burning facility that is, you know, generating the power, you'd be getting it from a bluem Energy server owned by that company.

So it'll be interesting to see. Yeah, I think, um, I think as far as reducing emissions, it's potentially a great thing, whether or not it will make financial sense to move to that. See, that's the problem is that sometimes what makes sense financially, unfortunately, does not measure up with what makes sense in every other sense of the word. Right, And of course, as we know, as we know, um, you know, the boxes running on natural gas. Uh, fossil fuels are finite, so bio gas I mean that that's

a little No. I'm sure we could probably find some methane somewhere around here. I'm not saying don't don't make comments about Josh, not his fault. I didn't name names. You're the one in anyway, But no, I do think that that would be an option. But you know, it's going to need to be flexible, and apparently it seems that Blue Energy has taken that into account. So maybe uh facilities located near landfills which are generating methane, and boy,

how do you do they? Um? I used to play disc golf at a park that was next to a landfill and they had those you know, the pipes where they vent the gas. Well, let's be fair. Methane itself before anyone writes in, is has no odor on its own, but it does come with some other stuff that. Yes, yes,

the methane that you're familiar with. The odor comes from either other materials or it's an odor that has specifically been included by the gas company so that if there were a guest like you would be able to detect it. And we are aware of that, So please don't email us all right, So anyway, let's wrap this up. This was demystifying the bloom box. If you guys have a particular topic you would like us to demystify, So it's really kind of exploring something and discussing how it really works. Um,

let us know. One of the things we were talking about possibly tackling in the future is, for example, the segue. Yes. So if you have a topic that you would like us to demystify, let us know on either Twitter or Facebook are handled. There is tech Stuff hs W, or you can shoot us an email at tech stuff at how stuff Works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff Works

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