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End to All Power Problems

Has anyone heard of Bloom Energy? It's a new technology that many tech companies are now using to generate power off of the grid.

It takes methane (or another similar fuel) and uses fuel cells to chemically convert fuel to power. Check out the 60 minutes segment on it, pretty amazing. I think it could be a huge paradigm type shift for the entire country.

It actually works, and they are hoping to be able to get the cost down to $3000 per house. No more power bill, only a gas bill, and we have tripled our Natural Gas reserves in the country since 2007. Fewer power plants, many fewer transmission wires, less oil........

Oh yeah, and most importantly, clean power to your audio gear.
macdadtexas
6550c
393 posts
 
Does it produce AC or DC? Will we need to convert all our gear to use DC? If DC, then an inverter will be needed- how noisy are those things? I bet they are super bad? I guess you could have a dedicated fuel cell for the HE stereo and keep everything DC and another for all the other things.

Fortunatly, I live in an area that does lots of hydroelectic power, so coal, oil,wind, gas is not needed.
danlib1
819 posts
 
The problem is the obsession with solar and wind, at the expense of other approaches. I've read about the Bloom approach...I just hope the greens don't reject it out of hand because it's a "fossil fuel".
g_m_c
443 posts
 
this is a decade away
vegasears
1,173 posts
 
Hate to be the wet blanket but the way I see it happening is.. All those people at the power companies are out of a job and because we have very little manufacturing left in this country the power cells are made in China. Oh ya, the power used to manufacture those power cells is produced by dirty cool fired plants.
chadnliz
3,736 posts
 
When Al Gore lowers his footprint I will look into mine, till then they can all go to............
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