Bloom Boxes: the way of the future?

Bloom Energy The Bloom Box was recently released after many years of secretive work on it and its secretive use at Google’s Mountain View campus. The Bloom Box is a commercial scale box of stacked fuel cells with the ability to provide enough energy to power a small office building or approximately 100 residential houses. The Bloom Box would be approximately 67% cleaner than typical coal-fired power plants and almost 100% cleaner when paired with renewable fuels. As of now the commercial scale boxes cost between $700,000 and $800,000 and most customers will be able to break even on this investment within three to five years. Currently Bloom has several big name customers including Coca-Cola, eBay, Wal-Mart, FedEx, and Google. Google’s Mountain View campus currently hosts a 400-kilowatt Bloom Box which has been providing a large portion of the a building’s energy needs since July 2008. Google says it has saved almost $100,000 using its Bloom Box so far. However, many critics say that this type of energy is still by far too expensive to be competitive in the market. Bloom claims that within ten years they should be able to have Bloom Boxes available for use in single family homes. The business hopes to be able to reduce the cost of the boxes for home use to around $2,000. Bloom Boxes do seem to offer some sort of hope for environmentally sustainable energy for the future with greatly decreased pollution and need for power lines. However, these boxes still require some sort of energy input into their production and also for the chemical reaction that allows them to create energy to occur. As such, this type of energy is still in many ways dependent on other forms of non-sustainable energy to work which demonstrates to me that this technology still needs improvements. The cost of this technology also seems concerning. There have been many great advances in environmentally friendly technologies that have not been successful due to their costs. For example, the many electric and other sustainable cars designed in Silicon Valley have never been widely marketable. However, I believe technologies such as this are a step in the right direction. If people do not continue to look for answers then advances will never be made. These sort of advances also provide incentives for power companies to become more sustainable and environmentally friendly so that they do not become obsolete in the future.