Bloom Energy and other hype

What is their contribution in the longer term?

The sustainable energy world is bouncing from hype to hype. It comes with a lot of buzz, and in many cases, simply disappears into oblivion after a short period.

Last February, another new hype was born, this time from the California-based company Bloom Energy. They launched their 'Bloom Box' concept. This device consists of a small power station in a box containing fuels cells that convert natural gas or biogas into electricity and heat.

Bloom Energy presents it as an innovation that will create a revolution in the energy world. The company claims it will enable every individual or organisation to produce their own clean and cheap electricity. 'With Bloom Box you can be green and save money at the same time,' proclaims their website. However, they remain strikingly vague about the design and actual performance of their box. The majority of their claims are patently false.

1) The concept is not new at all. Plug Power produced a similar device in 2000. They managed to collect big money on the stock market, but failed to deliver and today their shares are worth about 3% of their initial value.

2) The Bloom Box is not as efficient as the company claims. Yes, it has a 64% hydrogen-to-electricity efficiency, but taking into account the entire cycle from natural gas to electricity, the efficiency is only 41%. That is about the same level as a well-chosen natural gas engine. Those engines need more maintenance and are noisy but...

3) ...they are also eight times cheaper than the Bloom Box. To make the comparison even worse, fuel cells typically degrade rapidly, complicating the payback of the investment. The Bloom Box will not save you any money.

4) The Bloom Box is not 'green' since it makes use of natural gas, which is a depletable fossil fuel generating carbon emission. True, it could also work on biogas, but that would raise its life cycle cost even higher. Moreover, biogas is probably not sustainable when produced on the same scale as natural gas today.

Hype is mostly a waste of valuable energy

As often happens with this kind of hype, the Bloom Box provides fuel for heavy discussions on various Internet forums. This is probably its principal contribution: it provokes a debate and makes people think about what our energy future should look like.

Apart from that, I don’t see many merits. Even if the device does represent another step towards a sustainable energy future (which in this case I seriously doubt), such hype provokes a jerk on the steering wheel. This results in a misdirection of effort and money and disrupts the people and organisations who are working on the energy problem with patience and determination. The hype also creates false expectations, which in the end lead to disappointments. At the end of the day, the entire sustainable energy effort risks being discredited and perceived as one big frothy hype without any real substance.

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