Bloom Energy: Hype or Hope?

The Nat Gas fuel cell seems like a perfect application in electric vehicles.
Maybe you wouldnt even need batteries.
Forget the hydrogen fuel cell ,what a dog.
For one thing there is nat gas readily available and there are already fueling stations.

 

Fuel cells in electric vehicles generally require a battery. Fuel cells are good at producing steady current, while driving requires bursts of current for accelerating and such. A battery serves as a buffer.

Tom

 

Fuel cells are extremely expensive and have a shorter life than ICEs. If you are going to use natural gas or propane as a fuel, it's far more economical to burn it in an ICE. It requires only minor modifications to run an ICE on natural gas or propane. That's why there are fueling stations.

 

I really don't see anything remarkable or "special" about this device. It's a fuel cell that runs on methane.

The only real advantage I can see to this system is if it's applied to a CHP (Combined Heat and Power) process. For industrial and large commercial applications, there are many advantages, but with much lower cost and proven technologies

CHP applications typically run a Prime Mover generator off natural gas. The exhaust heat from the Prime Mover, in addition to the coolant heat, is used to preheat absorption chillers, domestic hot water boilers, etc

In CHP applications, using proven and reliable Prime Movers, the combined efficiencies are >85%. As far as exhaust emissions, all new CHP installations utilize catalytic converters in the exhaust stream

There appears to be quite a bit of confusion in this thread about fuel cells as well. They are NOT engines. They do not "burn" the methane. Actually, I still prefer traditional CHP Prime Movers, they can contribute to significant long-term energy and cost savings, and emissions reduction

Combined Heat and Power Focus - CHP Emission Reductions - DECC's Free resource supporting the development of CHP

Clean Air Online - Combined Heat and Power

etc

 

I am very interested in how these will advance...

In Japan, you can receive incentives and tax reductions, etc, if you use one type of energy for your home. All electric or all gas. At this time, all electric is much more popular because the only "new" equipment you need for it is not all that expensive - electric water heater and electric stove. But there are more and more efficient gas powered generators coming on to the market making all gas more appealing. Especially as gas production here is strongly working to shift to biogases...

With a more efficient way to generate electricity from the gas, I can definitely see more of this catching on - at least in Japan, where it is cheaper to use only one source.

 

This 'distributed power generation' is a lot safer from a national security perspective as well. Instead of a force of hackers going after several large hubs they'd have to target hundreds of thousands of local hubs.

The investments on the power company level would seems to be a lot less expensive too.

I'm impressed at the initial roster of early innovators ready to step forward to try it out. This could go off the charts quickly if all of them come back in 3-5 yrs with glowing accounts. Every big company on the planet will want to save money in huge gobs like this if it works.

 

High Temperature (as required for Hydrocarbon fuels) Fuel Cells are not a good match for vehicles, unless they run contiously (trains?). In a car application, its probable you would use as much energy to heat the fuel cell up to operating temperature, as you would produce from it to go down the neighborhood grocery and back....

 

Except that instead of going after several large electric generating plants, they'd go after the several large natural gas production/distribution facilities.

Distributed power generation is a great idea, but only when the energy is actually harvested locally, as with wind or solar. In this case, you've just substituted natural gas pipelines for high-voltage electric transmission lines.