Al Gore Joins Richard Branson in Backing GreenRoad "Driving is the third most deadly profession after deep sea fishing and working in a coal mine. Not only does driving more safely save lives but research shows it can also save 10% on annual fuel costs, and alleviate a good chunk of the $230 billion professional fleets spend on crashes each year. Enter GreenRoad: a system that helps professional drivers drive more safely and as a result save their company a lot of money.
The GreenRoad system looks simple from the outside: There’s a two-inch device on the dashboard that starts the day with a green light. If a driver brakes hard, swerves or turns recklessly, the light turns yellow. If the driver continues to drive erratically the light stays yellow. If it gets worse the light turns red. That’s it. But like a lot of apparently simple ideas, there’s a lot more going on under the hood."
Top-secret Zero-emission Bloom Box Revealed (Kind of) "It's not much to look at, but a Bloom Box is basically a fuel-cell power plant the size of a door stop that can power a house year-round; larger ones, meanwhile, can power just about anything. In the words of Bloom's CEO, their little boxes could entirely replace the grid as we know it."
"Sounds a little pie-in-the-sky, but according to last night's 60 Minutes spot by Lesley Stahl—the first behind the scenes look at the technology—its potential is huge. Google has been quietly powering one of its data centers with four of these magic boxes for 18 months, and FedEx, Walmart, Staples, and eBay have been trying out the technology as well. eBay's CEO says they have already saved $100,000 in electricity costs in just nine months."
"So how does it work? They take some beach sand, bake it into a ceramic disk, and then coat each side with proprietary green and black inks. Then they stack these disks, separated by cheap metal plates, and feed oxygen onto one side, and fuel onto the other. The two combine in the cell and presto: emissions-free electricity."
4 comments:
I've read a couple of articles about the Bloom Box, which seems quite interesting. I think the only way you could consider it zero-emissions is if you run it on hydrogen, which is problematic. Still, running on natural gas I read reports that it's as much as 85% efficient if you use its waste heat to heat water and/or the building it's powering, compared to about 25% efficiency for a natural-gas-fired internal-combustion generator. Maybe this will become our Shipstone.
DKB is spot on. It's a nice refinement of the fuel cell concept....only smaller, cheaper amd faster.
If you want another interesting power story check out a company called BlackLight power.
I've been following this one for years and still can't decide if the guy who "conceived" the whole thing is a combination of Nicolai Tesla, Thomas Edison, and Niels Bohr or a complete charlatan/self-deluded Harvard trained MD (Dr. Randall Mills).
If he is correct, then all the physics and chemistry texts will require some serious editing.
He claims to have found a pathway for the hydrogen atom electron to attain an energy level state lower than the ground state. Something I was taught to be impossible.
Apparently, getting there releases some significant energy and creates novel matter (hydrinos).
TT
Bloom Box might function emissions free, but is it carbon neutral? It seems like a lot of energy is spent refining raw materials, baking and coating.
Yeah, perhaps the cell inside the Bloom Box is the size of a door stop, but did you look at the size of the whole thing. Maybe it's a door stop in Giant land.
The thing is a house sized generator but not the engine type we are familiar with. It's a good idea if it is as efficient as it says and you want to delocalize power production for some reason. As DKB said, you still need the fuel source though. Most hydrogen these days still comes from fossil fuel sources. Maybe you could use electrolysis using the electricity generated by the Bloom Box running on hydrogen generated by electrolysis...
On the other hand, it is just a fuel cell. This company apparently has found a good catalyst, good membranes, a good production system, and most important, good marketing. I still want one.
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