Fuel Cell Nation

Another Bloom Story

 
There's a new Press Release from Bloom Energy about the  Bloom Electrons^TM program they started. Instead of paying big money up front to buy a Bloom Box [a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), running on natural gas], you can sign up for a 10-year lease and "... pay only for the electricity consumed ...". On the positive side, you now have a known price for much of your electricity supply (without tying down your natural gas price,) which is good. Also, you get the kudos of friends and neighbors for being an early adopter of Green Energy.

What I don't like is their somewhat deceptive advertising that you can pick one up and only "pay only for the electricity consumed." People are going to be saddened when they investigate and see that, just like cogeneration systems (and many other energy-saving technologies), it only pays to base-load a Bloom Box. Peak electric power will still need to be bought from the local electric utility. Of course, this non-base-loaded power is a large fraction of most customer's total annual electricity needs. So Bloom Electrons users will not generally be totaly green customers.

Once again, there is no such thing as a free lunch!

Interesting Pizza Seminar

Myoungbae Lee, a postdoc at the Virginia Tech Department of Chemical Engineering (Jim McGrath's group), was recently at Giner to work with some of our specialized membrane characterization equipment. He made a presentation for us while he was here at one of our periodic Pizza Seminars, which expanded on Effects of block length and solution-casting conditions on the final morphology and properties of disulfonated poly(arylene ether sulfone) multiblock copolymer films for proton exchange membranes.

We got to hear some of his latest results concerning details of his work with us on a DOE Fuel Cell project. The VT multiblock copolymer materials are a potential future source of low-cost proton exchange membrane (PEM). Though specifically addressing the effect of various (thermal and other) treatments on the properties of the VT membranes, it helped give us insight into other PEMs, including Nafion (today's baseline fuel cell membrane).