Another green technology scam with no increased benefits.
The Institute for Energy Research writes:
In 2010, fuel cell manufacturer Bloom Energy unveiled its “Bloom Energy Server.” The unveiling and subsequent press attention claimed that these “Bloom Boxes” were green, efficient and represented the future of energy production. But three years later it appears that Bloom Energy’s success can be attributed to savvy PR and government subsidies—not a superior product. After reviewing Bloom’s products in the real world, it appears that not only are Bloom Boxes functionally the same as natural gas power plants, but they are less efficient.
It Started with a Fawning Media
Bloom Energy generated buzz in 2010 after 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl became the first journalist to tour the Sunnyvale, California headquarters and look inside the top-secret “Bloom Box”. Stahl’s piece, however, was much closer to advertising than journalism. For example, Stahl starts, “In the world of energy, the Holy Grail is a power source that’s inexpensive and clean, with no emissions. Well over 100 start-ups in Silicon Valley are working on it, and one of them, Bloom Energy, is about to make public its invention.”
…
Bloom’s good PR extends beyond Apple. A number of well-known companies have purchased Bloom Boxes, including Adobe, FedEx, Staples, Google, Coca-Cola, and Wal-Mart. One reason these companies signed up is because of government subsidies. As 60 Minutes explains, “In California 20 percent of the cost is subsidized by the state, and there’s a 30 percent federal tax break because it’s a ‘green’ technology. In other words: the price is cut in half.” Getting the price cut in half definitely makes expensive energy technology look appealing, especially if it has the veneer of being “green.”
While Bloom Boxes aren’t green (unless you consider natural power plants green), the most important question is whether Bloom Boxes are efficient. According to 60 Minutes, Google has some Bloom Boxes that “use natural gas, but half as much as would be required for a traditional power plant.” The claim that Bloom Boxes are efficient does not stand up to scrutiny.
Is Bloom Green: Unboxing Bloom Energy’s Costs
A couple of engineers in California decided to compare Bloom’s energy efficiency with a cogeneration facility running on natural gas. These two engineers, Bob Spitzka and James Hall, have worked on the feasibility and design of nearly 100 cogeneration facilities and wanted to see how Bloom compared in terms of efficiency. After all, as 60 Minutes noted above, Bloom Boxes received subsidies because they are perceived as “green.”
Spitzka and Hall find that conventional cogeneration, which also produces usable heat, can achieve better CO2 reductions than Bloom Energy fuel cells when operating on the same fuel. The following chart compares a cogeneration unit to a Bloom Energy unit, each rated at 100 kw and operating 90 percent of the year:
As the chart shows, a conventional cogeneration unit would cost $500,000 less annually than a Bloom Energy unit. Moreover, the Bloom unit actually increases CO2 emissions by 98.2 tons per year, despite Bloom Energy’s claims that Bloom Boxes are better for the environment. Moreover, cogeneration is nothing new; the technology has existed for more than a century, yet these old units cost less and are more efficient than Bloom Energy’s Bloom Box.
more here: http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2013/06/18/the-bloom-is-off-bloom-energy/
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(…and just for the record, I’m skeptical about green energy that requires huge subsidies to pencil out, but I like the comparison to be fair.)
” The lifetime of the fuel cells appears to be about two years, based on our conversations with the maintenance people.”
Aaagh….. the critical comment! Not to mention the subsidies….Not to mention the comparisons with (larger scale) co-gen…..
Noted that our good ol’ resident warmista Nick Stokes didn’t touch on these uissues!
No matter. He’s probably got shares in (Aussie) Ceramic Fuel Cells (ASX: CFC), yet another scam of the same stripe.
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we venture to deceive…
http://hfgapps.hubb.com/asxtools/Charts.aspx?asxCode=CFU&compare=comp_index&indicies=0&pma1=0&pma2=0&volumeInd=9&vma=0&TimeFrame=M10
I agree with others who suggest that the article is a little misleading. Joe Public sums it up well (
June 24, 2013 at 11:01 pm). For once, I appear to agree with Nick Stokes ( June 24, 2013 at 10:55 pm ).
It all depends upon whether you want/can use the waste heat. Even in a warm environment, such as California, waste heat could be useful since it could be used to power some other applcation, possibly air con, or the like.
If, in your application, waste heat is not desirable and cannot conveniently be used, then the Bloom Energy product would appear a useful choice. If on the other hand, your application can make use of the waste heat, then the Bloom Energy product is not as good (or efficient overall) as Cogen.
One should not indulge in green energy bashing siimply because it is green, or is claimed to be green (most so called green applications are not as green as claimed).
Hey Richard. Don’t forget to amortise the cost of the Bloom Boxes over 2 – 3 years, i.e. the miserable lifetime of the current ceramic fuel cells (refer Dave Rutledge’s post). Then your math simply enters the realm of the Wizard of Oz….How would you feel if your PV solar panels lasted 2 – 3 years instead of 20 – 25 years????
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
Bloom called me in late 2010 and offered me a job. I was skeptical and even asked how prospects were. I specifically asked how the units were working after installation. Of course, I was talking to an HR rep, but assurances were glowing. Regardless, I’m glad I didn’t significantly consider taking the job. The salary was rather sad in my opinion, as well.
I don’t know what they are made of, but that looks like a hell of a lot of metallic minerals in one of those things, and I’ve never met a greenie who thinks mining is green.
The Bloom Box is generating on site where as the Co-gen plant is generating its electricity remotely. Where is the transmission line loss (resistance = heat loss) accounted for with the Co-gen calculation?
Thank you Dave; that is exactly the kind of comparison this discussion needs. Could you possibly supply more detail? The DOE uses “levelized cost” calculations to compare different power generation technologies. Do you have enough information to do such a calculation for the Bloom units?
Nick Stokes is making the point that allowing a credit for recovered heat distorts the comparison and in principle he’s correct. Others make the point the various government subsidies provided for the Bloom units distort the comparison and they are equally correct.
Yale University has both cogen plants (one 16 MW and one 10 mW) as well as a natural gas fuel cell (not a Bloom model; made by a CT company) of 256 kW. The fuel cell also produces waste heat which is used to heat the building (Peabody Museum), so it appears to operate by a different mechanism than the Bloom units; I thought all fuel cell technologies also produced heat. How are the Bloom units different?
One of the reasons cogen plants are so attractive is precisely because they make effective use of waste heat, so there is in effect less waste — total CCGT efficiency can top 70%. This only works if you use the heat reasonably close to where it is generated, which makes them especially suitable for campus-sized installations. Yale University (New Haven, CT where I once worked until 1992), like many college/university campuses already had central heating plants and a network of steam tunnels to heat many of their approximately 200 buildings in the main campus. They also had their own local electric distribution grid. So it was a relatively simple matter to gut an existing heating plant and install a cogen unit. In the summer when building heat is not needed, the waste heat can be used to produce refrigeration by a gas absorption cycle.
The reason Yale didn’t do this years earlier was political. Commercial accounts pay a much higher rate than residential and the effect of a major consumer such as Yale (largest single customer of United Illuminating at the time) leaving the system would be to raise residential rates. I guess the cost benefit to the University simply got to the point where they couldn’t ignore it any more. They installed the 16 mW unit in 1993 and the 10 mW one a few years later, with the historically low price of natural gas due to fracking, those decisions must be looking awfully good now.
Bloom Boxes also give off way more Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) than natural gas power plants.
“Also buried on page 161 of the permit application is a Table 2 notation that says these 235 “clean” servers would emit 22.56 pounds of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) per day. But Delaware, like other states, regulates VOC emissions at far lower levels (Maryland, for instance, regulates boat repair shops that emit more than 15 pounds per day). Moreover, if the same amount of power had been generated by combined cycle gas turbines, only 0.249 pounds of VOCs would be emitted daily. That’s 90 times less pollution!”
http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/03/hype-around-bloom-energy-justified/
Commie Bob said
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So far nobody has raised the issues related to how long the systems last and how much it costs to keep them running. Neither fuel cells nor engines last forever.
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The very first hydro electric generating system is still operating and delivering power. It was built in 1868
Alan Watt says
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Nick Stokes is making the point that allowing a credit for recovered heat distorts the comparison and in principle he’s correct. Others make the point the various government subsidies provided for the Bloom units distort the comparison and they are equally correct.
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No he is not nor are you. Energy out is energy out.
Barry Hoffman says
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The Bloom Box is generating on site where as the Co-gen plant is generating its electricity remotely. Where is the transmission line loss (resistance = heat loss) accounted for with the Co-gen calculation?
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Barry you need to get up to speeds, many cogen sets available in that size range for on site use, built as a complete integrated package, no transmission losses.
RE: Ashby says:
June 24, 2013 at 10:34 pm
I imagine waste heat isn’t always desirable in hot places like California, even when used to heat water, though I can see its utility in colder climes during winter. So it depends on where you’re installing it.
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Only the inland part of CA is hot, and only in the summer.
CA tends toward a mild climate in the heavily populated coastal and near coastal areas.
What the discussion here shows is that there is no single best method to use gas to generate useable energy. If you can use a co-gen system, you are probably going to be more efficient, but if you are only looking at electricity production (for non-heating/cooling purposes) then the Bloom box does work.
However, the critical line to me is this one from a commentor with some actual experience:
“The lifetime of the fuel cells appears to be about two years, based on our conversations with the maintenance people.”
Wow, just wow. All that investment and still just a two year lifetime. Without going into manufacturing costs (and the energy involved in that), this would turn me off making a push for these as an infrastructure development. I get a longer lifetime out of my PC!
I question the magnitudeof the benefit of the waste heat. For one thing, I thought most building heating systems nowadays are more than 75% efficient. Also, at some times in most locations,
buildings don’t need heat but air conditioning.
Donald, read the posts, Air conditioning from waste heat.
Rob Potter says:
June 25, 2013 at 7:53 am
“However, the critical line to me is this one from a commentor with some actual experience:
“The lifetime of the fuel cells appears to be about two years, based on our conversations with the maintenance people.””
Probably the carbon pollutes the electrodes. This was also a problem, only worse, in molten carbonate fuel cells which consume hydrocarbons. That’s why you traditionally run fuell cells on H2 only.
Too bad. I thought those Bloom boxes had solved that problem.
James at 48 says (June 25, 2013 at 7:40 am): “Only the inland part of CA is hot, and only in the summer. CA tends toward a mild climate in the heavily populated coastal and near coastal areas.”
Falsely attributed to Mark Twain: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
Please don’t fall for that argument. Now you’re conceding that CO2 emissions are pollution and bad for the environment. I personally feel that any CO2 emissions are benign.
Pointing out the CO2 emissions are higher is not conceding that CO2 is bad, just pointing out that the units fail even on their own terms. Sold as “GREEN”, yet produce more CO2, consume more fuel per useful watt, and wear out faster than the conventional alternative.
To Barry Hoffman, Alan Watt, Richard Verney, and others
Some additional comments on Caltech’s experience. Again, I would appreciate it if anyone can correct errors.
Our Bloom boxes and our combined-cycle cogen plant are on both campus, so there are no transmission-line loss issues.
Our cogen plant is optimized to deliver both heat and electricity. The efficiency for electricity is 40%. When the heat is included, the combined efficiency is in the low 80s. It is interesting that even in our mild climate, we ran out of heat first, and we had to convert our heat-based ammonia chiller to an electrical refrigerator a while back.
The effect of the short fuel-cell lifetime shows up in high electricity costs, because the subsidies do not cover the replacement cells. Our cogen plant costs us 9 cents per kilowatt hour (and we get heat), while we pay Bloom 14 cents per kilowatt hour for the fuel-cell electricity. In our market 14 cents per kWh would be fine for solar (we actually only pay 12 cents per kWh to the company that installed 1.2MW of PV over our parking lots), because it is less than what the city of Pasadena charges us for afternoon power. However, the Bloom box electricity comes day and night, and at night we generate too much power and have to sell it to the city at a loss at the low night-time rate.
The one advantage for us of fuel cells is that the operating temperatures are lower than in the gas turbine, and we do not have to monitor the NOx emissions for the Southern California Air Quality Management District. This is actually a big deal. Air pollution is a bipartisan issue in Los Angeles.
Also a general comment. If fuel cells and combined-cycle plants are both optimized for electricity only, the efficiencies are similar.
Thanks, Dave, for the numbers.
Barry Hoffman says:
June 25, 2013 at 6:02 am
The Bloom Box is generating on site where as the Co-gen plant is generating its electricity remotely. Where is the transmission line loss (resistance = heat loss) accounted for with the Co-gen calculation?
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Co-Gen facilities are always located next to the users. Typically Universities have heating plants located on campus and you can use co-gen for district heating and many other applications. In a former life I did a number of co-gen studies for power plants etc. to determine economic uses of waste heat in remote communities. Take a look at places where co-generation and district heating are used. It is not unusual. Manhattan heats 100,000 buildings. You can use a heat exchanger for cooling. A quick search before posting would suffice. But, you posted your stance and that’s ok. I judy posted mine. And I have cogeneration in my house. I use a water to water heat exchanger for part of the heat in my house and I use the waste heat to heat my domestic hotwater. None of this is difficult.
Grey Lensman says:
June 25, 2013 at 7:13 am
The chart is not a fair comparison. Unless the Bloom units are different from other fuel cells, they also generate heat and should be given an appropriate credit. See here for a description of how Fuel Cell Energy units work (the supplier of the natural gas unit installed at the Peabody Museum at Yale University ). Their description states the waste heat is enough to boil water into steam. Using waste heat from the fuel cell to heat the Museum building was part of the benefit.
I was frankly very surprised that a CCGT plant took just under double the fuel to generate the same 100 kW of power (from their chart). If the sole purpose is to generate electricity and you can’t use waste heat, then according to their chart the Bloom units provide a better return for a given amount of natural gas. CCGT cogen installations make especially good sense in those circumstances where you can use the waste heat.
However if the capital expense is $500,000 more per year for the Bloom units, then they don’t make sense even if they save half the fuel.