Bloom Energy provides fuel cells

Bloom Energy Company presented on Wednesday, with fanfare, its fuel cells, but kept secret their plans for increased marketing of their expensive power generating apparatus.

At a press conference, executives from Bloom Energy disseminated not many new details about their strategies for the promising technology of fuel cells is cheap and affordable homes.

This is an important point because the company sells $ 700,000 a cabinet of fuel cell that looks like a filing cabinet.
With funding by nearly $ 400 million, Bloom Energy is one company that attract attention among which are installed in the "Valley of the Semiconductor in California.

Large corporations have been the first customers, but Bloom Energy wants to reduce the price in thousands of dollars for equipment that are affordable for families.
The company president, K.R. Sridhar said the cuts could take a decade or more as technology advances, as happened with computer chips, which increased its capacity and was cheaper to over the decades.

"We are very confident that we can activate the economic precepts," said Sridhar at the press conference at the offices of the company sales and auction site eBay.
Since its founding in 2001, the company has maintained its discretion regarding the progress of technology.

The lack of product details raised questions among experts, for whom it is still impossible to measure the true cost of power generation with the cabinet of Bloom Energy cells and whether this technology is substantially different from those of other companies in the industry.

"I would try to take a healthy dose of skepticism," said Bryan Pivovar, manager of the fuel cell division of the Center for Hydrogen Technologies and Systems, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

"What we showed the managers of Bloom Energy is to have these systems and have achieved market them," he added.

"I have not seen anything from Bloom to make me believe that there is something special in the way they have armed your system and what their innovation," he said.

According to Bloom Energy, the fuel cell cabinet produces more energy with less environmental damage than other similar products on the market because it not only uses hydrogen to start the chemical reaction that generates electricity.
The system could be activated by wind, sunlight and what is available, which can vary from community to community, said the directors of the company without elaborate on details.

One of the easiest ways to activate the cabinet Bloom would connect directly to a natural gas pipeline.
Bloom Energy said its customers include companies Google Inc. and eBay Inc., which have cheaper energy.

Cabinets with fuel cells, both companies get electricity to nine to 10 cents per kilowatt hour, whereas if the network buy would cost between 13 and 14 cents.