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By Robert Quigley The wait is over: Bloom Energy is currently showing off its Bloom Box fuel cell technology at eBay headquarters in San Jose, California. In addition to Bloom Energy founder K.R. Sridhar, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger are also in attendance. The San Jose Mercury, which is covering the event, reports: Tech journalists joined [...]
We’re here live at the official unveiling of Bloom Energy’s Bloom Box. The 8-year-old company that has raised close to $400 million is finally showing off its fuel cell after a huge PR blitz that started Sunday with a “60 Minutes” video and an article in Fortune. The event starts at 8:30AM, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and General Colin Powell are supposed to be here.
The Bloom Box fuel cell device has been the subject of plenty of controversy since its unofficial unveiling in a 60 Minutes segment earlier this week. The device, which has already been installed on the campuses of major companies like eBay, Google, Staples, and FedEx, converts natural gas into electricity. But how efficient is it? Is the box worth the money? Amy Szoczlas Cole, the Director of eBay’s Green Team, spoke with us briefly about eBay’s installation of five Bloom Boxes.
According to Cole, the boxes take up 3,000 square feet of space and produce 500 kilowatts of power–enough to take 15% of the San Jose, California, campus’s energy use off the grid. At the moment, eBay is running its Bloom Boxes off natural gas, but the company plans to switch to biogas sometime in the near future. “We’re in the stages of finalizing the contract to turn on biogas,” Cole explained. Once the system switches to biogas, CO2 will not longer be released as a byproduct of the Bloom Box energy production process.
Over the past several years, there’s been no shortage of talk about alternative energy, and its potential to change the world. The problem is that most of it is just that — talk. But tonight, a report that aired on 60 Minutes showed one alternative that is not only real, it’s already being tested by companies such as Google and eBay. You simply have to watch this.
Bloom Energy are producing tiny fuel cell boxes they call “Bloom Boxes.” Two of these can apparently power a U.S. home (and only one for homes in countries that use less power). So how small are they? Look at the picture above, each device isn’t much bigger than a standard brick. Of course, they need to be surrounded by a larger unit that takes in an energy source (such as natural gas). But still, these units look to be about the size of a refrigerator and can easily fit outside of a home, providing it with clean, cheap energy.
He’s no Wyclef Jean or George Clooney, but that hasn’t stopped seven-year-old Charlie Simpson from raising more than £136,000 ($220,000) for the Haiti earthquake.
Charlie Simpson from Fulham, west London had hoped to raise just £500 for UNICEF’s earthquake appeal by cycling eight kilometers (five miles)around a local park.
“My name is Charlie Simpson. I want to do a sponsored bike ride for Haiti because there was a big earthquake and loads of people have lost their lives,” said Simpson on his JustGiving page, a fundraising site which launched his efforts.
This morning I’ll be escorting my wife to the hospital, where the doctors will perform a caesarean section to remove our first child. She didn’t want to do it this way – neither of us did – but sometimes the Fates decide otherwise. The Fates or, in our case, government employees.
On the morning of October 26th Mary and I entered Portland International Airport, en route to the Las Vegas wedding of one of my best friends. Although we live in Los Angeles, we’d been in Oregon working on a film, and up to that point had had nothing but praise to shower on the city of Portland, a refreshing change of pace from our own suffocating metropolis.
At the security checkpoint I was led aside for the “inspection” that’s all the rage at airports these days…
Scan, baby, scan. That’s the mantra among politicians at all levels in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to conventional wisdom, the would-be “underwear bomber” could have been stopped by airport security if he’d been put through a full-body scanner, which would have revealed the cache of explosives attached to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s groin.
Spirituality has a different meaning to each of us, it seems. A standard definition would be: “A sense of meaning and purpose; a sense of self and of a relationship with ‘that which is greater than self”. Currently, Religion and Mysticism seem to have the monopoly on Spirituality. Theistic religion often regards a ‘relationship with [...]
By Jacque Fresco With the advent of future developments in science and technology, we will assign more and more decision making to machines. At present this is evident in military systems in which electronic sensors maintain the ideal flight characteristics in advanced aircraft. The capacities of computers today exceed five hundred trillion bits of information [...]
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Counting since July 1st 2011.
