In defense of the Bloom Box

This one's for my favorite rocket scientist!

My comment on criticism for K R Sridhar's Bloom Box
(read the article here)

The other fuel cells cannot be used. This one can and has been, by actual customers to run their actual buildings. Walmart, Ebay and Google have testified that this thing works, physically demonstrated the equipment which is out there for the whole world to see and verify. We don't need something that's magical - we just need something that works. The "revolution" lies in bringing a lab concept to the home and making it practical and economical - something that these skeptics have been failing at and are now taking digs at the people who have succeeded. Please ask them to furnish their own products before publishing this sort of criticism.

The article linked on top serves as a great example of negative publishing - the publishers themselves knew they didn't have anything concrete so they worded the heading like they wanted to whereas the actual text reveals there's very little but silly complaints equivalent to "Daddy, not fair, I wanted to see magic. This thing is scientific!" ... and in the process completely downplayed the actual potential of this product. Bad publishing, Bad!

For the uninitiated, here's something about the Bloom Box...

Imagine that the Transformer substation that distributes electricity to your and your neighboring houses, is replaced by a dark, silent box of roughly the same size. Imagine that it's not connected to any electricity supplier, yet silently supplies power to your and your neighbors' homes 24x7. Now imagine that instead of depending on grid electricity or diesel or other fuel, it is only connected to a pipe that channels biogas to it. Now imagine that that biogas is sourced from a standard standalone biogas plant (size of a small room) in the same area, where all of your and your neighbors' trash and sewage is redirected to. Imagine that this box, the same size as a transformer or diesel generator, uses an electrochemical process by which the power generated is more than twice that what we get from any standard fuel-burning electric generator used today. Because there is no burning involved. Imagine that there are no moving parts, no loud noise, no excess heat or byproducts of burning, and the only emission is water vapor and CO2 which happens to be carbon-neutral because it's coming from rotting trash and not fossil fuels. (so it's just returning CO2 that was initially already present in the air instead of adding to it.)

To string everything together, imagine that your own waste (including poop!), the same trash you would normally throw away, is being used to silently generate 24x7 electricity for your home, with no electric bills once the initial setup and maintenance is taken care of, and without pollution, noise or fossil fuel emissions.

That's the Bloom Box for you.

They're still working on it... It's at the stage where cell phones were in 1995. You can check it out here!
(Watch the Be Launch Video series to get a complete grasp of it!)