Friday, March 12, 2010

Cool Technology of the Week


I have long believed that fuel cell technology has the potential to be a high quality, green energy source that gives us alternatives to burning coal or relying on oil imports.

Of course, the promise of fuel cells has been slowed by high costs, and complex technology.

On 60 minutes a few weeks ago, Bloom Energy introduced it's next generation fuel cell technology - the Energy Server.

It's already in production at eBay, Walmart, Staples, and Google.

How does it work?

Here's a flash animation.

The company and its technology are still a bit mysterious. There are detractors who think this may be the next Cold Fusion. There are questions of reliability, maintainability and practicality




Holy grail? Maybe. Cool Technology? Definitely.

2 comments:

A Quick Remark said...

I work as an IT professional in the energy industry, and right now, I'm totally excited about this technology. It's been spreading around our office like crazy. Seems pretty cool.

I also noticed that you are a CIO in the healthcare industry. Do you have any advice for someone who's been in the IT industry for 8 years and would love to switch over to healthcare, but not exactly sure how to do it?

I'm fascinated by the data and the technologies and how they can potentially work together to help people.

GreenLeaves said...

If I am not mistaken Siemens has also been working for years on reformer fuel cells. http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/power-generation/fuel-cells/

I think it is one of the technologies that is just taking time to reach critical mass. The great advantage is that we can use the tremendous energy density and practicality of liquid fuels to generate electricity without combustion.