Nowadays, technology develop rapidly to meet the luxurious necessity and natural need of human kind. Power grid was once a great invention in human history as everyone were enjoying the comfortable life with all kind of electrical appliance in home or office.

But, history mean in the past. Bloom Energy would change the history of electricity generation with the latest technology of  Solid Oxide Fuel Cell. With the continuous supplies of fuel, heat and air, the electricity generation process in SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cell) will continue and non-stop.

A brief explanation on how the SOFC works can be found here.

Solid Oxide Fuel Cell is actually one of the fuel cell technologies that generate clean and reliable energy. There are few type of fuel cell available in the market but the legacy fuel cell technologies like proton exchange membranes (PEMs), phosphoric acid fuel cells (PAFCs), and molten carbonate fuel cells (MCFCs), have all required expensive precious metals, corrosive acids, or hard to contain molten materials. It makes the fuel cell technologies hardly to be adopted in daily life.

Expert had agreed that Solid Oxide Fuel Cell is the most efficient fuel cell. With low cost ceramic materials, and extremely high electrical efficiencies, SOFCs can deliver attractive economics. As Solid Oxide Fuel Cell has a high temperature output, it still cannot be fully adopted in industrial or house use. Bloom Energy has solved these engineering challenges. With breakthroughs in materials science, and revolutionary new design, Bloom’s SOFC technology is a cost effective, all-electric solution.

Bloom Energy SOFC overweigh hydrogen fuel cell in four main ways:

• Low cost materials – SOFC use a common sand-like powder instead of precious
  metals like platinum or corrosive materials like acids.
• High electrical efficiency –SOFC convert fuel into electricity at nearly twice the
  rate of some legacy technologies
• Fuel flexibility – SOFC is capable of using either renewable or fossil fuels
• Reversible – Bloom’s technology is capable of both energy generation and storage

Energy Server Architecture

Each Energy server consists of thousand of fuel cell. Each fuel cell is a flat solid ceramic square made from a common sand-like "powder”.

Each of the fuel cell is capable of producing 25Watts. To generate more power, fuel cell are sandwiched. along with metal interconnect plates into a fuel cell “stack”. A few “stack” cascaded together is enough to power an average house. Sound nice!

     Figure: the component of Energy Server

Information via Bloom Energy

PS: Bloom energy SOFC only produce small amount of CO2 as the side product (claimed by Bloom Energy).