@pikipupiba , I’m considerably less skeptical about this this than I am about a functioning quantum computer. The technological challenges are far less daunting, e.g., I know methanol fuel cells already exist, but nobody has figured out how to make them inexpensive enough for mass marketing.
Bloom claims they’ll eventually be able to make these things small enough and cheap enough that individual homeowners will be able to buy them. The average U.S. home consumes 936 KWH of electicity per month, which averages out to 1.3 KW of power at any given time. But that is average demand over a month – my wife has a hair dryer (I think it’s really a leaf blower) that uses over 1.8 KW when it’s on. With all of the other stuff that’s powered on – the air conditioning, for instance – I probably need around 5KW available on demand. So I would need a power plant capable of producing 5KW in my house.
The ones Bloom is producing now generate around 100KW of electricity each and cost about $800,000. If you can scale that linearly, you’re talking $8000/KW, so I’d need to shell out $40,000 for a 5KW Bloom box to power my house. I can’t afford that, and I don’t believe the costs of the device would be linear with respect to power output.
That’s not to say these things don’t have potential. But right now, they are far too expensive to pan out. If Bloom can get the costs down and demonstrate reliability, this is going to be a monster. Those are monster-sized ifs, though.