A3StormDrain

A3StormDrain

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Please answer the following questions about the article: what did you find interesting? what did you find not find interesting? what did you not understand? what did you learn (if anything) reading the article?

After reading this paper, there were a couple things that we found interesting. We thought it was wonderful that Boulder is the first city to try out a smart grid. It's great that the city we live in is the first one to try what sounds like a great program to reduce energy consumption. It includes what seem like several interesting features, including a competition with rewards for saving power. This competition is not only fun, but everyone, including the earth, wins! But while the smart grid sounds promising, it also seems like a big undertaking. The benefits of the smart grid are easy to talk about, but implementing the system will be difficult. Installing the smart grid will require a complete overhaul of the power infrastructure, which will require a lot of money and a lot of work.

One thing we didn't understand is why power companies are funding this change. Morally it is something they should be doing, but how will it be profitable? The smart grid seems to contain only benefits for the individual consumer, possibly even hurting the power companies. When consumers use less energy as a result of the smart grid, the companies lose money. We would like to know what's in it for the power companies.

From this paper, we learned that one of the major challenges with smart grid technology and sustainability is harnessing social cooperation in relation to energy usage and grid design. This is one of the many challenges that need to be overcome to make the smart grid work, but our future is looking bright.

Based on an exploration of the web, scientific articles, newspaper stories, ….. ? Write a Short Essay (about 1 page) about an interesting question / website related to one or more of the themes: Energy Sustainability, Smart Meters, Smart Grid

The Bloom Box is a revolutionary piece of technology that could have the potential to disrupt the energy spectrum as we know it. The Bloom Box is a solid oxide fuel cell that needs a gas line to generate electricity at the site where it is located.  What’s interesting about the Bloom Box is that it aims to replace most of the electrical grid. “The Bloom box is intended to replace the grid…for its customers. It's cheaper than the grid, it's cleaner than the grid.” Currently, a few large corporations are testing the boxes on-site. The initial cost of a corporate box is around $750,000 with a payback period of three to five years.  Companies like Google and eBay have been testing for months and have seen hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy savings as a result.
Although an overhaul of the electrical grid is an exciting way to make the nation's national infrastructure more efficient, it could be extremely costly and will have to overcome many obstacles. One hurdle Bloom Energy must overcome is their device's size and cost footprint. Bloom Energy is trying to reduce their Bloom Boxes to a "household" size so every household can use it. Bloom hopes to create a device that will power a typical home for less than three thousand dollars. Another hurdle Bloom will need to overcome is heavy lobbying from existing energy monopolies. People designing and developing the smart grid have now encountered this most impressive competitor. The energy corporations of today do not want to lose their customer base, and will fight any competitor attempting to take it. Bloom Energy's last hurdle to overcome is producing their Bloom Box on a large scale, to fulfill their dream of a Box in every home.

Bloom Energy is not the first company to create a clean-energy fuel cell, but few others have been successful. Bloom Energy has about four hundred million dollars of funding and plenty of other corporations to back them up, including FedEx, Google, Walmart, and eBay. Their Box is also reliable (almost 99.99%).

The Bloom Box's potential is huge. It's exciting to imagine a future where every home is part of a more intelligent energy grid, each powered primarily by a Bloom Box.  A large part of developing a better electrical grid is the development of new technologies for homes and home appliances. We can only hope that devices like the Bloom Box will be a part of this future.

Briefly describe your own interests, experiences, actions, changes in your behavior (if any) related to “energy awareness”!

We are young, poor college students living in hippy-happy Boulder. So of course we are interested in saving power to save money. We have had to pay overpriced energy bills during the winter, and we would like that to change. We have all switched out conventional light bulbs with CFLs. These bulbs are more expensive, but reduce energy and cost in the long run, especially when installed in an entire house or apartment. Some of us use wood-burning stoves. These are more harmful to the environment, but save us money because the wood is free. Most of us are aware of our power consumption. If our roommates leave lights on, or turn the heat up in the winter, we yell at them to save energy.