A3StormDrain

A3StormDrain

To-Do

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 there were a couple of different things that we found interesting. We all thought it was pretty cool that Boulder is in fact the first city to try out a smart grid. It's great that the city we are all living in is the first one to try what sounds like a great program to better energy consumption. Though it is cool, it seems like a really big undertaking. Of course it is easy to talk about, but implementing it is another story. The plan as a whole is a complete overhaul of the power infrastructure. Yes it is for the best, but to get there we are going to have to spend a lot of money and do a lot of work. The idea is great, but overall there are a lot of road blocks in the way. Also it's a really cool idea to have some sort of competition with rewards for saving power. Everyone loves competitions, so why have one where everyone, including the earth wins!

One thing that we didn't really understand is why power companies are funding this change. Morally, it is something they should be doing, but it doesn't seem profitable for them. The smart grid system as a whole seems great for the consumer. It tells them where they can make improvements and in the end, use less power. The less power they use though, the less the power company makes. Overall

We learned that one of the major challenges with smart grid technology and sustainable is having social cooperation with energy usage and grid design. There are many challenges that need to be overcome to make the smart grid work, but it's looking like our future.

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 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 thousand dollars 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 saving as a result.  
Although the Smart Grid is an exciting plan to rebuild our national infrastructure, it seems to be very costly and has many issues ahead of it.  Bloom energy is trying to get their bloom box devices down to household size so everyone could use it.  The hope is to reach a device that will power your home for under three thousand dollars.  One hurdle that bloom may need to overcome is the heavy lobbying by existing energy monopolies.  People designing and developing the smart grid have now encountered their most impressive competitor.  The energy corporations of today do not want to lose their entire customer base to a startup out of silicon valley.
Bloom energy is not the first to claim a clean energy fuel cell.  Many companies have tried, but none have been successful thus far.  Bloom energy has about four hundred million dollars of funding and plenty of companies backing them up.  These companies include FedEx, Google, Walmart, and eBay among others.  One of the biggest challenges ahead is developing the technology further to enable home and private usage.  They will have to bring down the cost significantly for consumers.  The reliability of these devices is always a concern, but Bloom is fast approaching 99.99% up time.  The last piece is to figure out large scale production so that they may fulfill their dream of putting on of these in every single home.  
The potential with the bloom box is huge.  It will be interesting to see how it develops in the future.  It is not hard to see a future where our homes are part of the smart grid, with bloom boxes outside providing most of the power.  A large chunk of the smart grid development is focused on developing new technologies for home and home appliances.  We can only hope that existing smart grid technologies will be able to pair up with Bloom Boxes in the future.

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

Overall, we are all poor college students living in Boulder so we are all interested in saving power to save money. All of us have experienced ridiculous energy bills during the winter, and we all would like that to change. The one thing most of us have done is to switch out conventional light bulbs with CFLs. They are sometimes a little pricey at the store, but in a whole house or apartments, they can really add up and end up saving you money. A few of us have wood burning stoves which we are going to utilize too. it's questionable if that is better or worse for the environment, but it will save us money because we can get wood for free. Another conclusion we came up with is that most of us are very aware of saving power. A few or our roommates will leave lights on, or crank up the heat in the winter, but we are all the ones that yell at them to turn their lights off, or turn the heat back down to a reasonable level. It would be nice if everyone was very energy aware, but not everyone is.