Saturday, July 6, 2013

Engineers Now Corrupted





I blogged how it took one month for President Obama to corrupt Secretary of Energy Dr. Moniz.  Now Engineers are corrupted.  Yes the Engineers News Record (ENR) a once venerable publication published utter nonsense on the Bloom Boxes being installed in Delaware.   ENR is owned by McGraw Hill and here is a link to the poorly written and pathetically researched piece on Bloom in the First Sate.


We know that the CEO of Bloom has fibbed about the efficiency of the piece of government sponsored junk, but his hype went outrageously far in claiming per the ENR piece “At a 2010 press event unveiling the Bloom Energy Server, co-founder K.R. Srindar said, "It took eight years and over 400,000,000 cumulative hours of making, breaking, improving and testing this fuel cell to get it to the point where we needed to get it."

A person works approximate 2,000 hours a year or 16,000 hours in 8 years.  This mean Bloom had 25,000 people working on the box full time for 8 years.  Hog Wash!

The article then claims “Already delivering power to the local electrical grid owned by PJM as part of a deal with utility Delmarva Power & Light Co., the estimated $40-million Red Lion Energy Center eventually will produce 27.5 MW.” 

We know from the California CPUC that the installed cost per watt of a Bloom Box is $9.53.  27.5 MW is 27.5 million watts and the project should have cost $262 million not $40 million.  Perhaps Bloom got $222 million of subsidies and this would be a record for the team of Al Gore, John Doerr, and Colin Powell. 

ENR has 400 million hours worked and $40 million spent.  For Bloom who are famous at underpaying Mexican welders working in Santa Clara California they could have only paid 10 cents an hour to the workers if the ENR got the data correct.  But we know that ENR did poor research and wrote a terrible article.  I know Mr. Huffman got taken by Bloom and its customer AT&T but getting ENR to be taken for a ride by Bloom is amazing.

The following is my email to the editors of ENR in which I sent yesterday.  Let’s see if and how they respond:

Dear All at ENR

I read with great interest the following article in ENR

Issue: 07/08/2013

Fuel Cells Finding Their Niche

07/03/2013



Sadly the article misses the point about the expense and emissions these Bloom Fuel Cells cause.

Data from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) show the installation cost of the fuel cell to be $9.53 per watt.  The article stated that the 27.5 megawatt station will cost $40 million.  The real CAPEX before government hand out is $262 million.  Surely ENR could have checked this simple fact!

The Bloom deal with Delmarva is for residents of Delaware to pay over 22 cents per kwh for their power under the PPA.  This is twice the price of existing power and more than 3 times as expensive than power from a combined cycle power station using the very same natural gas.

Now the zinger.  Per the Delaware permit application of November 2011 for the Red Lion project CO2 emissions are 884 pounds CO2 per mwh.  A combined cycle gas station will emit only 730 pounds of CO2 per mwh.

The people in Delaware are getting screwed on price and breathing in more CO2 thanks to Bloom's political connections (Al Gore, John Doerr and Colin Powell).  I suggest you read my article in the link below that gives the real engineering data behind this crony capitalist project.


Sadly ENR had its eyes closed in writing this article and it saddens me how little real engineering analysis is done in researching Bloom who are the greatest green washer of all time.

Lindsay Leveen  BSChE, MSChE, MBA   
Recipient of the NorCal AIChE Professional Development Award for a lifetime of achievement in Chemical Engineering

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