Last night, 60 Minutes reported on Bloom Energy and their BloomBox technology. You can read a transcript of the story here. Bloom appears to have developed a reasonably priced fuel cell technology.
My thought on this was that if they can sell me one for cheap (like less than the $3000 quoted in the story) to power my house using natural gas, it might pay for itself in a reasonable amount of time. It would be even better if the power company would let me sell electricity back to the grid – because a fuel cell operating in the 90+% efficiency range would allow a BloomBox owner to generate electricity for about half the price of a combined cycle natural gas fired power plant. I won’t hold my breath for that one though – this being Canada where government regulation never saw a novel idea they couldn’t kill to protect the status quo…
My first thought on seeing this story though was “OMG, it’s a Shipstone!” from the Robert Heinlein novel, Friday (buy here). Now it’s not quite as magical as a shipstone, but it is interesting how science fiction turns out not to be so fictional after all…