For anyone who didn’t watch 60 Minutes this last Sunday, I’ll explain why you should watch the video.

The Bloom Box is a fuel cell designed to provide homes electricity from a box the size of a stack of 15 cd/dvds that costs about $3000.  The fuel cell does emit CO2 when fueled by carbon based fuels, but it creates twice as much electricity as traditional natural gas generators. This means that substituting these methane powered fuel cells for coal power plants could cut CO2 emissions by 75%. Deploying small, off grid Bloom devices further reduces transmission loses and grid costs associated with delivering power.  A successful Bloom Box, could have a huge impact on on a world increasingly run on electricity.

Will it work? Well they’ve got systems running at Google, eBay and FedEx in northern California and they’re funded by Kleiner Perkins, et. al. for $400 Million. That makes it seem like it’s coming soon. If this works, my only question is could we capture enough methane, from bio sources to power society without continuing to add CO2 from burning “mined” fuels?

Check out this video:

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