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It is a solid oxide fuel cell. There is nothing magical.

It is presented like it is a brand new invention and that they are the only ones making the product, however R&D on this technology has been going on since the 1960s by big companies like Westinghouse, GE, and tens of other companies all over the world. DOE has a 10-year old still-active program dedicated just to SOFCs. There is a book about solid oxide fuel cells.

There is no platinum or other precious metals. It is ceramic oxides and nickel, similar to alkaline cells except these run at much higher rates per unit area which promises to make them cheaper than other types of cells. Read the links above for the materials. The electrodes are "inks" only during manufacturing - they are heat treated to form stable solid materials. Recently, developments in materials science has brought them close to commercialization (manufacturing cost and durability have been issues). Of the perhaps 50 companies attempting to commercialize this technology, it seems that the Bloom company is just the one that happens to be funded by silicon valley investors.

This is not to say the technology is not exciting and potentially can improve our use of fossil fuels. The same cells can also be run in the reverse direction as electrolyzers, applying renewable/nuclear (non-fossil) electricity to split water and carbon dioxide to create fuels (link1 link2).

Well, this isn't quite true. Averaged over larger regions--such as a state or a country--there is wind all the time. Naturally, the larger the region, the more consistent the power will generally be for that region. There are several studies considering different regions and different technologies (i.e., current power infrastructure, or proposed HVDC lines). Below are some notable findings.

From Stanford (pdf): interconnected wind farms could provide 33-47% of baseload power in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

In Europe, 20% of baseload could be from wind power with the current infrastructure (pdf), or 70% from wind (and 100% renewables) with a high voltage DC transmission network (pdf).

Other more local findings are 25% baseload in Minnesota, and 50% in the UK. The point, then, is that wind can provide much more power to the grid than previously thought, and is often reasonably economical.

The lithium ion batteries being adopted for transportation, e.g. the Tesla batteries, are reported to have a charging efficiency of 86%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster#Battery_system Some batteries are not as good though vanadium oxide batteries look like they compare well. http://www.risoe.dk/Research/sustainable_energy/wind_energy/projects/vanadiumbattery.aspx

I am working on a similar process that synthesizes hydrocarbon fuels from carbon dioxide, water, and non-fossil energy (could be solar) and should eventually have some publications out about this. There are several ways to go about this. But first, let me comment on some of the comments:

Regarding the "They're leaving the production of actual liquid fuel to other people ... all this thing does right now is produce carbon monoxide." comment, reducing CO2 to CO is the hardest part of the process. Once you have concentrated CO, you can follow the coal-to-liquids processes and water-gas shift (CO + H2O => CO2 + H2) to get hydrogen and run the syngas (CO + H2 mixture) into Fischer-Tropsch reactors. They've been doing this for 50 years in South Africa to produce synthetic diesel.

Regarding the "Renewable not!" comment and using power-plant flue gas CO2 as the input to this process, this would indeed not be sustainable. However, if industrial capture of CO2 from the air is available, one can fully close the loop and have a sustainable hydrocarbon fuel cycle. Flue gas CO2 could be a good option in the short term, however. For instance, if solar and other nearly-carbon-free energy sources begin to rapidly take over, coal plants will not immediately be shut down. Other CO2-emitting industrial plants such as aluminum smelters, etc, will also have CO2 emissions to deal with, and this form of using it to store non-fossil energy by recycling it once as a liquid fuel would be worthwhile. One comment discussed this transition well.

Related, other comments say "why not just use the solar energy to produce electricity". These intermittent resources need storage, and liquid fuel storage is not a bad method (and very versatile). Others responded about storage.

So, processes like this are a way to store non-fossil energy as a convenient energy-dense fuel which can be used in our existing petroleum fuel infrastructure and vehicles (as opposed to hydrogen and batteries). Biofuels can do the same, and there are many comments above ("I saw something like this... it's called a tree") mentioning biofuels and how this process replicates it with much more complexity; indeed you could call this whole process including the Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis "artificial photosynthesis". However, this process cuts out the middle-man of the plant in biofuels processes, which has much lower sunlight-to-fuel efficiency than industrial solar collectors (PV or thermal) and requires a lot of fertilizers and pesticides to boost growth rate. Such land- and resource-intensive agriculture is not sustainable in its current form and may not ever be on the scale we will need it.

TFA discusses a solar-heat-driven thermochemical process that has potential. A somewhat similar solar-heat thermolytic process splits CO2 directly at higher temperatures. There are many other methods of accomplishing this that are at different levels of development and being researched, including electrochemical (pdf link1, pdf link2), photoelectrochemical, photo(bio)chemical...

In Risø Denmark there is a pretty large research group working on fuel cells. They always planned to sell to industry, but only recently private companies believed so much in the idea that they started to invest large amounts of money Their website contains some very nice ram files :)

In Risø Denmark there is a pretty large research group working on fuel cells. They always planned to sell to industry, but only recently private companies believed so much in the idea that they started to invest large amounts of money Their website contains some very nice ram files :)