I first read about the Boom Box on eGadget.

“Two blocks can power the average high-consumption American home — one block can power the average European home. At least that’s the claim being made by K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, on 60 Minutes last night. The original technology comes from an oxygen generator meant for a scrapped NASA Mars program that’s been converted, with the help of an estimated $400 million in private funding, into a fuel cell. Bloom’s design feeds oxygen into one side of a cell while fuel (natural gas, bio gas from landfill waste, solar, etc) is supplied to the other side to provide the chemical reaction required for power. The cells themselves are inexpensive ceramic disks painted with a secret green “ink” on one side and a black “ink” on the other. The disks are separated by a cheap metal alloy, instead of more precious metals like platinum, and stacked into a cube of varying capabilities — a stack of 64 can power a small business like Starbucks.”

This does seem to bonafide… and we will be watching this space.

There are some parallels betten this and Daniel Nocera’s work at MIT, although they are two distint system.

It looks more an more likely each day that we will soon be living a cleaner world. The big questions is, how do the big energy suppliers meter these progressive energy sources???

For those of you who enjoy your shopping trips to New York and using the latest, greatest and most power-hungry PCs on the planet, the UK government has served up a carbon footprint calculator so that you can measure the level of damage that you are doing..

However, this service is getting so many hits that the Directgov servers are struggling to cope. (Typicall really:)

“The Act on CO2 calculator is currently seeing an overwhelming response and we’re working to fix the problems you may be experiencing,” reads a notice on the site.

I can just see all those people at their PCs, supposed to be working but spending the day trying to on, the churn from all the machines heating up offices where the air con is being switched up a notch or two. Employees frustrated at the futility of trying to measure their carbon foot prints are probably nipping out for a fag to calm down.

Call me a cynic but I find myself wondering just how much CO2 this system is contributing to the worked today and whether it’s really a pointless exercise – will it really make more of a difference that just being more sensible?

If you would like to take it for a spin and find out how much damage you are doing, ust go here for the carbon footprint calculator.

* UPDATE
I finally managed to try the site – I recommend that you leave it a week before trying as the site is really slow. I thought that my solar panels’ would be installed before I got through it! The verdict is that I am marginally kinder than most, which has come as a shock as I am careful, am switching to solar energy, will be buying a Smart Car, and have energy efficient bulbs. However, I think that I should recalculate once these have all come into effect. Also my trip to NY last Christmas may have been more irresponsible that initially thought