What is the Bloom energy stock symbol?

What is the bloom energy stock symbol?

• Answer:

  I think it's still privately held, i.e.: it hasn't IPO'd yet so there is no symbol yet. So far Venture Capitilists have sunk over $400 million into it when it was originally projected to only require $100 million. The 2008 net income was a negative $85 million. Much of the details of how their product works is kept secret however we do know that they claim to be able to use hydrocarbon based fuels such as natural gas and regular air which means that their materials must be able to withstand an acidic environment. They do say that they use a ceramic and their patents would indicate that they use Scandia Stabilized Zirconium which is very hard to come by, the current world demands for it are being met out of Soviet era stockpiles. There have been fuel cells before that could operate with hydrocarbon fuels but they did so at high temperatures. The Bloom energy claims is plausible but efforts along those lines have always been unsustainable as the impurities in the hydrocarbon fuels and in the air can easily clog up a fuel cell. Indeed, one of Bloom Energy's early installation failed due to the intake of dirty air from the nearby freeway which they said they solved by turning the machines around to intake cleaner air. It's curious that other fuel cell companies have taken a remarkably different approach to the problems but there's no doubt that a minor breakthrough in material technology will be all that it would take. Of course there are many other promising fuel cell technologies such as microbial film fuel cells that have greater promise of tolerating impurities. If you do want to invest, you would need to contact the Venture Capital company Kleiner Perkins. Personally, I would prefer to see the synthesis of liquid hydrocarbon fuels via gasification (not just of natural gas but potentially trash and dried sewage as well as storm debris) and small scale Fischer Tropsch reactors (current reactors are on massive scales). Liquid hydrocarbons is still a very energy dense convenient chemical store of energy and the only real problem is that we're currently extracting it from nature's reserves sequestered for millions of years. If we simply synthesize it from CO2 and H2O already in our environment, which we've already proven on industrial scales, we can be free of fossil fuel sources. Bloom energy focuses on an efficient means of deriving electricity from hydrocarbon fuels thereby addresses the main problem of electricity and that is of energy storage but Bloom Energy is still using fossil reserves as the source for the hydrocarbon fuels. If they are able to do what they claim that they are doing at the cost that they say they are doing it at then they definitely have a future but they aren't presenting a solution to the world's energy problems just a more efficient means of utilizing some of our fossil reserves.