Bloom energy

 His company, publicly traded Bloom Energy, sells fuel cells—steel boxes that generate electricity using natural gas. The boxes, which it calls energy servers, emit a nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, but they are supposed to make much less of it than traditional power plants and do so without generating lots of smog ingredients like nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxides.

Every time there is a disaster your power price is going to go up, because somebody has to pay for the damage, Bloom is capitalizing on the outages by wooing potential customers in fire-risk zones to protect against grid failure with Bloom-powered

Over its 19 years in business, Bloom has installed several thousand of its 15-ton boxes worldwide for big tech companies including Apple, AT&T and Paypal, which are willing to pay up to guarantee 24/7 power for data centers where the cost of downtime is nearly $9,000 per minute. A lot of its customers are in states with the highest power prices and big clean-energy subsidies, like New York, where Home Depot has installed them as backup generators “wherever they make economic sense

The natural gas, thanks to fracking, is already there,” Sridhar says. And yet, despite big promises, Sridhar’s boxes are highly unlikely to transform the grid in California, or anywhere else. The reasons are manifold 多樣化的, but boil down to this: Bloom’s technology is too dirty and too costly.

decade ago, Sridhar envisioned that by now his fuel cell technology would be in every home, costing $3,000 a pop. In reality, not a single home in America has its own Bloom box. Instead, his boxes are used mostly for industrial and commercial customers, costing approximately $1.2 million each. Without subsidies, they generate power at a cost of roughly 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour versus 10 cents per kwh for grid power nationally.

He later worked at the University of Arizona’s Space Technologies Lab, building an oxygen-generating machine for NASA’s missions to Mars. When the Mars Polar Lander crashed in 1999, his project was canceled. Undeterred, he worked to more or less reverse that technology, to turn methane and oxygen into carbon dioxide and electricity.

Those initial machines were hand-assembled, Sridhar recalls, in a hobby shop at Moffett Federal Airfield in Santa Clara County, rather than on today’s automated assembly line. A former Bloom executive claims that those early boxes had to be monitored 24/7, and that internal modules stacked with hundreds of 4-by-4-inch fuel cell wafers needed to be swapped out a couple times a year, at $225,000 a pop. Another complication of these Rube Goldberg devices was the filtration systems—metal canisters filled with pebbles of solid catalysts that separate sulfur compounds and other contaminants from the methane gas 甲皖. According to the same executive, the first time technicians went to empty the canisters, they simply sucked out the used catalyst with a Shop-Vac and ended up spreading a rotten-egg smell across the neighborhood. Bloom called the executive’s account “hearsay

IAS 21 The Effects of Changes in Foreign Exchange Rates

The following procedures apply when an entity accounts for transactions in a foreign currency. A foreign currency transaction is recorded, on initial recognition in the functional currency, by applying to the foreign currency amount the spot exchange rate at the date of the transaction. At the end of each reporting period:

• foreign currency monetary items are translated into the functional currency using the closing rate;
• non-monetary items that are measured in terms of historical cost in a foreign currency continue to be translated using the exchange rate that prevailed at the date of the transaction; and
• non-monetary items that are measured at fair value in a foreign currency are translated using the exchange rates that prevailed at the date when the fair value was measured.

The resulting exchange differences are recognised in profit or loss when they arise except for some exchange differences that form part of a reporting entity’s net investment in a foreign operation.  The latter are recognised initially in other comprehensive income and reclassified to profit or loss on disposal of the net investment.

For translation into the functional currency or into a presentation currency, the following procedures apply, except in limited circumstances:

• assets and liabilities are translated at the exchange rate at the end of the period;
• income and expenses are translated at exchange rates at the dates of the transactions; and
• resulting exchange differences are recognised in other comprehensive income and reclassified to profit or loss on disposal of the related foreign operation.

Exchange differences arising when monetary items are settled or when monetary items are translated at rates different from those at which they were translated when initially recognised or in previous financial statements are reported in profit or loss in the period, with one exception. [IAS 21.28] The exception is that exchange differences arising on monetary items that form part of the reporting entity's net investment in a foreign operation are recognised, in the consolidated financial statements that include the foreign operation, in other comprehensive income; they will be recognised in profit or loss on disposal of the net investment. [IAS 21.32]hh

Exchange differences arising when monetary items are settled or when monetary items are translated at rates different from those at which they were translated when initially recognised or in previous financial statements are reported in profit or loss in the period, with one exception. [IAS 21.28] The exception is that exchange differences arising on monetary items that form part of the reporting entity's net investment in a foreign operation are recognised, in the consolidated financial statements that include the foreign operation, in other comprehensive income; they will be recognised in profit or loss on disposal of the net investment. [IAS 21.32]

Exchange differences arising when monetary items are settled or when monetary items are translated at rates different from those at which they were translated when initially recognised or in previous financial statements are reported in profit or loss in the period, with one exception. [IAS 21.28] The exception is that exchange differences arising on monetary items that form part of the reporting entity's net investment in a foreign operation are recognised, in the consolidated financial statements that include the foreign operation, in other comprehensive income; they will be recognised in profit or loss on disposal of the net investment. [IAS 21.32]