A home fuel cell device is obviously going to be REALLY expensive any way you look at it. Or is there something else in the works?

I’m going to help spread the word about this great blog.

Within the past two or three months alone, I’ve read about a 5kW unit, a 25 kW unit, and, from the Business Week article, a 100kW unit(they mention 5 units sold to eBay that produce up to 500kW)…so which is it?
Aaron notes that part of the secrecy is because they want to have field experience that demonstrates that they have a reliable product. The problem is that Solid Oxide Fuel Cells typically operate at really high temperatures and that takes toll on the materials used. Bloom may have a product that operates at lower temperatures (thus increasing stack life and the life of the other components). So presumably all of these tests with U. Tennessee and eBay and others are to verify this – but in order to be competitive with existing commercial offerings they need to hit at least 50k operating hours…well thats at least 6 years of operation…and if the tests don’t go as planned it could be a lot longer before we see Bloom ready to sell anything.

As for the economics of the fuel cell, its incredibly difficult to imagine a set of circumstances in which they’ll approach anything close to grid-parity anytime soon. OK, if you’re talking about just the manufactured price (which is how a lot of solar PV manufacturers get away with the grid-parity claim)…and if you wrap in the 30% ITC credit, and various state capital offsets, and RECS, and maybe you’re talking about 17c/kWh grid rates in Alaska or Connecticut, oh and don’t forget to waive the interconnection fees! Absent stacking the deck in their favor with those parameters, its just hard to imagine.