11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
What a waste of money!, September 18, 2002
This review is from: Fuel Cells vs. The Grid (Digital)
This is a very elementary, outdated introduction to fuel cells that doesn't tell you a damn thing about the comparative economics of fuel cells vs. grid. For example it discusses the Plugpower Homegen 7000 that has been abandoned. Fuel cell vs grid economics is a subject I am extremely interest in and about which I have been thinking for some time.
With the grid, you also get load diversity so that for each kW of the sum of non coincident peaks you are serving, if you, for example, are serving single family residences, you only need about one and a fraction kW of central station power to serve the coincident peak. Therefore, if a central station combined cycle turbine should cost $500 per kW, the generation cost (sans grid) per kW of the sum of noncoincident peaks would only be $50. But the hook is that in order to get that load diversity, you must pay for the wires and substations for load integration. A recent study by A.D. Little, in which Sean Casten, the son of Tom Casten, was one of the principal researchers, found that the replacement cost of transmission and distribution was about $1260 per kW of non-coincident peak load and up to $310 per kW more for distribution substations. That compares with about $500 for the average historic cost. That computes to a grid cost of up to $1,470 per kW for central staton power delivered and shows that the cost of load integration is skyrocketing. In contrast, fuel cell costs are fast declining and will decline even more rapidly with volume production.
Given that number, fuel cells are getting more competitive. That is the cost they must beat if they are to be operated isolated but if they are operated grid connected, with a really good efficiency as they might have with a turbine bottoming cycle, they can serve as base load at an even higher cost per kW. Of course the $1,470 per kW of integrating cost varies greatly among electric utilities. Aside from the cost, their other benefits such as freedom from toxic pollution, premium power reliability, ability to grow with demand in small increments, and elimination of NIMBY and transmission lines, and maybe primary distribtion lines, might even increase the point of market entry.
This document doesn't tell you a [darn] thing about the economics of grid vs fuel cell. If it were possible to rate this less than one star, I would do so.
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