Ceramic Fuel Cells -Gas to Electricity & more

[Sparty]

From Greenernergynews http://www.green-energy-news.com/arc.../20090048.html Excerpt: Of course we’d want to use that renewable natural gas most efficiently and for that we’ll skip over to Australia. There Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited (CFCL) has launched its BlueGEN micro-Combined Heat & Power (micro-CHP) system. BlueGEN, with its solid oxide fuel cell technology, will generate electricity at 60 percent efficiency that reaches 85 percent when heat is utilized for space heating or domestic hot water in combined heat and power mode. The unit is about the size of a dishwasher and operates at 2 kilowatts power output constantly (24/7/365 days a year) with unused electricity sent back to the grid. Each BlueGEN unit can produce up to 17,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. The unit makes about 200 liters (52 gallons) of hot water each day as well. The price? About $8000 Australian ($5600 US). Pay back period is forecast by the company to be about seven years, at least in Australia. The pay back calculation includes the unit itself, buying natural gas, selling electricity back to the grid while buying some electricity to cover demand higher than 2 kilowatts. CFCL is ramping up to begin selling the units in Australia in 2010. So there’s hope for those of us who might want to generate our own renewable power but live in houses where wind and solar are not possible. But we still have to wait until savvy entrepreneurs bring products like BlueGEN into town and municipal waste operators start pumping renewable methane into the pipelines.