Solar energy has received a lot of political dollars, incentives, subsidies or whatever you want to call it. At this point I like to call it “handouts”. There have now been enough solar power panels installed in the US to power roughly 200,000 residential homes.
The hidden cost that goes into solar that no one hears about is how much does it cost to produce the silicon panels that people install on their rooftops?
You see a lot of the cost from the creation of the solar panel to the purchase of the solar panel is paid for by the US government.
These tax dollars in the US that come from you and me are what subsidizes a solar panel system from production to purchase for the environmentally conscious consumer.
Don’t get me wrong I like the idea of energy efficiency and even renewable energy and I have even had this priced out.
What it comes down to is this. You can get a solar power system installed on your home and achieve a fixed electric rate including all fees and charges at around 12 cents per kilowatt hour. The recovery of your capital investment would take about 30 – 40 years as opposed to 6 years with an energy server as made by Bloom Box.
Now this assumes that the deep cycle batteries never wear out and they will. It also assumes the panels will not need maintenance or replacement.
For a totally off the grid solar panel system imagine paying anywhere from $30,000 – $50,000 in capital investment. This makes solar panels barely affordable for the most well to do people.
Now solar panels are one of many distributed generation systems. Distributed generation simply means that the power is created at the point of energy consumption.
Before you bet the farm on solar panels to power your home consider new state of the art distributed generation systems that use natural gas, bio-power, hydrogen, and liquid petroleum to create electricity to power your home or business.
Sure natural gas and LP is not renewable energy but it happens to be very clean these days with new ways to filter CO2 emissions and petroleum pollution.
A box known as the Bloom Box is considered the latest in state of the art distributed generation systems that use such fuel sources as natural gas, LP, bio-energy and even hydrogen.
The value of this company is around .45 billion dollars and they are now producing about 1 Bloom Box a day that has a foot print the size of a parking space.
One of these electricity power servers can power about 200 homes. The analysis shows that one of these commercial Bloom Boxes covered by a warranty of the 100-kilowatt solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) type costs about $700,000, and can produce electricity at about $12.50 per watt or .125 per kilowatt hour.
They are working on smaller less expensive units to power a single home but these are not yet available.
Now consider that this estimate is based on if the box uses natural gas as its fuel source locked in at a fixed price for 10 years. This also considers that at this time these boxes receive no government subsidies as you see with solar panels.
With government subsidies the price could be about 10 cents per kilowatt hour which would be lower than the already subsidized price of solar power at 12 cents per kilowatt hour and higher.
A major point worth noting is that a Bloom Box works uninterrupted all day throughout peak demand periods of the day at a set price per kilowatt hour. Commercial facilities using non-distributed generation power on the other hand must contend with locking in such things as heat rate, and natural gas throughout each year to continue to have price predictability.
Looking at the cost from a per kilowatt hour basis we are talking about 10 cents per kilowatt hour and that price could drop if Bloom Box can sell these at a cheaper price.
If single home units are made even if the boxes were only used during peak periods during the day it should have the effect of alleviating high demand on large power generation facilities we use now which could further lower electricity prices for everyone.
Ebay and Google are already using these distributed generation energy servers in their data centers and the expected capital cost recovery time is only 6 years.
For those who think distributed generation is simply spreading out pollution at each facility that implements the energy server consider that 45 million pounds of CO2 emissions have been eliminated by the Bloom Box.
