End to All Power Problems

these are not solar cells, and they don't need any gov't incentives to get them going. The marginal cost to use this technology is projected to be lower than buying power from the grid, and use less infrastructure.

To me this is not a "green" play, heck I live in Houston,TX home of big Oil, big Nat Gas, big Power (get the theme?), and I still think this is the most exciting technology (if it works as it seems it will) in my life time.

This should make a huge dent in oil consumption, and fuel a a massive surge in electric car demand. All of these new products are huge economic drivers that coud drive our econonmy for years to come.

I hope it works.

Big Oil will be behind this like you wouldn't believe. Big oil also is big natural gas, and domestically. It would be the biggest profit making venture of all time. Now IPP's (independent power producers) and large regulated power companies (FPL, Southern Co, TVA, WPS, AEP), now they will have problems with this.

Magfan, sorry butyou actually have all of that wrong from top to bottom.

This technology will generate power and only as much as you use. You will have no excess to sell back to your electric provider. You will only be billed for the Nat Gas that you use if this works as advertised. You are "off the grid" unless you keep a connection for back up. The power company has no say in this at all. They cannot stop you from generating your own power.

What happened with Enron in the Summer 2000 had nothing to do with FERC. The state of California deregulated their retail and wholesale power without knowledge of what they were doing. The utilities were no longer in charge of the grid, and were actually complicit in the legislation that passed allowing it. They should have paid more attention.

What Enron, Dynegy, El Paso, Aquila (and other charged in this F--- Up) did was they took advantage of some terrible rules concerning scheduling through the congested transmission point into SoCal. They would all schedule into the points, they would fill up and dis-allow a lot of the generation to flow. The companies would then take the generation off line and market would SCREAM up to find generation to fill the load.

Firstly, the companies that did this were not doing anything illegal, they were just short term thinking idiots who shot the goose who laid the golden egg. Part of the problem was that California regulations were so rediculous, that at the time there was not anywhere near enough transmission capacity (thanks tree huggers and Grey D), or generation so that caused the congestion. Who on earth would de-regulate then?? It was a cluster from Day 1.

The idiots at the mechant energy companies involved shot he goose that laid the golden egg because they were so short sighted they didn't think of the consequences beyond the quarterly returns from the prices they pushed the market to.

The other huge regions that were in the process of deregulating, Souther Co (GA, AL, parts of FL, MS), Florida Power and Light, Entergy (LA, AR and parts of TX), AEP, etc... all used this crisis to stop deregulation dead in it's tracks. This was a major cause for the Bankruptcies of Mirant, NRG, Calpine and the dissolution of a bunch of other merchant power developers, and none of it was good for the consumer. Oh yeah, and the "Smartest Guys in the Room" took about 15,000 jobs with them as they melted down.

Sorry, I digressed, but long story short, no the utilities won't be happy, but they cannot stop you from generating at your house, and you will have no excess power to sell back to the grid.

Also the state commisions, not FERC dictate your particular states' rules regarding retail (consumer) power. The good news for you in Cali, is that you will get this technology first, and many businesses there (Google, eBay, Cisco) have been the Beta test facilities, and Cali has great natural gas infrastucture, and access to lots of supply.

So sign up now.

Well, even if you use a gas turbine, such as GE, Seimens, Mitsubishi, Rolls Royce or Mitsui 7 series or the like, with new heat rates below 7, which acutally ups the effciency, you still need to put that power over transmission lines, which creates a rather sizeable line loss in the transmission of power. This would allow for production of power, at the source of use, and would not have any line loss. That means it's in reality much more efficient.

Also, you forget that if methane is used for these units, the first power units to be taken offline will be No 2 and No 7 Oil based units, then baseload coal units, that create HUGE amounts of CO2. Gas fired units will remain in the qeue for back up. Also, nothing is more expensive in the power business than the constrution and maintenence of transmission lines. That cost should be greatly reduced to eliminated.

Also, the efficiency of these now is 60% comparable to existing combined cycle natural gas fired generation, plus the upside of no transmission which makes them much cheaper, since you are not only not paying for the line loss, but for the cost of transmission across the utilities power grid. The more this efficiency goes up, the more in the money this gets. Even with a subsequent rise in gas cost that could be expected from increased Nat Gas demand, you are still way in the money since the US is now SO LONG nat gas. Also, the increase would not be 1:1, since it would be offset by large generation units that would have used natural gas being taken off line.

Solar cells would be great for certain regions of the country, or if they could make them sensitive enough to work everwhere, but alas we are not there yet. Solar and wind, along with a quantum jump forward in the storage of power are the holy grail, and hopefully the future.

Also, those countries you named with Huge Solar % are miniscule as compared to the US as far as power consumption, and their gov'ts have underwritten the cost, so it's some of the most, if not the most expensive power on the planet.

Solar is not an answer right now, it's way too expensive. We are very long natural gas, in fact the US is about to start EXPORTING natural gas, when a few years back we were set to begin importing up to 15% of our natural gas by 2020. Well, thank God for shale gas, now let's use it to get away from foreign oil, and develope exportable technologies using it such as this.

I have been in the power and natural gas business for close to 20yrs now, and I am always shocked by how little people know about the biggest business in the world Energy. These new gas developement, which the US is helping other countries develope as well, could be a bridge from fossil fuels to economically viable sustainable, renewables. Plus, it's a huge new industry. Watch it, it's going to happen.

Magfan, you need to check with someone at one of the non-profit "green" coalition about the meter issue. I'm not an advocate for gov't subsidized anything, but, it's seems at odds the the gov't is subsidizing these technologies, then the state commisions allowing the utilities to screw you on the rules.

There must be a group working on a class action suit against the utility. It should only have to go the state commision,and that can actually get resolution, in many states, very quickly.

Good luck.