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You Want to Build Where?

Whether there was actually ten grand in that Bennington farmer's bag is anyone's guess, but the tale does point to what is expected to be one of the first large markets for residential fuel cells: folks who live, or want to live, on the edges of or beyond the power grid.

Last summer, Flint Energies, a nonprofit rural electric cooperative with some 60,000 customers in central and southern Georgia, signed on to become the exclusive distributor of Plug Power fuel cell systems in 100 of that state's 159 counties.

"This is a great opportunity for us to be able to provide a very clean type of energy to those people who want to live two or three miles off the road," says Jimmy Autry, Flint's vice president of marketing, noting that the counties to be served under the agreement are mainly rural. "We are going to be able to put generation on-site in a customer's home or cabin, be it way out on a farm or back in the woods."

In the past, says Autry, Flint had no choice but to run long line extensions out to folks determined to live beyond the existing grid. And until last year, the costs involved in stringing those lines were absorbed by the cooperative.

But last October, Flint changed its policy, taking the burden out of the hands of current customers and putting it squarely—and heavily—on the shoulders of the property owner requesting the line Under the current rules, a new customer still gets the first quarter mile of line free, but every foot thereafter costs $3, with each additional mile totaling a shopping $15,840. And that, according Autry, still leaves the cooperative to pick up about $2,160 per mile. "It's not going to take us long to figure out that fuel cells are going to be a much more cost-effective option," he adds.

The first, though surely not the last, of the nation's 1,000 or so rural electric cooperatives to enter into a fuel cell distribution agreement, Flint Energies expects to begin selling residential systems in2001, at a price of about $8,500. But, like others involved in the industry, Flint predicts that price will drop to less than $4,000 by 2003.

Autry envisions four possible avenues of distribution: outright sales, financing arrangements, leasing options or contract service agreements. For the last of these, Flint would maintain ownership of the fuel cell system and would charge the customer a flat, monthly fee for electrical power, based on average fuel, capital and maintenance costs.

"Not every customer is going to be able to dig into his pocket and pull out $8,500 or even $4,000," says Autry, "so I have to maximize every opportunity to put one [of these systems] in a person's home."

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