The Gun Counter

Anyone familiar with them?

Tropical makes a 5kw Fuel cell designed to run on NG Clearedge in the US makes a similar model.

Bluegen makes a 13kw fuel cell.

Most of them are designed to recover waste heat as well, driving fuel efficiency into the 90%+ range.

They're not cheap. The Clearedge 5kw cell, for example, cost 56 grand. Still it may make financial sense to small businesses with high electric loads, expensive electric, and cheap natural gas delivered.

Maybe if they were an order of magnitude more powerful... Yeesh...

They're mainly a way to mitigate electrical costs - remember that 5kw is running 24/7 at full output. that translates into just under 44Mwh per year. To put this in perspective, Connecticut, which in 2010 was second highest in the country on average for electrical rates(17.39c/kwh), it would mean it generated 7616 dollars worth of electricity.

Yes, but how much did it consume in gas, in addition to the wear and tear on the generator...

At those prices, it would actually be cost effective to install one of the turbine systems I've seen, for most plants. (They are 100KW systems.)

NG is very cheap right now.

Yes it costs 56 grand. But the cost of a monthly note+the cost of the gas is probably less than the cost of the electricity it replaces. Even it's only 2 grand a year, it makes financial sense to do so. It also means you have another source of backup power.

Google is investing in much larger versions for their data centers for these reasons.

As for turbines, I don't think they're as efficient as the fuel cells.