Great thread
This from Indi especially resonated with me
"Another cap raising later this year and hope to god that this time next year we are finally seeing some meaningful numbers of fully integrated mCHPs going into the field (happy with 1000 by end of 2013) and Bluegen continues to build good numbers and by end of 2013 we have 5,000 in the field."
It captures the knife edge situation.
However, I also strongly agree with this from mark:
"I look at the progress in Germany , UK , Holland and the possibilities of Japan and the US ( all with major Gas reticulation ) [and] I think we've done wonders in spite of the parlous nature of the world these passed few years"
For me, we are waiting for the world to wake up to the fact that there are better ways of doing things. But what we are talking about shifts power and wealth away from centralized generators and spreads it between inventors, manufacturers, individuals, cooperatives, corporations and (still some) big powerful institutions (gas + elec companies).
CFCL started as inventors, became manufacturers and offer a product that will benefit individuals, cooperatives and corporations if the shift is allowed to occur.
Things are difficult because gas + elec retailers are often also centralized generators.
The difference between, for example German, UK and Australia is that
Germany (very) basically gives decentralized generators a right to connect, at true cost, (from memory) UK makes it a bit harder, putting more costs on decentralized generators, and in Australia there is no right to connect to the grid whatsoever, and you can therefore safely assume that the "connection costs" are prohibitive.
For e.g. Cost (briefley) in 2011 of "connecting" a $100,000 solar system to the grid in the ACT = approx. $80,000
This is (presumably partly) why in the US our competitors have larger systems.
Sorry if it got rantish
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