However now, with the fuel cells being so fuel efficient in small sizes, and their cost rapidly declining with volume manufacture, we seem to be coming to a tipping point where distributed fuel cell generation may be less expensive than conventional integrated generation, particularly when the cost of transmissionanddistribution is increasing so rapidly.
Up to now, those scale economies of fuel efficiency and of capital cost in these large generating units have been so great as to be able to absorb the additional cost of transmissionanddistributionand still be lower than any competing form of electrical generation (except of course where plentiful hydroelectric generation could be built).