Ha. Had the most monotone professor, world renowned in his particularly dry and boring field, but he put the Ben Stein teacher drone to shame.
There were apocryphal-seeming stories of students falling asleep in upper-level grad classes of his. Only seeming, because they sound unlikely, unless you ever took one of his classes.
Case 1: 3 or 4 students, one fell asleep, and at end of lecture prof shushed students, and turned out lights and crept out, leaving him asleep. Case 2: single student made it to lecture, fell asleep, professor kept teaching. Sounds unlikely, but I have on good authority (passersby).
Also, depending on the particular middle man you're thinking of, generally utilities' residential customers basically subsidize business customers. The utilities soak residential customers in order to give corporate rates at or slightly below costs to encourage business (and thus, residential) growth.
Businesses (esp. power intensive) decide where to locate with energy cost as a factor, human beings, not so much. So you've got to offer better industrial rates (especially to high load factor businesses such as data centers) than your neighboring utilities, otherwise the grass will be greener on the other side of your fence.
These boxes are claimed to be twice as efficient as their gas turbines equivalents. But gas turbines, while being cheap to build (comparatively!), are the most expensive to run, and are generally only brought online to meet peak demands. So half the cost of running a gas turbine might still be expensive compared to cost averaged over the entire generation mix (hydro, nuclear, and fossil being much cheaper in a variable cost sense). See also my previous comment about residential customers subsidizing commercial ones.
Finally, I wonder how 'green' these boxes really are? I mean, compared to gas turbines? Carbon goes in, so it must come back out. Maybe in a more easily sequesterable form?
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.