7 bbl electric brewhouse questions

[bwalden234]

Hello all. In the midst of working on our brewery and we are at the point where we a trying to decide whether or not to go electric or go with natural gas. When pricing out the electric system, the cost of the control panel alone seems a bit high (brewmations is $20k and the Electric Brewery has a control panel but it will only run around 11kw). According to the online calculators we used we need 65kw to come to a boil. We are looking at 4 - 15kw elements for the boil kettle and 2-3 in the HLT. There is 3 phase on the pole outside our building so we could bring it in (not sure of the cost on this yet).

For those of you who have built out an electric brewhouse in the 7bbl range, how are you controlling your power? How many of what size elements are you using? Were there any surprises that you didn't anticipate? Thanks for any help...