I was telling my grandfather about Folding@Home recently. (He's an interesting guy... getting older, but still totally into electronics and computers.) We were talking about minimization of power consumption, and how it's important to balance functionality against that. As we were getting into the raw numbers (ie - 100W machine using 0.1 kWh, equating to ~$9/month for that machine), he brought up a good point: tax deductability for the power consumption. it's important to note here that we were talking about using the electricity costs for deductability, not the cost of the hardware itself.
here's the research i've done.
i've checked the F@H main pages - their donation page lists them as a non-profit, with a federal tax ID. that's a good thing.
i checked the F@H forums - this was the best thread on the topic, but fatchick never came back about what her tax rep told her. some other poster generated a single entry, but under a different (yet similar) name; that person, however, does not mention consulting with a CPA. the thread was eventually locked due to everyone saying "i am not a CPA, but..." there was also this thread about how, if you're folding at work (and in the UK) you probably can't deduct anything either.
i checked our forums - we briefly grazed the idea, but never made much progress in that thread (or others).
google wasn't very useful.
as far as i can tell, there's no information readily & publicly available on whether or not the cost of the power draw associated with the F@H project is tax deductible. there's a lot of educated guessing going on, but there's no one in particular that's stepped forward with strong evidence supporting or nullfying the question at hand.
it looks like the biggest problems are receipts from stanford for the "donations", and validating the power draw is being used for the folding@home projects. unless any of you guys know anything or can find anything, i'll be going to an H&R Block next week to see if they can put me in the right direction. i'll let you folks know what i find out.