Edited: Saturday, October 15 2011 01:40 PM

Outline of a rough draft. Too verbose. Needs serious trimming and condensing.
But it shows roughly where I’m headed. Thoughts?

Not Enough Juice For The Grid
Get Fusion.

Electric vehicles will need cheap and widespread electric power and they will need it soon if the market is to grow at its full potential. But the grid is not designed to handle such heavy loads and current energy sources can’t grow the grid fast enough to keep up.

One answer: Fusion power.
Yes, it’s a big leap. Conventional wisdom says that while fusion has tremendous promise it is always “decades away”… but in fact it may be much closer than you think.

How could this be possible? The answer lies in the fact that the limited funding afforded to fusion thus far has almost all been channeled into an equally limited set of options. These are the government-sponsored projects such as ITER and NIF and they all happen to be “Big Fusion” projects. They try to tackle big problems with big hardware in big installations and they have equally big costs to show for it. And in retrospect, while they are all worthy research efforts in their own right, none of them are good choices for providing safe, clean commercial power ASAP.

But several different companies are looking at a variety of different methods of sidestepping the big obstacles that the “Big Fusion” projects are destined to wrestle with. And it so happens that each of the proposed alternative fusion methods would result in much smaller and much cheaper commercial installations than their “Big” counterparts and their research costs are much less as well.

None of these alternative efforts are “Cold Fusion”. They are aiming for the real deal and several of them would use the same fuels at the same temperatures as the “Big Fusion” efforts but in smaller, more manageable devices. Other companies are reaching even further ahead for advanced fuels that would fuse at even higher temperatures in even smaller units.

So a variety of relatively small private projects are underway researching smaller, cheaper fusion units that could be easily added to a rapidly growing distributed grid. Each is trying a different method of achieving the goal of fusion power but they all have one thing in common: they need you. They need more investment. Especially investment from people who are not afraid to rock the twin boats of current government fusion research and current energy suppliers.

Are such alternative studies worth the effort?

Yes, they are.Their research costs are tiny compared to corporate and government R&D budgets and even the most basic forms of fusion power under study would solve humanity’s power issues permanently and safely. Each of the contenders would have its advantages and disadvantages compared to the other fusion methods but all would leave non-fusion contenders in the dust.

It is research, there can be no guarantees, but diversified investment in some of these concepts would be worthwhile… because if even one of them succeeds it will change the world forever.