Reply To: Alexander Franklin Mayer's Physics

[nakile]

Well, if focus fusion lives up to everything that its promised to be, it more or less takes the current electric grid and flips it on its head instead of integrating with it. There will still be grids, just not the ones we have now.

I think at first power companies will just hook these up at their existing power stations. At this point, everything is the same, minus the pollution and fuel cost taking up most of the power bill. Once they get the thumbs up from government and society, they’ll move to the substation level. When that happens, no more power transmission, only distribution. With transmission becoming depreciated, most renewables, aside from roof top solar and residential wind, will simply be done for. No more long distance transmission to move the renewable energy around. Less grid to support means that now even the distribution cost will start to drop. A total cost at or less than 3 cents per kw/h delivered would make electric heating competitive with the current cost of natural gas.

Over time, things will get even more distributed. Every several blocks will be a reactor station. I imagine at this point that pretty much all the distribution wiring will be underground, too. That’s the current trend at this moment will new grid work and since the current grid is very undersized for the demand that we’ll be seeing with this type of energy source (electric heat, electric cars, and some other unimaginable things) I’m sure the whole thing will end up being rebuilt.

I think for residential and light commercial use there will still be a local sort of grid since you can’t put one of these in your basement for both size and cost reasons. Even if you could get around those issues, it would still have to be maintained and managed and most people don’t have time for that, even if it was done by door to door professionals. Here, it’s a resource best shared.

But large commercial and industrial entities will most likely just have their own units on location. They’ll be able to get the super cheap energy directly from the reactor. When they want to do something new that requires more energy they can just go and do it, their system, their rules. Upgrade as necessary and move forward. It will definitely change how they use energy.

Of course, this all assuming that regulation and environmentalism moves in favor of distributed aneutronic fusion. As much as I like renewable energy, they have their own lobbyist now. And most environmentalist have been thinking that fusion is always 30-50 years away for so long that if comes earlier they simply might now know how to react. [em]All[/em] environmental policy that we have has been written around energy becoming more scarce and expensive.