Reply To: Alexander Franklin Mayer's Physics

[nakile]

Patientman wrote: I was considering suburban systems, because that is were I live. Hypothetically, I have a (coal, gas, or nuclear) 500 MW plant which generates a $1 million a day. The thing is paid for and you come along with a fusion generator. It has a lot of cost saving and money generating advantages….A normal capitalist would say, “screw the extra cost of multiple units in multiple places. I will just gang them up in one place and save the bucks. I also don’t have to worry about them in multiple places.” Remember, they play by their own rules. You can’t assume they will gravitate to a distributive network, just because it is the right thing to do. They also hate it when other people “tell” them how it should be done. (I’m just playing the devil’s advocate.) Thinking though capitalist tendencies requires painful brain mechanisms and sometimes it hurts. 😉

I agree, but I think a distributed system *might* be favored more by capitalism over time. Here’s another few hypothetical situations.

If you have a 500MW plant of any type, that thing is making a lot of power that needs to be sent to a lot of people. Enter step-up transformers, step down transformers, high voltage transmission, thick conductors, substations, and all the other things that need to be done to send a lot of power even a moderate distance. Now, of course, all these are currently paid for, but they’re also old, as is most of the existing grid, and need to be replaced. Our current grid is also designed to, I believe, handle an average household demand of about 5KW.

Enter focus fusion. Electricity is dirt cheap. All of sudden, people want to start heating their homes with electricity. I believe that the common furnace size is around 50,000 btu, which about equals a 15KW furnace. That’s just home heating, electric cars will be another huge demand on the grid, too. And I’m sure many people will come up with other crazy uses for electricity that we can’t even think of.

The energy density of our current grid is low. With this, it will have to go up. The whole things need rebuilt. If you want to stay centralized, this gets really complex because your 500MW plant has become at least 1.5GW now. You’ll have to expand it majorly, build a heftier cooling system because your stuffing a lot of things that make a lot of heat in a tight spot. You also have to start working with much higher voltages to make things efficient. I call it the tragedy of centralization. With centralization, a centralized facility gets increasingly complicated very quick even if all the users surrounding it aren’t trying to do much more.

All of a sudden, buying all those small properties and building all those tiny plants doesn’t sound too bad. With generation capacity spread throughout the area it’s needed in, you can work with moderate voltages, air cooling becomes possible, smaller conductors can be used, even perhaps eliminate most transformers. There’s work being done now to build inverters that directly output at 13.8kv distribution voltages with 2.4kv models already on the market. At this point, the only transformers you need are on the customers site. We’re talking, mechanically, a rather simple system.

Now I’m going to put my capitalism hat on. If there’s anything that I see happening, it’s that, yes, current power companies just retrofit their plants to save money, then to prevent a hugh demand spike that would make their aging network crumble, keep prices that same they are now as a form of demand control. Of course, this will lead to public outcry very quickly as they start collecting billions in cash while providing an old out of date grid that prevents anybody from doing anything new. If their smart, they’ll take those cash pools and start upgrading their network and that’s what I hope they do and think they most likely will. If they don’t somebody else will come along and do it, be it the municipalities or other companies, and put them out of business.

Now I’m going to put my evil capitalism hat on and get a little crazy. The larger power companies that retrofit first will do it to drum up capital to buy the smaller guys who aren’t as flexible and form an oligopoly.

Now we have pretty much the same situation we have with ISPs right now. Charging huge service cost on something that doesn’t cost them much while using the excuse “People seem to be doing fine with 10Mb connections, we see no need to go bigger” with the issue being that because people [em]don’t have[/em] bigger connectons they don’t know the possibilities that one brings.

But electricity is different from Internet. One is 100 years old, the other isn’t. One our older politicians understand, the other not so much. One the general public understands the great things that would come if it became cheaper, the other not so much.

So at this point you have either the current fray of power companies or a small group of oligopolized electric companies absolutely profiting off their customers with a cheap and clean state of the art energy source that would be wonderful to power everything off of, but we can’t. We still have to burn natural gas to heat our homes (and put CO2 into the air) and gasoline to power our cars (and put CO2 into the air).

In a very short period of time the fight for clean energy has gone from being a huge civil engineering and social challenge that would take half a century to becoming a messy political issue. With that, we’ll probably see a huge DOJ antitrust case come along, leading to a huge breakup and restructuring of the electrical supply system. Or like in the other scenario, others will simply come along and build a distributed grid anyway.

Those are some of my best guesses. Though I think it really depends more on how different political and environmental groups will react to aneutronic fusion, since it really is a complete 180 from the direction we’ve been going in with energy policy.