Reply To: Focus fusion and transportation

[Brian H]

Rematog wrote: Aeronaut,

Very interesting analysis. Now your getting a feel for “obligation to serve”, which is what a regulated utility has to it’s customers (the utility takes on this duty in exchange for the regualated monopoly status).

Not mentioned in this is the added cost per house to “own” their own power supply. If the FF module, installed on site, costs $1,000K, and the distribution system to these 100 homes costs $500K to install, that adds $15k to the construciton cost of each of these 100 homes.

I went back to a cost of power I’d work up in an old post, and maintenance for a FF module (1 day every 4 weeks + 2 weeks/year, I’d be glad to post if you’d like) @$119,240/year. Now, as this is being done in field, rather than a centralized plant site, multiply this by 25% (time to drive to site each day, cost of vehiles, and crafts being less well supervised) = $149,000 per year / 100 homes = $1,490/year. Plus, you have to have a back-up power supply (the Grid?) for those 24 days per year. (12 of the days would only have about 8 hrs down time so it works out to about 96% availablility, not a bad number at all).

With a cost of money of 6%, the capital investment costs + maintenance costs: $15K@6%= $900 + $1,500 maint = $2,400/yr or $200 Month.

While not a huge electric bill, this does not seem to me to be the “cheap power” the board is assuming.

WHY?

Because, the 5MW module is being sized for peak load which was done so it could be DEDICATED to a DISTRUBUTED location. The grid allows the central station to keep it’s units much more evenly loaded, so they actually generate a much larger percentage of their rated capacity.

So, Aeronaut, your example, to me, provides another arguement against distributed generation. (and I’ll not even discuss the “keep the kids from jumping the fence” safety issue.)

Rematog

The big number in your calcs is the maintenance ($1500), but your frequency number is way high, IMO. The maintenance cycle I’ve seen referred to is 2X/yr, 2 days downtime each. (9 hrs. cooling off, refuel, replace any degraded parts/items, restart). Your capital costs are also VERY ‘generous’, possibly double, IMO. Roughing it, that would cut the cost per household in half. I think you also overstate the margin necessary for peak for 100 homes; that’s a sufficiently large ‘sample’ that usage patterns are likely to track the overall grid fairly closely, with only a few % points wider peaks and valleys. Which would further dilute the cost/household. Your peak allowance of 50kw/household is probably triple actual max load. It takes quite a bit of hypothesizing to see 100 homes simultaneously drawing 15kw or more.

IAC, such a “cluster” would probably have some linkage to the overall grid, if only to be able to feed excess power into the system, which would be most of the time, maybe even virtually all the time.

IOW, I think you’re pushing your conservative ‘worst case’ assumptions way too far.

P.S.
There’s another category of cost reduction I haven’t taken into account, as it’s rather tricky to figure. It’s the reduction of ongoing and prospective alternative expenditure on conventional (=existing) power system construction and maintenance. That would vary hugely from situation to situation, I think.