Reply To: Focus fusion and transportation

[Aeronaut]

10 miles from an 80 pound battery! I’m impressed. I think the prospect was saying is “I need a 20 mile range”.

Thanx for the breakdown on your numbers Brian. While a 15 minute sample is enough to miss entire A/C and furnace cycles, I’m sure the university was reading the power meter every month, too, so your numbers of 15kW expected load yielding 100% headroom make my numbers look a lot brighter. What really made my day, though, is the idea of selling FF to the utilities as an energy conservation plan. The real trick is going to be how to accurately forecast how much headroom is needed to cover growth during the permitting/financing cycle as it stands (or is perceived by the utility’s Board) at that moment. Remember, they’re working on a 50 year planning cycle.

Another number that needs to be more precisely defined imo is that my load calcs were based on 240V * 30A=720W max clothes dryer (not the more meaningful RMS value of 509W). Not really sure what the meter would actually record, but it’s easy to see a 30A breaker as 120 volts. (ask me how I know 😉

Eric, thanx for pointing up my decimal slip- I’m so used to interpreting .55 as 55 cents that I’d gritted my teeth and figured it as the cost of pioneering- throw in a few more reactors, especially if the feds are buying the peak load units.

The township model that I’ve been looking at may not be the best approach in my rural county, although it could improve Grid reliability at a verrry granular level. The six adjoining counties, however, have around 40 to 45% of Michigan’s population, and a lot of these farmers are getting way up in age. But still, one thousand acres for a GW plant boggles my mind’s eye. Yes, we have the isolation, but acquiring that much land without the hard feelings of eminent domain could take 50 years. It would also eliminate large chunks of several roads.

On the plus side, “snipping” a high voltage transmission line out there would let this plant feed two cities, and it would only take maybe 50 miles total transmission line construction to bring most of this 7 county region’s transmission lines into this plant…. and the posts feeding these farms and houses are almost certainly already there, permitted, and amortized.

Rematog, how difficult would it be to sell your management the design concept of 3 or 4 modules high, 25 to 50 modules wide, per bank, with the option of designing the building to function (or retrofit) as a containment building? Thanx.

edit- Just looked at my 1993 plat book for the county. These large blocks average 200 to 300 acres each, and few are adjoining. This looks like Rematog’s plant needs roughly 2 square miles, and the only way to do that without a LOT of negotiating is to talk the State out of a relatively small part of the public hunting/rec area beginning on the west edge of my township. Next township over has a large lake that’s a HUGE camping and boating draw, so even out here it’s going to be a huge challenge just to acquire a large block of land.