Reply To: Focus fusion and transportation

[JimmyT]

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.

Fifteen Kw/household does seem like a big load….now. But maybe not if this undercuts natural gas for heating. And maybe a sizable fraction of households overnight recharge their electric vehicles ….and God only knows what else. Recharging their light sabers maybe?