Reply To: Questions regarding DPF.

[AaronB]

I anticipate a situation where we license the technology to a manufacturer that builds several FF generators which are sold or leased to a utility company for testing at a pilot location. That location might be an electrical substation that powers a big neighborhood. There would be about 5 FF generators all drawing off of and feeding into the same big banks of capacitors, with the surplus being used by the customers. If one FF reactor needs to be repaired or serviced, it would go offline while the other 4 pick up the slack. If demand goes up or down, the pulse rate of all 5 generators would respond, varying from (off the top of my head) 100-500 hz. If there was a catastrophic failure and we had to shut the whole thing down, the utility company could tap into the regular grid to power the neighborhood until the bugs were worked out. After the pilot location was operated for a few months without problems, through a couple of electrode replacements, then we could start to go full scale. I imagine the utility companies would want to replace their most difficult nodes first, gradually working to replace the majority of their substations with FF generators, and eventually taking their big coal and gas-powered plants offline as the FF-powered grid becomes robust enough to handle the ups and downs of demand. Assuming it works well in one area, there would be little difficulty copying that template all over the world. The limiting factor at that point would be construction speed.

A second possible route into the utility market would be as a load leveler. FF generators would allow the coal or gas power plants to operate continuously at their ideal level, and only kick in as needed. FF generators would be located at the power plant and replace their current backup generators. This would have minimal impact to current operations, and would allow the utility to test and perfect the process without public scrutiny or NIMBY issues.