Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Rematog]

I agree with Transmute…

While special interests have a loud voice (mostly with the speech of $), the U.S. is at it’s heart a democracy.

Any politician who was publicly perceived as standing between Americans and their standard of living would be road kill at the next election.

So sops to the special interests there will be, but oil and utilities have as much chance of stopping this as the movie industry had of stopping television, or the buggy builders of stopping Henry Ford.

Regulated utilities will likely be seeking recovery of their “prudently invested” capital, per the social contract giving them their monopoly. If you consider a graph with two lines, the higher being “rates” (utility gross income actually), and the other being “cost to produce power” (total utility operating cost & allowed profit actually), then if the “rates” drop at X% per year, and “Costs” drop at X-N% per year, both going down till they reach the new equilibrium and rejoin (Focus Fusion fully deployed), then the area between the to lines needs to be the value of the stranded assets (Obsolete power plants). These will likely not be straight lines, with early cost decreases to fulfill customer expectations, but an extension of higher “rates” after full deployment of Focus Fusion, in order to make the “area between the lines” match the needed capital recovery.

Non-regulated Independent Power Producers (called IPP in the industry) will not have recourse to this and will have to write off tens or hundreds of billions in obsolete plant. Some people will lose their shirts. If fact, I foresee the regulated utilities using the leverage of the new lower prices to attempt to kill off IPP and regain that market for themselves.

Other existing and new industries will deploy as fast as they can get delivery of power blocks and regulatory approval. I hope Mr. Lerner and crew hurry, it will be a wonderful, busy, time to be in this business.

(Despite what you may think, this will cause a massive increase in demand for people like me….in order to deploy FF, if it happens before I retire. I have worked for a regulated utility and currently work for an IPP, so I know both beasts and will likely be one of the initial losers. But, there will be work to do, and I’ve changed jobs before, it’s part of life.)

Rematog