Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 31 total)
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  • #13429
    Tim1
    Participant

    It can be very complex and cumbersome to turn off the FF device and allow Decaborane to precipitate onto the beryllium electrodes, or costly to keep the device idling to prevent this.

    I agree that the first use of a Focus Fusion device would be fore base load power, but I don’t think it would be hard to power cycle the machine. Even the prototype will need to have heaters to start the machine. (If I remember they have already been specified.) Preventing the decaborane from precipitating on electrodes should not be a problem. Just use a cold trap to precipitate the decaborane before you let the electrodes cool down. You probably can operate the Focus Fusion device decaborane lean as you power it down.

    It used to be that a significant overpotential was required to generate hydrogen from water. Recent research has lowered the required overpotential quite a bit. Also the cost of the electricity is being lowered by over an order of magnitude. You can’t get much electricity today at $0.05/kwh, if a Focus Fusion device can produce it for $0.005, while selling it a peak prices for a few hours per day, the cost of the electricity used to generate hydrogen would be very low. The Focus Fusion devices could be located at the location that the hydrogen is required. The electricity could be shipped over the existing transmission lines.

    #13430
    Joeviocoe
    Participant

    …if a Focus Fusion device can produce it for $0.005, while selling it a peak prices for a few hours per day, the cost of the electricity used to generate hydrogen would be very low. The Focus Fusion devices could be located at the location that the hydrogen is required. The electricity could be shipped over the existing transmission lines.

    Even with free electricity… hydrogen costs would be driven by everything else (compression, storage, transportation, etc). So at best it may provide cheaper hydrogen than we currently have… but being an inefficient energy carrier, it is still much worse to use for most applications.

    So as I said, If Hydrogen is needed on THAT site, and hydrogen is the required form of energy for some industrial application, AND that application doesn’t already have waste hydrogen (as many already do)… then FF would be a good fit.
    … but we are talking about niche cases here… whereas electricity powers MUCH MUCH MORE. And for applications that use electricity for power… it is much better to avoid conversions.. and just keep FF energy as electricity.

    #13434
    delt0r
    Participant

    As a side note. The current trend with grids its moving towards HVDC at least for the trunk lines. These days solid state DC DC converters are not that much more expensive than similar rated transformers. ps i did 3 years EE and spent time working on the Grid back in my home country.

    #13435
    Tim1
    Participant

    Actually the main impact Focus Fusion will have on large grids is to make them obsolete. Since FF devices don’t have much environmental impact, they will be located near the point of use. (Waste heat should be the major environmental impact, may be district heating and adsorption chillers will become popular.)

    #13438
    ikanreed
    Participant

    Tim1 wrote: Actually the main impact Focus Fusion will have on large grids is to make them obsolete. Since FF devices don’t have much environmental impact, they will be located near the point of use. (Waste heat should be the major environmental impact, may be district heating and adsorption chillers will become popular.)

    The fact that a coal boiler would fit in my back yard doesn’t mean I’d want one for any particular reason. Economies of scale will continue to apply to maintenance of generators, regardless of energy source.

    #13439
    Tulse
    Participant

    Like most things, one of the larger costs for an FF generating station will be personnel, and the way to minimize that cost is to centrally locate multiple devices, and have those overseen by a small staff, rather to have many distributed small generation stations that each need their own staff.

    #13440
    markrh
    Participant

    Tulse wrote: Like most things, one of the larger costs for an FF generating station will be personnel, and the way to minimize that cost is to centrally locate multiple devices, and have those overseen by a small staff, rather to have many distributed small generation stations that each need their own staff.

    One or two reactors for a small community would not require a full time staff to maintain. The system can be monitored remotely and maintenance would only require periodic refueling and electrode replacement.

    #13441
    Andrew Palfreyman
    Participant

    A single household won’t know what to do with 5 MW. But a new business model for mini-grid establishment might be born to isolate blocks of, say, 1000 houses per reactor. After all, the wires are all there; there is just some tweaking of the connectivities to be done.
    This raises the question of what is the minimum practical or cost-effective power level capability of an FF reactor?

    #13442
    delt0r
    Participant

    markrh wrote:

    Like most things, one of the larger costs for an FF generating station will be personnel, and the way to minimize that cost is to centrally locate multiple devices, and have those overseen by a small staff, rather to have many distributed small generation stations that each need their own staff.

    One or two reactors for a small community would not require a full time staff to maintain. The system can be monitored remotely and maintenance would only require periodic refueling and electrode replacement.

    Yes it would. You are not going to get a bunch of highly qualified persoanl to only work part time, or train up for just a part time job. These things need maintenance no matter how idealistically auto-magic you make them. Just a pulse power supply to run these things is something that doesn’t even exist right now, and any currently plausible design is going to need a lot of maintenance. The circulating power is much larger than the output so you have a lot of high power, high voltage electronics. This stuff doesn’t just run like in some movie. It needs maintenance.

    It will need maintenance by highly specialized and qualified staff, and they will have plenty to do.

    On the other note. I don’t really understand the whole “centralized power is evil corporations and stuff” mindset. We have centralized power because it make a *lot* of economic sense. FF would not change that.

    Assuming FF even works of course. And that is still a big IF.

    #13443
    markrh
    Participant

    delt0r wrote:

    Like most things, one of the larger costs for an FF generating station will be personnel, and the way to minimize that cost is to centrally locate multiple devices, and have those overseen by a small staff, rather to have many distributed small generation stations that each need their own staff.

    One or two reactors for a small community would not require a full time staff to maintain. The system can be monitored remotely and maintenance would only require periodic refueling and electrode replacement.

    Yes it would. You are not going to get a bunch of highly qualified persoanl to only work part time, or train up for just a part time job. These things need maintenance no matter how idealistically auto-magic you make them. Just a pulse power supply to run these things is something that doesn’t even exist right now, and any currently plausible design is going to need a lot of maintenance. The circulating power is much larger than the output so you have a lot of high power, high voltage electronics. This stuff doesn’t just run like in some movie. It needs maintenance.

    It will need maintenance by highly specialized and qualified staff, and they will have plenty to do.

    On the other note. I don’t really understand the whole “centralized power is evil corporations and stuff” mindset. We have centralized power because it make a *lot* of economic sense. FF would not change that.

    Assuming FF even works of course. And that is still a big IF.

    I am am not saying hire part time workers to maintain a few units in a community. Utility companies have a centrally located full time staff that go on the road to maintain the electrical infrastructure. It is no different than that. The need to maintain a large long distance grid would become redundant, thus would incur a large savings. The economics of scale would become a mute point due to the reduced loss in power compared to delivering it over long a distance.

    #13444
    Andrew Palfreyman
    Participant

    If you’re a home owner, you know that, unless you’re unusually keen to prove your engineering prowess (I’m not), a guy comes by every two or three years and checks up on your hot water heater. I see no difference.

    #13446
    Tim1
    Participant

    I live in the northeastern US which influences my perspective, but here is why I think that large grids will become obsolete.

    I am not saying that that you would want to have FF devices deployed in ones and twos, but the way the grid is currently structured, electric power is frequently sent over hundreds of miles over high voltage lines. My guess is that if focus fusion takes off, that most generating stations would be local and have from 20 to 100 FF devices, or 100 to 500 MW. This would vastly simplify the grid and boost it’s reliability. This would mean very short transmission lines in all but sparsely populated areas.

    My power bill gets itemized with things like transmission, distribution, and the actual cost of the generated electricity split out: (All numbers are dollars per Kwh.)

    .02240 Transmission
    .06169 Distribution
    .09379 Generation (The thing that Focus Fusion does.)
    .00853 Other

    If the generation cost goes down to 0.005, my bill only gets cut in half. You would have to radically change the grid to make a significant impact on the rest of my power bill.

    Cities like New York and areas like Long Island draw power from hundreds of miles away, as far as eastern Canada and the mid-western US. This has caused several major blackouts. The New York City, Long island area depend on about a dozen 345KV power lines for much of their electricity. Each line is capable of supplying over 600MW of power. Most of the lines run for hundreds of miles and cost about a million dollars per mile to build. They both increase the cost of power and cause reliability problems like the prospect of more blackouts. At a minimum most if not all of these lines would be replaced with local generation. Although New York is an extreme example, most large cities in the US are dependent on remotely generated electricity and would abandon power from long transmission lines in favor of locally generated electricity if Focus Fusion were available.

    In addition to having the grid evolve to be more city scale rather than regional scale, most institutions that are big enough to have a campus rather than a single building would probably be able to operate a few Focus Fusion devices to eliminate any distribution or transmission charges from their electricity bill, in addition to being able to use waste heat for heating and cooling. These institutions would include universities, hospitals and manufacturers. All of them already have significant staff that manages their heating cooling and electrical systems.

    #13453
    delt0r
    Participant

    This is *nothing* like a water heater. If you can’t see that then there is nothing i can do that will convince you otherwise.

    Just show me a high voltage high current high rep rate switch with a life time in the Millions of firings… You can’t because at best these sort of switches have lifetimes in the 1000s of reps.

    #13455
    Andrew Palfreyman
    Participant

    Reductio ad absurdum: semiconductors switch not at 200 Hz but at GHz. They operate with microamps at sub-volt levels and have lifetimes in the kajillions of reps. Therefore, for this application, it’s just an engineering issue of serialisation (for the voltage) and parallelisation (for current). It’s clear that this can be done with today’s tech; the only question is how cheaply.

    #13458
    delt0r
    Participant

    It absolutely is not clear it can be done at all. Missions of amps, 10kV or more. And certainly not without maintenance. HVDC substations and systems are not maintenance free.

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