[Breakable]

Brian H wrote:
Breakable, I’d normally agree and track with your reasoning — except for the HUGE pressure to become “energy independent” and the HUGE pressure to become low carbon-emitting — and HUGE price difference! This is not a moderate improvement, it’s a factor of about 50.

I would love to be in charge of a PR campaign to pressure authorities and utilities to move fast on this. There are so many killer tools available that it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. They’d never know what hit them!

I am happy with your HUGE amount of optimism 😉 .
You should also notice that what I was targeting was the decentralization, and not the use of focus fusion overall.
The overall usage might be enough to bring enough benefits, for the government to ignore the added benefit of decentralization.
While I agree the potential leverages seems to be plenty, they still would have to be used very efficiently to defeat all the skepticism, fear and inertia.

[Breakable]

I would expect that centralized power distribution would not be replaced in a fast and efficient manner, even if FF engine would not produce X-Rays and would run on non-flammable fuel.
This is because there is a huge amount of inertia in how things are currently done. I think it will take 5-15 year for decentralized deployments to start in such countries as USA and UK. This is because there will be a lot of political and commercial activity required for it to change:
1)Big companies think big. Small companies will have to be created to think local. The capital will have to be raised.
2)Demand for cheaper electricity will have to happen by voters and political activists. If the prices fall a little by centralized implementation, how long would it take for people to ask for more?
3)Regulations will emerge. Who will they be targeted to? I think those will have to be adjusted for small companies to operate efficiently.
4)Huge demand for the product and human resources will have to be satisfied. This wont happen overnight.

All these things take time, money and effort. Centralized deployment seems much easier in for the beginning, even if its not so efficient. Taking one step at a time will help not to fall, and meet less resistance.

[Breakable]

Rematog,
While I admire your faith in focus fusion I still don’t believe solar cells or wind power is doomed as soon as focus fusion emerges with a usable prototype.

Regarding the efficiency, yes I believe currently it is about ~14% for production solar cells and ~40% for laboratory models. Focus fusion has an estimated efficiency of 80%, but only if their energy conversion methods work. They have not proven yet, while solar cells are. And most likely will improve in the near future,

Another factor to think about is the transmission lines. The current centralized infrastructure is about 30% efficient. I don’t think anyone will want to replace it if the energy will be cheap and plenty. Even if Sweden did that a decade ago. Although I would love to see local power generation.

Solar and Wind power can in many cases be installed at home and in suburbia cases can supply all the required power even with the current technology. If you have extra – feed back to the grid. So thats almost 0% power loss. If there is no wind and cloudy – well thats where the grid power comes in, and guess what I see at the end of the power line in this case? Fusion power actually, but for now its coal.

There is one more interesting idea about the utilities. As I believe they are not very efficient in management of funds. The numbers I quote will be taken from the clouds but let me tell them nevertheless. I heard that it costs a nuclear power plant to produce one kilowatt-hour 1 cent of imaginary currency, while at the end of the line it is sold to consumers at 30 cents. Thats where the “cheap” part sinks…

PS:How long will it take for any superior technology to overtake this huge world, with its barriers, different cultures, fear and politics?

Please don’t misunderstand me, I am just trying to be a pessimist in short term, so I could be optimistic about the long run.
Regards,
Breakable

[Breakable]

Brian H wrote:

“home usable”?? How did that get in the mix? What possible generation capability would an apartment dweller use? That requirement is simply suburban nonsense. “Individual generation” is an elitist luxury.

As for evil utilities taking a 95% profit margin on delivered power, it is to laugh. 😆 If you think industrial users would put up with that for 5 minutes, you’re dreaming. Any region/area that priced power fairly would have a huge “comparative advantage”. Not to mention the lynch parties ratepayers would form if any such rakeoff were attempted. At the very worst, neighborhoods could pool resources and put up a unit and contract out maintenance.

Well I don’t want to speculate more on what could happen, because there is no way to actually prove it, but just wait and see.

I just wanted to express my opinion that there are home used renewable alternatives currently in use, and there is a huge market for them which has increasing momentum, and there is some interesting development to improve those. That wont go away easy..

Regarding the evil utilities, so they usually are not evil, but just profit hungry. I don’t really know what their profit margins are currently, but I would guess they are huge, and they would not mind getting a bigger peace of cake, especially after investing into some new technology like fusion.

Neighborhoods might be able to pool resources, but for that someone has to stand up and do something. Current technologies enable them to do a lot of great things, but there is leadership and technical knowledge required.

[Breakable]

Brian H wrote:
Solar is inherently big and diffuse and periodic and unreliable; that’s just the way sunlight falls to Earth. Orbiting solar with MW downlink may have a large scale future, though.

As for the $50-$60, there’s just nothing there which could vary the cost much. And it’s SO large a gap that nibbling at the edges, even for 10 years, won’t change the verdict.

It remains to be seen what would be the verdict for solar, wind and other renewables.
I still stand by my opinion that they will remain a viable alternative until a “home usable zero-maintenance idiot-proof fusion reactor” will be designed and mass produced for a while. That could take some time. I would say another 30-50 years unless singularity happens? Even ITER should be finished by then :D.
Is that enough time to recap on current investments?

Regarding price margins for services provided I have a nice example:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/13/sms-costs-hubble

PS:I am sorry but my thought process likes to jump over some of the reasoning, and that makes it harder to understand.

[Breakable]

Brian H wrote:
$1/watt = $1,000/KW. FF is $50-$60/KW. Thats 16-20 times cheaper.

1$/watt is now. What will it be in 10 years?
And guess who will pocket the difference between between $1,000/KW and $50-$60/KW?
Grid electricity will not cost as much as it takes to produce it, but how much you can pay for it.
So its likely that individual generation will be cheaper in long term.
I believe it will stay like it is now – buy a system and it will repay itself in 10-20 years, but instead of 10k $ it might cost 1k$.

Btw the figure $50-$60 is still remaining to be seen.

[Breakable]

I would love OTEC to do that instead of fusion power and reverse-osmosis plants.
Think about it:
Salted water comes in
Fresh water comes out +
Electricity comes out.
Totally perfect solution. Of course the usual approach of the world is that nobody wants one.
See more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion

[Breakable]

Peak oil is already occurring.
Take a look at oil production and oil consumption number for the last two ears.

[Breakable]

In my opinion focus fusion can nicely cooperate with other kinds of technology.
I would expect that in the future solar and wind power would be used to power individual homes in times of plenty,
and in still and cloudy conditions fusion reactors would start up.
Why I think that? Because solar and wind power are getting cheaper by the minute, and while everyone will be able to afford solar panels,
not everyone could install a fusion reactor in the basement.

http://www.nanosolar.com is producing solar panels for 1$ per watt already. Sold out for 2008.
http://www.humdingerwind.com/windbelt.html is developing micro wind generator for 3$ per piece, to light up developing countries.

[Breakable]

Brian H wrote: Never say never. Right around the end of ’07, Stanford announced the development of silicon nanowire LiIon battery tech which increases energy density (storage capacity) by 10X, and eliminates charge/discharge and heating issues (the nano-structures don’t stress and burst like larger silicon ion-absorbers at high charge levels).
…
At current electricity prices, the Roadster gets 130mpg equivalent. At FF electricity prices, this would be at least 3000 mpg-equivalent. With a corresponding range — over 2000 miles with silicon nanowire LiIon batteries.

Well not fully correct as the silicon nanowires can be used in one electrode only. That translates to no more 5x improvement.
Well even a 2x improvement should be good enough, but the most important number is not the range, but the price of batteries and electricity of course.

Regarding biofuels, in my opinion anything that trows CO2 into atmosphere is bad. Even if it takes it later back – because the circulating dioxide is sill causing global warming. I think its likely we will start scrubbing air of dioxide in near future, that is if we reach a point where energy is cheap and plenty – such as implementing fusion power.

[Breakable]

JimmyT wrote:
Sort of ironic, don’t you think? That the first “greenhouse earth” experiment failed due to an inadequate ammount of CO2 in the air.

Thats really funny 😀
Do you have any reference to this experiment – its hard to find something with these keywords “greenhouse earth” ?

[Breakable]

My own knowledge of the subject is not very deep. Yes the mirror is something that copies your website content so it would be accessible when your main server is offline.
The simplest approach is to be able to access the copied content by a different url. I have no extensive knowledge how to implement dynamic mirroring so it would kick in automatically, when the main server goes down. I guess it would require playing with dns records, so that the mirroring server would constantly check if the main server is online, and if not, it would register dns records to point to itself instead.

Some information i found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_(computing)
http://wenderhost.com/2007/06/11/mirror-a-dynamic-website-on-a-cpanelwhm-server/

[Breakable]

I would love to see a small investment company created with specific goal of investing into Lawrenceville Plasma Physics,
I believe its possible to raise at least 750k $ this way easily if there was a simple way to channel private funds.
I for once would be glad to invest at least 10k and my own salary is far from that of highly developed countries.

[Breakable]

Thank you for the explanation.
I wish that your hosting will finally get better!
Have no real idea about the reliability of the site i linked to. If you click on the “read review” button you can see how they ranked their websites. I bought a domain/hosting plane from http://www.ixwebhosting.com which is ranked #1. I will see how it goes.

PS:Its not a bad idea to have a mirror, if possible.

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