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JimmyT wrote: I don’t know of any fatalities either. But I know of 2 cases where thieves were severely burned in the process of trying this. The identity of the one set of thieves is unknown. The only reason we know they were burned is because of the charred flesh they left behind. Might have been a fatality for all we know. Southern Ohio region in case you’re curious.

Seems like a hard way to make money to me.

The way I’d go about stealing wire is take a high powered rifle and shoot through the wire at some point, on both ends, then just roll it up off the ground after it falls down.

The very idea reminds me of the Twilight Zone Episode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bridge

-Dave

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Lerner wrote: And then 10 years after mass production starts, oil consumption will be way down and the price will be close to the cost of production–that is about $5 a barrel or so.

I’ve always been a fan of the idea that if cheap electrical power were available, why not capture CO2 from the atmosphere and water from the ocean and synthetically produce hydrocarbons? The advantage is we’ve already got the distribution infrastructure in place plus a lot of vehicles that run on oil.

I expect further improvements in big capacitor storage. Lithium batteries and whatever that are currently used for electric vehicles — what a joke. They take a huge amount of energy to make, they’re heavy, and they wear out because they require chemical changes to take place in order to charge and discharge.

Big capacitors, on the other hand, just store charge without any chemical reactions going on. Nothing to wear out. And they’re getting cheaper and denser all the time.

I think there will never be a hydrogen economy. Rather I expect vehicles to shift from oil/gasoline to electric using dense capacitors. Just my opinion though.

Even without oil being used to power transportation, there are endless other uses for it. Plastics, fertilizer, lubricants to name a few. Those applications won’t go away.

Such an exciting future awaits us. I wish it would hurry up and get here!

-Dave

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Breakable wrote: We are talking about that more in a different thread. Look at the end.

Your link was broken — it goes to a post reply mechanism but I can’t figure out what thread you’re referring to.

-Dave

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prosario_2000 wrote: That’s why the question above confuses both kinds of technology, as if you can make technology open source. Maybe you can make the specifications free, but never the physical technology itself … unless we realize Star Trek’s dream of inventing the replicator.

The equivalent to open source for physical things (hardware) is if you don’t maintain any proprietary/secret information. You patent everything, so no one else can patent it first, then you allow anyone to use your ideas in their products for free, or at least for a very low licence fee.

You could release a reference design for a piece of hardware, then allow anyone to go manufacture it. Taiwan/China would start mass producing them, and their profit comes from the marginal increase they sell it over their production costs. Some other company can come out with a cheaper cost of production unit and undercut them. Capitalism at its finest! Open source for hardware would just mean the licensing fees are very, very low, or perhaps zero.

-Dave

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Breakable wrote: 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.

I think you’d see a recycling of the long distance power lines. The copper in the wires will be worth more and more as the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) continue to increase consumption. The perfect place for a FF device would be the endpoint in the cities where all the transformers are, stepping down the voltage.

Also there will be a need for more land. The strip of land the power lines occupy will be more valuable, wasting it on power distribution won’t be reasonable.

I still like http://www.nanosolar.com, but they’re not real until I can go buy some of their cells — and I can’t today.

-Dave

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