I am afraid household electricity is just not going to get much cheaper - maybe 20-30% drop, but it probably will drop far more for industry.
The cost of ownership and maintainence of in-house LENR based electrical power generation will still make it marginal as to whether it is worth doing. Problem being the extreme spikiness of loads with average of 500-1000 watts and peaks of 5-10kW. Having a household system that can deliver such peak power while also not being excessively wasteful for normal use is expensive. Batteries cost at least $0.05/kWh for electricity (due to high up front cost and limited cycle life) - which is about what a power company charges to deliver power anyway. Also small heat engines and LENR are high maintenance and expensive (probably 1-2 times a year needed) - and any maintenance callout will be a large fraction of a house's yearly electricity bill. So it is very hard to pick whether it will be: 1/ Current Utilities 2/ Smaller neighbourhood schemes that are possibly best as they can smooth loads out over say 20-30 houses while saving the cost of most grid infrastructure and reducing overall maintenance costs 3/ A more capital expensive home system with some future cheaper battery storage and a very long-life reliable and cheap heat engine. I think probably neighbourhood 100kW-1MW will win, but there will still be niches for all three options. I also agree that DC is the ultimate solution. New inverters/converters (particularly using SiC JFETS) have efficiency that equals transformers, and if you look around a house there are not many appliances that really need AC - most could utilise DC quite happily at no extra cost, DC also simplifies battery backup. On 21 October 2011 15:17, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 11:36 PM, ecat builder <ecatbuil...@gmail.com>wrote: > >> >> Hoyt: Are you sure the electric company will want unsynchronized AC? >> > > I predict that home generators will produce direct current, not AC. DC is > safer because it is less prone to cause electrocution. Electric power > companies will not purchase this power for two reasons: > > 1. They will all go out of business. > > 2. Electric power will be worthless. Selling it would be like trying to > rent out 10 MB of hard disk space. This is not an imaginary example. In the > 1970s time-share companies rented out hard disk space in increments as small > as this. Nowadays, 10 MB of hard disk space can be purchased for about > one-tenth of a penny, I think. Unless I dropped one or two orders of > magnitude. > > > >> How will the governments keep the electric >> companies in business? >> > > Why would governments do this? This would be like trying to keep the vacuum > tube computer industry in business. > > I expect there will be some initial attempts to keep power companies, and > perhaps even oil companies, in business, but everyone will soon see that > this is a futile waste of money. > > - Jed > >
