Robert Lynn <robert.gulliver.l...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We'll I've worked and researched in the utility electricity, and micro CHP > (combined heat and power) industry off and on over the last 20 years, so if > you want to argue the point you are going to need to justify your > disagreement a whole lot better than by an appeal to (your own) authority :) > Hey, I did not make this stuff up. I do not know enough about electricity to do that. I got these ideas from people at EPRI and in various books. Your experience is with present day technology which is expensive because it is optimized for high fuel efficiency. Cold fusion technology will be as different as the automobile is to the railroad locomotive. The goal will not be to optimize equipment to produce the greatest fuel efficiency, but rather to produce the lowest lifetime equipment cost. Of the european median small consumer price of electricity $0.24/kWh only > about 30% of it is actual fuel cost . . . Yes, that is what I said in chapter 14. but cold fusion devices would save much more than merely the cost of fuel. That's just the start. ($0.08/kWh assuming 60% generation efficiency with $0.05/kWh gas price) - > meaning about 70% of the home electricity cost is in generation and > distribution. Distribution costs with cold fusion will cogenerators would be zero. They are right there, in your house. > That won't change if the utility is still doing the production, after all > the grid and generation is expensive to maintain, so even if the heat is > free it still wouldn't drop the price by more than 30%. > Why would the utility still be doing production? > However even with household gas prices ~30% of electricity prices > ($0.075kWh vs $0.24kWh median) micro CHP it is not economic without large > subsidies (I did an industry survey and report for my job last year). This is CHP technology optimized to work with high-cost fuels. Technology designed from the ground up with the goal of making the equipment itself cheap would have entirely different characteristics. There is no reason why a first-generation device should cost more than today's standby gas generators, which costs $6,000 for a unit with way more power than my house would ever need. These devices are not intended to run full-time but they could be improved. The actual machines are the size of an air conditioner. See the photo on p. 116. Later it will cost ~$2000 and it will replace the furnace as well as the power company. > Yearly costs are similar to current electricity bill, hence poor uptake, > and they still needing to pay for a grid connection as well to handle peaks. > No, there is no need for this. See chapter 15. There will not long be a grid to connect to, in any case. > There is absolutely no way that you can make a domestic cold fusion device > that can supply the 1kW average 10kW peak electrical power you need for less > than the $700 per year (capital and maintenance cost) . . . There may not be now but there soon will be. This is a lot like saying in 1979 that there is no way you could make a 12 MB hard disk for less than $3000. That was true back then. A few years later it was not. It is like saying in 1908 at automobile tires will never cost less than $50 each (equivalent to about $1000 today). Once the core technology drops in price, incentive is created and people will soon find ways to make cheap peripheral technology to go along with the core technology. A market for billions of small generators will open, and someone will find a way to meet it. Once you get zero cost energy, people will find ways to make small cheap generators and cheap thermal refrigerators and other equipment. It will be as cheap as today's automobile engines per unit of power. That is to say, about 4 times cheaper than power company equipment. (Cheaper but far less efficient and with a shorter lifespan.) > that your 60% price drop would require, even a conventional gas boiler > costs not much less than that. That is because conventional gas boilers have to be efficient and they have to have pollution control. > Also if you think 5% efficient thermoelectric converters might be a cheaper > option than heat engines then check the price of 5% efficient Bismuth > Telluride thermoelectrics ($10k/kW) . . . What do you think it would cost to build a 2 TB hard disk in 1979? It couldn't be done but if someone did it would cost tens of millions of dollars. Now it costs $100. Bismuth costs $13 a pound. The cost of this and all other materials will plummet when cold fusion mining and extraction techniques become common. If thermoelectric converters are expensive now that is because the technology has not been developed or mass-produced yet. When the market for billions of thermoelectric devices worldwide opens up, the cost will fall. - Jed
