Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote:
> Humanity will continue to migrate into the city from the remote > countryside Cities will house people in high concentrations. > In high concentrations, central generators may remain cost effective for a while. Eventually, all machines will have built in cold fusion power supplies. There will be no distribution of electricity anywhere, not even in your house. Arthur Clarke predicted that cold fusion home generators will be DC, not AC, because it is a lot safer. You cannot distribute DC electricity with a power company, and transformers are wasteful and expensive. Cold fusion power generators can be cogenerators, replacing central heating or hot water heaters, at practically no additional cost. > Power production will continue to be grid based and connected to huge > power stations where economies of scale will rule the day. > Economy of scale does not work when scaling up costs more than scaling down! That is why we have microcomputers nowadays instead of mainframe and minicomputers. Even giant computers are made up of small ones in an MPP configuration. Starting around 1980, small computers become more cost effective than large ones. It was the "economy of scale" reversed -- the smaller, the cheaper per FLOP or storage space. The same thing happened to rural passenger rail transportation after the introduction of the Model T. It soon became cheaper to drive a car than to ride in a train or trolley car. Only large urban short range passenger service survived. Automobiles are scaled down from railroad locomotives. They are decentralized. They are not only cheaper, but far more convenient. Cold fusion home generators will ultimately be far cheaper, more reliable and more convenient than central electric power distribution. Also, many applications that now use electricity will use cold fusion heat directly. These include space heating, water heating, air conditioning and refrigeration, clothes drying, process heating and so on. About 8% of all energy used in the home. See chapter 15 of my book. - Jed
