Since the subject of electric power generation and power companies has come up, let me get back to this analysis. I quibble with it, for the reasons I just mentioned in chapter 14 of my book.
My conclusion is that if you are going to set up a cold fusion reactor to generate power to be resold to an electric power company, you better do this within a few years. I do not think that a first-generation Rossi device would be cost effective for this purpose. It might be cost effective for thermal heat generation in a large facility. Aussie Guy E-Cat <aussieguy.e...@gmail.com> wrote: > 1) thermal to electrical conversion efficiency of 35%, generating 350 Ac > kWs from 1 MW thermal > Maybe ~25% for small generators. It is on the low end for conventional nuclear reactors. It does not matter. > 2) COP 6, feeding 167 kWs of electricity generated back into the input to > generate 1 MW thermal > The COP for the Defkalion reactors is much higher than 6. They have been saying this for months. If Rossi's reactors are only 6 I do not understand why. He has achieved heat after death for many hours. Why on earth is he stuck as an overall COP of 6? His large demonstration on Oct. 28 had a much higher COP. Assuming Defkalion's claims are real, they appear to be far ahead of Rossi in engineering. As I said, there has never been a reason to believe that cold fusion is stuck at any particular COP. Basically, I think you can ignore the COP. > 4) Total plant cost (thermal and electrical) of $2,500,000 for a 1 MW > thermal plant that produces 183 Ac kW after internal usage / losses > I think more like 250 kWe (electric). > 5) 30 year life > I think 30 years is far too long: 1. This is a first-generation device, almost a prototype. It will wear out quickly. 2. This device will be obsolete in months. Much cheaper and better ones will be available. That always happens with first-generation devices. 3. Power companies will be gone in 30 years. The market for power company electricity will evaporate long before that. They will have a huge glut of conventional equipment. > 7) $2 / MWh (thermal) fuel and maintenance cost > Maintenance costs will rise in a few years when this unit becomes obsolete. > we get a LCOE of around $0.065 / Ac kWh. A little less than that, I think. > Needs to be more like $0.02 / Ac kWh to make the massive change needed. To > do that > > 1) the COP needs to be at least 20 > As I said, you can ignore it, assuming Rossi is as good as Defkalion. > 2) reducing the loop back Ac kWhs losses to no more than 50 Ac kWs > Not an issue. > 3) which increases the Ac kWhs to be delivered to the grid to 300 Ac kW > Probably more like ~250 kW because you want to use a cheap, low-efficiency generator. > 4) the plant cost (including thermal to electrical plant) needs to be no > more than $1.5 / thermal watt at the multi MW size. > Charging $1 million for 1 MW of cold fusion heat capacity will soon seem ridiculous. Like charging $3000 for a 20 MB personal computer hard disk. That is what I paid for one back around 1980. I do not know what the cost of a 250 kW generator is. There will be virtually no market for such machines in the future so whatever the cost is now it will not get much cheaper. In 20 years, nearly all generators will be less than 20 kW. The cost of 250 kW generators will be roughly similar to the cost of "clothes washer" scale minicomputer hard disks used circa 1975. They never got cheaper. They vanished. They were replaced by 5 inch desktop hard disks. > Lets see if Defkalion, Leonardo or someone else can achieve that. Then the > world will change because then there is profit and a good ROI to be made > making it change. If cold fusion is commercialized, in 30 years heat and power will a hundred times cheaper than they are now. I am not exaggerating. Centuries from now they will be thousands to millions of times cheaper. We have all seen computers grow far cheaper. Some people believe that computers are exceptional because the components can be made ever smaller (Moore's law). However, in the past, other commodities and products also became radically cheaper over time, including some that cannot change in scale. These include the cost of food, the cost of illumination, transportation, printing, electricity and others. Regrettably, you can add to that list the cost of weapons of mass destruction. - Jed
