Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: > *These grid based customers who are stuck on the grid will have to bear > the entire cost of an underutilized and little used grid made very > expensive by connectivity to all the far flung shared centralize power > stations.* > No, they will not. This will not be a problem. The power company stockholders will bear the cost, not the customers. The power companies will go bankrupt. This is what always happens when a technology becomes obsolete. Consider:
U.S. passenger railroads lost many customers in the 1930s as cars become widespread, and they lost them all by 1970. But the railroads did not raise their fares high for the last passengers. The same thing happened with ocean liners between Europe and the U.S. in the 1960s, in competition to airplanes. At the end they did not charge more; they charged less and less, in a desperate effort to attract customers. The last people to buy old-style mainframe computers and minicomputers got very good deals. The prices were cut to to the bone, but personal computers were cheaper. There are many other examples. The power companies and the oil companies will lose billions of dollars. In they end they will go bankrupt. They will leave useless infrastructure everywhere, such as power plants, wires on poles, supertankers and oil refineries. This is worth trillions of dollars now but it will only be worth the scrap value. It will be have to be cleaned up and scrapped at public expense, but that will only cost a small fraction of the money we will save by using cold fusion. - Jed
