James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: Even if cold fusion brings the cost per kWh to 5 mil, it will still make > sense to locate floating photobioreactors producing agricultural feedstocks > in the tropical doldrums protected by artificial floating atolls supporting > beachfront real estate enjoying enormous amounts of electrical energy per > capita. >
I think 5 mill = 0.005 cents. Anyway, no this does not make sense. This is like saying that even though we now have 2 terabyte disks that cost $100, it makes sense to use a 10 MB disk that cost me $20,000 in 1978. "Photobioreactors producing agricultural feedstocks" may be useful for the feedstocks they produce, but the energy will far more expensive than cold fusion, and it will be annoying and expensive to harvest, so people will throw it away. People in rural areas who own ~20 acres of forested land can easily cut enough firewood to heat their houses. I know people who do that. It is cheaper than heating with natural gas or electricity. You only have to pay for the fuel for the buzz saw and log splitter, which consume much less energy than the logs they produce. However, cutting and splitting wood is a lot of work. You would not do it to save money if the alternative was cold fusion space heating that cost you $0.0000001 per year in fuel. People will still need to cut up fallen trees to maintain a healthy forest, but they will have no economic use for the firewood. (Granted, saving money is not the only reason people burn wood. Some people do it out out of nostalgia, or because they enjoy seeing a fire. Some cut wood for exercise. Some might burn it just to get it out of the way.) - Jed
