Something else that piqued my interest: McKubre's highly optimist prediction of being able to manufacture CF power cells possibly within 20 years seemed carefully worded. What I mean by that is that if these power cells can indeed be economically manufactured, particularly for the excessive power consumption needs of most America cars, IMO, there is absolutely no reason why the same technology could not be used to get every single household, building, and industrial complex completely off the grid. However, to publicly speculate about such a possibility might be considered so disruptive to the economic fabric of our society that I wonder if McKubre deliberately chose not to go there. Instead, McKubre suggested CF power cells could be used to replace the infrastructure of most power utilities, and as such, save the power utility's reason for existence.
Actually, IMO, even if it is technically plausible to get every building off the grid and completely self sufficient there are valid reasons to maintain some kind of a local grid - something akin to how the Internet works. For example, if the power generator housed in your basement suddenly (and most inconveniently) decided to go on the fritz Sunday evening just when you're sitting down to watch another installment of 60 minutes it would be nice to be able to automatically receive power from your neighbor's power generator next door, or even better, from several of your neighbors. I suspect this could only be possible if there was a smart grid in place constantly monitoring the power requirements of all households in every block. It would seem to me that power utilities may need to re-invent themselves. There's no reason why they shouldn't be up to the task. Instead of being the supplier of energy to the masses, they may need to transform themselves into service companies that maintain the optimal health of each household power generator, all this for a nominal monthly service fee of course. It would be no different than receiving cable service for TV and Internet. And of course, you KNOW there will have to be some kind of regulation, probably on the national scale. There would HAVE to be some kind of distributive power standards in place to make sure accidents wouldn't happen. For example: someone's power module might accidentally begin spilling excess power into the local grid, or worse, slip out of phase with the local grid. This would possibly disrupt the power needs of the entire block - and then NOBODY gets to watch 60 Minutes! This is, of course, the same strategy that BLP is attempting to exploit. Economically speaking, it is less disruptive if one includes the white elephant. Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
