Jed I agree with you. What I modeled was based on current best available
data. There is a massive problem with elimination of the grid as it is
not possible to switch everyone off the grid an once. A 15% shift off
grid would reduce the grid owners income enough to stop grid maintenance
and then the 85% on grid would have no power. I do agree that with LENR
home reactors we may not need the grid but moving from where we are
today to that situation will be very difficult.
AG
On 12/1/2011 8:07 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
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
<mailto: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
