I wrote: > It makes you realize why electricity is so expensive, and how much better > small cold fusion generators would be. Imagine the cost of bringing 3,000 > utility crews from places like Ohio and Texas. > Years ago when I made this point, someone responded by saying:
"What if the generators are unreliable? What if one of them breaks in a storm? Or suppose one breaks at the house where someone who needs electricity constantly for a medical device?" That is worth thinking about. Suppose that a cold fusion generator MTBF and hours of outage per year are higher than today's power company electricity. Oddly enough, it would still be more reliable in some important ways, because of mitigating factors: Cold fusion generators will not fail en mass from a single common cause, the way power company electricity fails in an ice storm. The generators will fail individually for the same sort of reasons automobiles or refrigerators fail: old equipment, manufacturing defects, maintenance errors. The number of cold fusion generators that fail on any given day will be constant. So the number of repair crews needed to keep the generators running will not spike. Inventory will be predictable and there will be no sudden demand for replacement units. Suppose that in severely inclement weather, your cold fusion generator fails, even though the weather has nothing to do with it. A repair crew cannot reach you. You are in the dark. However, your neighbors will be unaffected. You can always go next door to stay warm. You might borrow electricity with a 50-foot extension cord. (I did this for a few days when the wires were pulled out of our house during a storm.) It will be easier to cope with. I expect that many larger appliances will be self powered with their own cold fusion power supplies, especially furnaces, air conditioners and hot water heaters. So even if your power goes off, the furnace will stay on, and you can still take a hot bath. This is like having a gas stove during a power failure. You can still cook. At my house the the gas water heater is not connected to electricity, and you can light the gas stove with a match, so we could cook and bathe normally during a power failure. We do not have all our eggs in one basket. Finally, for people who have a critical, life-sustaining need for electricity, it will be possible to buy two or more generators, with automatic redundancy built in. This will be similar to what some people do today, which is to buy a natural gas fired emergency generator that cuts into service immediately when the power fails, and which is tied into your house main panel. If both generators fail for some reason (say, with a common cause such as a short circuit) you could still go next door where they have electricity. Or you might use the 50-foot extension cord. Equipment reliability is complicated. It cannot always be measured easily with metrics such as MTBF. - Jed
