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What if Energy was (Nearly) Free?
anvilmark asks: "Sci-Fi and sci-fi games often incorporate the romantic idea of 'free trader' ships with ports of call on a myriad planets across the galaxy. Recently I was toying with the physics of propelling such ships and their cargos out of a gravity well and realized the astronomical amounts of power it would take to do it (not to mention interstellar travel). This led naturally to contemplating how cheap energy would have to be in order to make this activity profitable. To make a long story short (too late!), I began wondering what would happen if the introduction of fusion power takes energy costs from pennies per kilowatt hour to pennies per megawatt hour (or GWH)? How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?"
How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?
;)
Somebody will undoubtedly declare war on somebody else.
Go read Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I suspect that this would drop my hosting chages. About 5 years ago, I was charged mostly for bandwidth and RUs. Now they don't care so much about how large it is as how much juice it uses.
I've done a lot of thinking about this myself, and it turns out to have some interesting implications.
First, it turns out that the cost of electric at the wall-socket is not dominated by the cost of production, but by the cost of the power grid. If the power were completely free, cost/kW-h at the home would only go down by about 50 percent.
On the other hand, cost of electricity does dominate the cost to make aluminum, steel, and many chemicals: profits would immediately go up, and costs would quickly drop precipitously for everything from cars to Tylenol.
Free electric power wouldn't in itself make space travel cheaper, but if you have cheap fusion you can either make fusion rockets, or extend VASIMR. If you can get thrust high and exhaust velocity very high -- say tens to hundreds of km/sec -- then you can quickly start doing things like going to the Moon with constant acceleration. In other words, a trip from Earth to Moon could be quicker than a trip from New York to Boston today.
Waste disposal would change radically -- give me enough power and I'll just do mass spectroscopy on a plasma made from the wastes. Call it 'mass mass spectroscopy' -- out the end comes pure (isotopically pure, if you care to do it) oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and so on. This will be very handy for Lunar exploration, as it makes possible the easy separation of 3He from 4He; 3He makes for good fusion fuel, and 4He ("depleted helium"?) makes for cheap reaction mass or lots of other things. On the other hand, it makes uranium enrichment much easier as well -- throw in yellowcake, and out the other end comes O2 235U and 238U.
If lunar 3He production is economic, so is production of hydrogen (either from fossil water or as a byproduct of 3He production) as well as oxygen, nitrogen, argon, potassium, thorium, and so on. (See KREEP.) Add O2, N2, and lights to a lunar lava tube, and you've got living space and farms -- with cheap power.
Some of the obvious effects of near-free power:
1) we'll use a lot more power, simply because we can. In some ways this will reduce combustion - electric heat in the winter, electric vehicles (at the very least, electric for short range vehicles and gas for long range). Appliances will have more features and draw more power both while active and while idle.
2) Appliances will be less efficient. This also means they will generate more heat. Everyone will have air conditioning, though, because it'll be cheap to run. The extra waste heat will be enough, especially in southern cities in summer, to increase the local temperature (more so than now).
3) new energy-hungry applications will arise that aren't developed now because of the power requirements. Non-portable computers will tend towards beowulf clusters because it'll be cheaper to buy N chips than single superchips.
4) the power grid must be expanded to carry the increase volume of power. Depending on the fusion technology's specifics, this will either mean lots of small fusion plants, or large fusion plants and a lot more power lines. Power lines my be overhead, or buried. Expect lots more research on cheaper, warmer-operating superconductors. Expect the results to end up used in everything else, especially electronics.
5) Less international conflict based on water supply - because desalination plants will be much cheaper to operate.
6) Changes in travel, especially sea travel. You can't build a ship the size of an aircraft carrier right now without being a major world power, because of the expertise needed and fuel needed. Fusion may allow this, though. This will certainly make long range shipping cheaper. It would eventually effect people as well - many would choose a cheap two-day sea trip to cross the sea over an expensive and crowded plane flight, especially if it was a vacation trip on a budget and the scenery was good. (business-class travellers would likely still fly).
I'm sure there are more, that's just the ones that jumped out at me after a few moments.
Well, if energy was free, then it would still be free today, and I'd imagine that most of the aftereffects would have already occured.
However, if energy were free (note use of subjuctive), which i think is what you meant, I take the cynical view that it would only destroy ourselves more quickly.
For example, it's not that we can't get to Mars via rocket today, we simply can't get enough energy crammed into a feasible size. If it were cheaper nothing would change.
At the same time, you are assuming that just because the mass/energy ratio of fusion is much higher, that makes it cheaper. This is not the case. In fact, coal is an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear power. Looking at current research into fusion technology, the extremely highpowered lasers and plasma contol technologies would be very expensive to build.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Heavily paraphrasing old memories of Pournelle's A Step Farther Out: With sufficiently cheap energy, we can reduce toxic wastes to their component elements; turn the Sahara into farmland; give everyone on Earth at least the standard of living the US had in the 1950s; mine the asteroids; colonize our solar system and others; move industry into space and turn the Earth into a garden.
And he's right. The cost of producing the vast majority of goods and services is heavily dependent on the cost of energy. Make that energy "too cheap to meter" (as was promised us when the first nuke plants were under construction - sigh -), and the cost of production - including raw materials - drops to essentially the cost of labor. And labor costs drop too: a well-fed, prosperous work force using exotic tools, e.g. diamond-tipped cutters or 8-way Xeon workstations, is much more productive than hungry, unhappy, poorly-equipped workers.
That being said, if this scenario is taken to the extreme, the possibility of global warming from simple waste heat rears its ugly head. There are probably ways of dealing with that, but, given the number of times my power's gone out this week (lots of wicked weather), I'm not sure I'd trust the planet's viability to bleeding-edge tech. So it goes.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
One of the biggest uses would have to be travel. Buy an electric car and never pay for fuel again. Start using propeller based planes or switch to super-fast electric trains. Maybe we could even have jets with ION propulsion. Ten times the propulsion for the same amount of fuel. Now we're talking about economical space travel. The cost of a trip to orbit could become affordable to about everyone. We could take the time to get to mars down from nine months to under 1.