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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?"
..for dads everywhere to yell about.
"Electricity's expensive! Ya trying to cool off the whole neighborhood? Close the #@%$ door!"
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.
Free Energy = Laser wars
A New Laser For War And Peace
"How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?"
Hmmmm... I wonder if anybody'd notice the extinction of the Energizer Bunny.
"Derp de derp."
I've got no clue what point that it'd become viable.
However, there's one item of trade that's better suited for such a system.
Information.
There's actually been some novels about it, where the traders don't trade for goods, but for information, new concepts, inventions and the like. Information for information (and supplies as nessisary, but that's less often). It takes up less space, and you don't need to rendevous to preform the trade.
Let's be reasonable. If we're going to have massive amounts of inexpensive energy available, then it's going to get used in large amounts. And unless this energy is coming straight out of the Earth's biosphere's ambient energy, we would be dumping massive amounts of extra heat into our ecosystem.
If we're not careful, we could wind up generating enough heat to change the weather and alter the Earth's rate of temperature change.
no thanks
I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium. It might take a while, but the oil fields of Texas were once thought to be an endless resource. Maybe before that happens we can build a Dyson Sphere and blend in with the rest of the universe's dark matter.
I am not sure about many other Universities around the country... but electricity for some universities is purchased in blocks. Basically this means that it costs just about as much to turn all the lights off in labor as the added cost of just leaving them on all the time. I wonder if energy costs for the average consumer decrease then might we see more of this type of thing in the American household. Longer lasting lights would also add to this happening.
I think Everytown, USA, would be filled with gawdy advertising of various forms.
Hopefully there would be some useful innovations, too, but most likely it would promote insane inefficiency. (Think Ford Expedition*10...)
So we get free free energy. What do we do first? We refridgerate every building on the planet. That would raise the outdoor temperature significantly over a few years.
On the bright side, it will be possible to microwave the entire planet and get rid of RFID tags.
If such energy became available, it wouldn't likely be available to the every planet-bound citizen. More likely, it would be like nuclear power in that it would be very highly regulated and unavailable directly to individuals. They could get the benifits of it, but only in moderation at an extremely high markup.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
There is the infrastucture costs, salaries, maintenance, delivery systems (poles, wire, labor), and whatever else goes into producing the fusion reaction.
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.
It's really a simple answer:
The first reckless party held by a bunch of teenagers would result in the evaporation of the oceans.
Let's face it, we live in a relatively closed system. An amount of energy comes into the biosphere that is relatively constant. The biosphere has evolved and developed dependent on that amount of energy being relatively constant.
Any 'revolution' in energy that means we have infinite amounts of it will mean the waste heat from all the new consuption will reck havoc on everything.
Depending on how much acceleration you add, cheap energy helps quite a bit.
Accelerating an electron from to almost the speed of light can increase it's mass 6 fold. Not much per electron, but when done in large numbers adds quite a bit.
Also, elemental hydrogen is available in reasonable quantities wherever you go, accelerating THAT to extremely high speeds is even better...
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)
If energy were plentiful and cheap, I think DeBeers would find a way to make people think it wasn't to keep the price artificially high.
And, unless sand was the new source of energy, I wouldn't want to be a Saudi prince.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
This is easy - if energy were nearly free, the whole world would turn into Las Vegas. Seriously. Because of the Hoover Dam out there, a typical household can run everything including the air conditioner for, like, $15/month. It's sickening.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Your memory about G-force is incorrect. The mass would have to be of the entire earth (or so) because nearly all of that mass would be fuel. That would be what's required to accelerate a modern rocket to near light speeds. Of course, then it would have to decelerate.
It is often said that the effects of this kind of thing are overestimated in the short term, but underestimated in the long term.
I won't directly speculate, but I'd point a few thing things out:
One, almost axiomatic right now is that even if we colonize space, we could never afford to lift any significant fraction of humanity off the surface. Effectively infinite power makes this possible, and the social changes this would unleash, even before it happened, the effect on the public conciousness and unconciousness, are almost entirely unpredictable. Right now, without even thinking about it much, we live on Earth, and there is nothing else. We have no Frontier anymore. Having one again would change things in almost unimaginable ways.
Two, it's the secondary effects you can't predict. Physicists might be able to build a bigger and better particle accelerator with more power, thanks to some previously prohibitively-energy-expensive alloy or something, and crack the secrets of the universe.
Three, the final limits of computation as we know it are driven by power consumption. Consequences of that left to the imagination. (Quantum computing may provide a partial out, but then again, probably only partial if it's significant at all; There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.)
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.
I would turn it up to 11!
--
$tar -xvf
Not so fast. You don't need that much energy to get from the bottom of one gravity well to the bottom of another, provided you can swap momentum around. There are a number of schemes along the lines of the cable cars that harvest energy from cars going down (and momentum from stopping cars) and feed it to cars going up / accellerating.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, but often the problem isn't the cost of the lunch but of all the stuff you wastefully throw away while eating it.
-- MarkusQ
Most recycling is either simply not done or not sensible simply because of the energy cost. Would we have inexpensive energy, we could afford to turn coal into oil, or recycle aluminium (today the cost/energy ratio - as shown by a Danish gov't report - actually would imply that burning aluminium would be cheaper than recycling it). Most recycling is simply not put into production because of the enormous energy cost involved in breaking down the molecules involved in building plastics and other stuff.
Low cost energy would also boost hydrogen technology, because the production would become very cheap. I don't know whether the same is true for Methanol, which is nowadays used for fuel cells (because hydrogen is too volatile for efficent storage).
On a completely different field, it would amost nearly kill off a lot of jobs (in the Western countries). Since a lot of products are already overengineered today, a low energy consumption is one of the last advantages additionally built into products. If there is less need for enigineering solutions in such products, there will be less need for engineers.
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.
I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium
You assume that fusion is the only way. Personally, I see the world moving beyond fusion power fairly quickly. By far the best source of energy for our needs is the sun. Now I'm not talking about everyone having a solar panel on their roof, I'm talking massive scale harvesting of all the energy that usually is "wasted" going off to light nowhere. Say you harvest 500 square kilometers of sun that usually would only serve to show alpha centauri that out sun exists. This is an extremely unpolluting and excellent source of energy.
The problems are three fold: getting the energy back to the earth, capturing enough energy for the whole planet and dissapating all that extra energy once it's used (lots of extra heat = nasty). I figure these will all be easy to solve over the next century.
I'd be pleased to see my ideas come into being, but you must understand that in order to protect my intellectual property, I have a patent pending on the use of the sun (or any star) to facilitate life or living.
Many thanks,
Darl McBride
The problem with the whole Scifi spaceship dreamy thingie is that the amount of energy required to power a ship, say of Millenium Falcon size, out of the Terran gravity well and then onwards into interstellar space is probably going to be enough to destroy a small city, if not a large one. And if you have that sort of things concentrated in a small ship some nutcase is going to buy one and perform an uncontrolled release.
A jet airliner loaded with fuel has a similar explosive potential as a small tactical nuclear weapon, as New Yorkers found out the hard way, and a spaceship will probably have the potential energy of a very, very large thermonuclear weapon. And if the nice ship is designed to blast off in one shot and zoom into the sunset the powerplant is going to have to be designed to release a large amount of that energy in a short time (unlike nuclear batteries in contemporaty spacecraft which do have a lot of potential but only need to release a small amount of it over a long time).
The long term place for serious energy production lies in antimatter in any case. One gram of antimatter annihilating with matter is enough to completely blow a city-sized hole into the ground, easy. One day the question of whether you want to put that sort of generating capacity into a small, handy penlight sized batter will be a technological problem. Perhaps we should think of the sociological problems before we do that.
But that all lies in the future. A more relevant question is about the here and now. Even today you get quite high energy densities in small devices. Modern Lithium Ion Cellphone batteries made cellphones possible. Your average innocent looking blocky thing inside you cellphone has a thermal and electical fuse inside it to completely shut down the battery if it should ever run out of specs because Lihium Ion batteries can explode. The cellphone makers put this safety mechanism into the batteries because early models blew up next to users heads. The marketing droid referred to this as "discharge with flame". Indeed. What sort of flame would you get from a penlight-sized antimatter batter that some teen geek opened up?
One argument against this is that it depends on how the free energy is delivered. For instance if it is by means of a fusion powerplant driving the electrical grid, you are still limited by the carrying capacity of the network.
Hoever, if you get a situation where someone could get a cute little mini fusion plant in his house which will deliver Gigawatts of energy some other possibilities becomes possible. Read the heat waste argument in the discussion.
Another favourite liberal argument is that there is always the argument that as technology puts more destructive potential into people's hand it also puts more potential to counteract that destruction. Even current technology is quite powerful, one guy in New Zealand (I think) is currently building a demonstration model of a cruise missle. For $5000. There was an article in K5 about this a short while ago. Visionary people like James Gosling are already getting scared by the potantial.
The question is if one guy's experiment will destroy most of humanity before humanity develops a counterattack. Its like a food cycle. If there are too many sharks they eat the fish and then there is not enough fish, the sharks die, and then fish multiply again and then there is more food for the rest of the sharks and cycle continues. Problem is, if that cycle gets off the chart and both species dies off.
And last, "free" is a relative term. "Free" for me means *I* don't have to pay the energy costs of my system. One way of harnessing pretty much free energy is to use a self replicating system where each generation harvests its own energy from the environment, so you, the creator does not have to supply all the energy for the system as a whole to run its course. A Computer virus uses energy paid for by someone else to run on his computer, so for you the virus writer its pretty free. Biological agents are the same thing. The guy who gets infected eats carbohydrates to keep your bioweapon alive.
Until he dies.
The whole "free cheap portable source of energy" problem will create a bad
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Lots of people keep bringing up Global warming as a problem but if you have all this power (cheap) couldn't you just build a reeeally big air conditioning unit?
Economics strikes again: if it really would cost trillions and trillions, you've got the real problem that we don't have trillions and trillions to spend. The whole GDP of the US is in the neighborhood of $6 trillion, and the world overall certainly doesn't exceed $20 trillion. So what you're proposing is tantamount to suggesting we put everyone on Earth into working on power sats, dropping everything else from food production to programming video games.
I doan' theeeeenk so, Cisco.
Solar power is certainly a fine idea, but out here at the Earth's orbit, it's still only 1 kW/m^2, and the best conversion efficiencies are still less that 20 percent -- in other words, we'd really get about 5 m^2 per kilowatt. It'd take a big satellite to replace one of those 10 GW reactors.
"Essentially for free" is flawed too, but I'll leave the reason for that as an exercise.