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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!