Cold Fusion Rears Ugly Head With Claims of Deuterium-Powered Homes

szczys writes: Ah, who can forget the cold-fusion fiasco of the early 1990s? Promises of room-temperature fusion machines in every home providing nearly-free energy for all. Relive those glory days of hype with this report of Deuterium-Based Home Reactors. Elliot Williams does a good job of deflating the sensationalism by pointing out all of the "breakthroughs," their lack of having any other labs successfully verify the experiments, and the fact that many of the same players from the news stories in the '90s are once again wrapped up in this one. I'm still waiting for the neighborhood E-Cat to arrive ...

Comments

Re:Just

[TWX]

Just get solar inexpensive enough and I'll be perfectly happy. It sure isn't there yet.

For me it would be, if the goddamn electric utility would set fair rules.

If the utility is going to charge me a grid-tie fee, make that fee the same as all of the subscribers. IE, any house with approximately the same service type (200A 240V Single Phase with Neutral) should have the same grid-tie fee as I as a solar user would have.

As a power producer, they should pay a reasonable amount of money for my power to them during peak hours. They should not be allowed to only reimburse me the rate they charge for middle-of-the-night lowest-demand time, which is something like 10% of what they charge during peak hours. I understand that I'm not going to get 100%, that's not the issue. I do expect to get more like 50%, especially if they itemize all power customers' grid-tie separate from their usage fees.

As they want it now, they want to benefit from my power production when they have the most demand, and to charge me for the privilege of supplying them with that power.

My argument in favor of my position is that during peak hours (I live in a hot desert climate) my production means that they do not have to supply as much power from on-demand power stations that are more costly to operate than their base-load power plants. They don't have to burn natural gas or propane or diesel to keep up with all of the air conditioners if enough solar customers are selling power back to the grid. The solar customers also put power back on to the grid locally, which reduces amperage across the higher current distribution portion as local power in a local section is being produced.

As they have it now it's a racket, and there is no reason for it to be so.

And yes, I am well aware of danger to linemen if there's a general outage and a residence is still supplying power. I would put in a transfer switch capable of intentional islanding and some form of intelligent grid AC resync and reconnect if I were to do this.