ahbwramc comments on Cold fusion: real after all?

Comment author: Kawoomba 17 April 2013 08:31:45PM 0 points [-]

Shorting oil companies?

Those are the ones with the economic and political clout to delay, patent, lie and buy their way into benefitting from this development, if it proves true.

They don't actually care about oil as in carbohydrates, they care about "stuff we can use to make oodles of money".

Comment author: DaFranker 18 April 2013 01:41:16PM 1 point [-]

People used to say the same thing about Hollywood. Now look at what Hollywood is doing.

I don't see why big bulky bureaucratic oil companies would fare any better at adjusting to change and new technologies.

Outside view says short them.

Comment author: drethelin 18 April 2013 04:08:42PM 1 point [-]

outside view? doesn't the even more outside view have a saying about markets and solvency and shorting?

Comment author: DaFranker 18 April 2013 04:53:04PM * 1 point [-]

Probably. I do not know of any such sayings, and do not know much about markets and solvency and shorting in general.

Perhaps a better rephrasing would be that a naive first outside view should conclude that oil companies will be just as stuck-in-their-ways as other examples have been or still are.

Kawoomba also makes a few other good points that are worth considering, tough I'm not sure they all add up to them doing all that much better than everyone else on the "update for new technologies" front.

Comment author: drethelin 18 April 2013 11:22:54PM 5 points [-]

"Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." is the saying.

Comment author: Kawoomba 18 April 2013 01:56:03PM 0 points [-]

Energy companies are in a reference class of their own, and their political influence, lobbying power and entrenchment comparable if at all to that of banks and financial institutions. They are transnational players that many see as transplanting state actors, even when some of them (e.g. Chinese energy companies, Russian energy companies) act as surrogates for their state. They are not like Hollywood.

If there is a new way to produce nigh-unlimited energy, it won't be long until there's a law to regulate it, and that law will be heavily influenced by energy companies. Or will they be stopped by public pressure and idealistic politicians? More like the lone battle of Elizabeth Warren, failing to get the simplest kind of regulation passed in the banking sector.

Let's not even get into the broken patent system which can be weaponized by the highest bidder.

Comment author: Jack 17 April 2013 08:49:12PM 1 point [-]

How much heavy water does the device use? Does Swartz have patents?

Comment author: novalis 17 April 2013 11:47:16PM * 1 point [-]

Funny that you should ask that. In fact, the patent office rejects cold fusion patents. When Swartz tried to file some patents, he was rejected and sued; he ultimately lost (see Swartz, 232 F.3d 862, 56 USPQ2d 1703, (Fed. Cir. 2000)). The only surprise here is that the patent office managed to get this one right -- in my field (software), the patent office is totally fucked. If CF worked, it would be relatively easy to demonstrate: just generate a bunch of power with it on a small power input, in a way that others can replicate (even if you have to ship them your equipment).

Comment author: knb 18 April 2013 03:45:36AM 0 points [-]

I wouldn't short oil companies, since I doubt cold fusion would be useful for powering cars directly, since the methods produce warmer water, not directly usable electricity. Hot water isn't really practical for powering cars.

Comment author: wedrifid comment score below threshold [+] (9 children)

Comment author: knb 18 April 2013 06:51:33AM * 0 points [-]

If only there was existing technology to harness warmer water]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_power) to [power cars.

Obviously we already have ways of creating electricity, the problem is storing it densely enough, which is why people still use gasoline cars. The limiting technology is batteries, not our ability to create electricity cheaply (already much cheaper than gasoline). Hence there is no reason to expect cold fusion to have a major impact on oil companies relative to other fossil fuel companies.

Or were you suggesting we put steam-thermal power plants in cars? I'm afraid I don't have time to explain to you all the reasons that is a bad idea.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 April 2013 07:38:49AM * 0 points [-]

Hence there is no reason to expect cold fusion to have a major impact on oil companies relative to other fossil fuel companies.

There would be less impact on oil companies than (say) coal companies. But given that electric cars are already viable for some purposes despite significantly less development a drastic drop in electricity cost will obviously increase the viability and change the margins.

The only reason not to short oil companies based on that counterfactual information is because of the opportunity cost. There are other industries that would be effected even more so whatever investment resources you have should be focussed in one of those. For example, lithium battery technology.

Comment author: knb 18 April 2013 09:07:46AM 1 point [-]

But given that electric cars are already viable for some purposes despite significantly less development a drastic drop in electricity cost will obviously increase the viability and change the margins.

You are wrong on multiple levels.

You are assuming that LENR energy would be drastically cheaper than present sources of electricity, which is almost certainly wrong. Since most of the retail price of electricity is not the fuel cost, but rather the capital costs of the thermal plant and power line maintenance, LENR thermal power plants would probably not drop the retail price of electricity by even half. It is entirely possible that the capital costs for LENR plants would be higher than coal.
Even if LENR electricity was free, it wouldn't do much to increase the viability of electric cars, which are held back by very practical concerns about the vastly higher initial cost, inferior range, and battery failure and capacity reduction with time. The limiting factor is not electricity prices, but battery capability. There is no reason to think LENR will have an impact on lithium battery technology, especially within the limited shelf life of a short sale.
There are about 30,000 electric cars on the street now in the United States, compared to ~250,000,000 passenger vehicles. It would take 7 doubling periods before electric vehicles were 1% of the U.S. passenger fleet.

LENR just wouldn't have a significant impact on the oil companies.

Comment author: DaFranker 18 April 2013 01:45:49PM * 2 points [-]

You are assuming that LENR energy would be drastically cheaper than present sources of electricity, which is almost certainly wrong. Since most of the retail price of electricity is not the fuel cost, but rather the capital costs of the thermal plant and power line maintenance, LENR thermal power plants would probably not drop the retail price of electricity by even half. It is entirely possible that the capital costs for LENR plants would be higher than coal.

Whoaaaaa there. Citation needed.

You're telling me that in the US and other places, with all those coal and oil plants, the electric line maintenance costs more than mining, treating, transporting (including cost of oil used by trucks), and processing the materials burned by the plants to make that electricity? On top of all that personnel that has to be paid to go operate the plant, operate the trucks, do the actual repairs and maintenance on the lines, etc.?

This tickles my priors too much and I am confused.

There are about 30,000 electric cars on the street now in the United States, compared to ~250,000,000 passenger vehicles. It would take 7 doubling periods before electric vehicles were 1% of the U.S. passenger fleet.

How many doubling periods did the iPhone take to go from 0 consumers to pervasive-"what-the-hell-you-don't-have-an-iPhone?!" phenomenon?

Doubling periods is an extremely poor metric for consumer object spread and popularity. The use of it here smells of dark arts or status signalling.

Comment author: knb 18 April 2013 07:48:11PM 1 point [-]

You're telling me that in the US and other places, with all those coal and oil plants, the electric line maintenance costs more than mining, treating, transporting (including cost of oil used by trucks), and processing the materials burned by the plants to make that electricity?

Yes, I am right. Note that I was specifically talking about thermal plants, not oil plants (which you mentioned, and I did not). Oil-fired plants are rare because it costs so much more than coal. A ton of coal currently currently costs much less than a single barrel of oil.

This tickles my priors too much and I am confused.

Note that the solar and wind power also have no fuel costs. Are you equally incredulous that solar and wind power cost substantially more than coal-thermal per watt? Please note that your strength as a rationalist does not just include the ability to state your incredulity, but also to research things that are very easy to research (one minute of googling would have made these questions unnecessary).

How many doubling periods did the iPhone take to go from 0 consumers to pervasive-"what-the-hell-you-don't-have-an-iPhone?!" phenomenon?

Cars are manufactured slower, redesigned more rarely (design generations last multiple years for each model), bought more rarely, and take much longer to pay off. The limiting factor (battery capability) has historically improved very slowly in spite of massive investment.

Nothing seems to beat lithium as a base material for batteries. Lithium is the third lightest element and is highly reactive, making it the best lightweight, high-density solution for the near term. Lithium is usually paired with cobaltate. Other possible partners, such as titanate and iron phosphate compounds, offer some advantages but deliver significantly lower voltages and energy yield. One scientist summed it up: "It will be refinement of existing chemistry from now on. There are no new compounds that will give higher energy density.2"

In future years, it is possible that a one percent annual improvement in lithium battery performance may become the norm. Some scientists believe that the lithium ion, which has been worked on for decades, may be close to peaking3. Changing the electrolyte, usually to a polymer, may offer some advantages but doesn’t appear to provide a significant improvement in energy density or cycle issues, which are the key attributes.

When progress is this slow, and the install base is that large, talking about doubling periods absolutely makes sense. Annual new car sales are only about ~6% the total passenger car fleet, so even if all new cars were electric, it would take at least 15 years before they were ubiquitous. And for them to become 100% of new cars, every automaker would have to redesign all of their model lines at once (this will never happen).

Comment author: DaFranker 18 April 2013 08:59:23PM * 1 point [-]

Please note that your strength as a rationalist does not just include the ability to state your incredulity, but also to research things that are very easy to research (one minute of googling would have made these questions unnecessary).

Ten minute of googling did not give me coherent results or even the kind of data I was looking for.

The only "maintenance" figures I could find were combinations of the original plant construction and project costs flattened over 30 years added to the "operation and maintenance" costs, in $/mWh (which I believe carries about the same information as the figures in your link).

Unsurprisingly, these were higher than what the figure for "$ cost per short ton" of coal (of which at least 2 out of 4 figures I found clearly did not include the costs of transport) gives when converted to $/mWh using some reference assumptions about kWh/btu and btu/coal (these).

From the link you give me, Fixed O&M seems to be the base maintenance and operating costs (I assume including personnel), while the variable O&M figures seem to be that + fuel. Line maintenance seems to be included in the first one, unless I've read this wrong (or perhaps isn't even anywhere in these figures), so the difference between the two numbers looks like what's interesting. And that difference is clearly higher than the fixed maintenance cost for new generation technologies.

If these figures don't contain line maintenance, then I don't see at all what you're basing your argument on. Your initial wording in the grandparent seemed to imply that the cost of line maintenance per mWh was greater than the total cost of mining, processing and transporting the coal per mWh. This is the main point on which I was incredulous, because my priors tell me that operating a train that ferries hundreds of tons of coal regularly for thousands of miles will cost more than maintaining the distribution lines.

However, I'll admit that my priors may not have been adjusted to take into account the costs of maintaining every single neighborhood, every single street transformer, every single endpoint to every single home, along with all the crap that happens there and all the disaster repairs necessary each year. If this was included in your claim, then that changes my perspective quite a lot.

Note that the solar and wind power also have no fuel costs. Are you equally incredulous that solar and wind power cost substantially more than coal-thermal per watt?

I never doubted that the costs of starting a new plant were extremely high. I was unclear on this; as I hopefully clarified above, it's the "line maintenance" point that got me wide-eyed.

Cars are manufactured slower, redesigned more rarely (design generations last multiple years for each model), bought more rarely, and take much longer to pay off. The limiting factor (battery capability) has historically improved very slowly in spite of massive investment.

Valid points. I also agree with the remaining bits. I'll concede that the metric may not be as poor as I believed. My conception may have been affected by a relatively high different prior that new energy storage and transfer technologies will come up in the foreseeable future that would be much more practical for electric vehicles. However, that's a separate point from the LENR issue and bears no relevance here, so my mistake.

Comment author: knb 19 April 2013 03:20:41AM 1 point [-]

I was referring to all non-fuel related costs, not the line maintenance in particular. The fuel costs are just a small fraction of the total retail price of electricity from thermal plants. We really have no way of knowing the overall costs of commercial power from LENR, but I would guess it would be no more than fission at the highest and slightly lower than coal at the cheapest.

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ahbwramc comments on Cold fusion: real after all? - Less Wrong

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