In fact, many 21st century fusion companies do not use Tokomaks, but use other designs from the 60s. My estimate from wikipedia is about half.
It is a weird claim that the current boom, concentrated in time, is the result of many advances, which were spread out over time. All these advances are being used at the same time because funders are paying for them now and not earlier. How do you know that you need all of those advances and not just some of them? People could have tried using ceramic superconductors in Tokomaks in the 90s, but they didn't, because of centralization. Maybe that wouldn't be enough because you need all the other advances, but it would have yielded more useful data than the actually performed experiments with large Tokomaks.
The transmission utility is not purely a transmission company. It spends money on both generation and transmission. Some generation charges leave to other companies. This is not a competitive market, but even if it were, it would only give you a bound on the cost of generation and tell you nothing about the cost of transmission.
You say solar is getting cheaper, but it is only the panels that are getting cheaper. They will continue to get even cheaper, but this is not relevant to retrofitting individual houses, where the cost is already dominated by labor. As the cost of labor dominates, economies of scale in labor will be more relevant.
To a first approximation, solar is legal for individual residences and illegal on a larger scale.
Maybe you could learn something by looking at the public filings, but you didn't look at them. By regulation, not by being public, it has to spend proportionate to its income, but whether it is spending on transmission or generation is a fiction dictated by the regulator. It may well be that its transmission operating costs are much lower than its price and that a change of prices would be viable without any improvement in efficiency. This is exactly what I would how I would expect the company to set prices if it controlled the regulator: to extract as much money as possible on transmission to minimize competition. I don't know how corrupt the regulator is, but that ignorance is exactly my point.
Even in this last comment you keep making that very distinction. The regulator dictates the price but you assert that you know what the monopoly spends.
If you just want to assert that the current set of regulations are unsustainable, then I agree. But not a single one of the comments reflects a belief that this is the topic, not even any of your comments.
Yes, if we assume that there is a competitive market for generation, price of transmission may prevent grid solar generation from being built. But you asserted that you could learn the cost of transmission from the bill.
These numbers are dictated by the regulator. What mechanism is there to make them have any relation to the real world?
How is this a response? Yes, advances accumulate over time, which is exactly my point and seems to me to be a rebuttal to the idea that the centralized project has been sane, let alone effective. Which advances do we need? How many do we need? Why is this the magic decade in which we have enough advances, rather than 30 years ago or 30 years hence?
In fact, the current boom does not reflect a belief that we have accumulated enough advances that if we combine them all they will work. Instead, there are many different fusion companies trying experiments to harness different advances. They all have different hypotheses and the fact that they are all contemporaries is a coincidence that you fail to explain. If there were a single bottleneck technology that they all use, that would explain it, but I don't think that's true. Computers are a particularly bad explanation because they have continuously improved: they have contributed to everything, but at different times.
Surely the reason that they are not trying to combine everything is that it takes time to assimilate advances. Some advances are new and will take time. But some are old and they could have started working on incorporating them decades ago. The failure of the centralized project to do that is extremely damning.