LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.

  • I am however, Certain the market inertia for AC will rule the day for the next 100 years.

    "Eighty-five percent of the horse-drawn vehicle industry of the country is untouched by the automobile. In proof of the foregoing permit me to say that in 1906-7, and coincident with an enormous demand for automobiles, the demand for buggies reached the highest tide of its history. The man who predicts the downfall of the automobile is a fool; the man who denies its great necessity and general adoption for many uses is a bigger fool; and the man who predicts the general annihilation of the horse and his vehicle is the greatest fool of all."


    - The keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the National Association of Carriage Builders in 1908, the year that Ford introduced the Model T


    I think it is unlikely there will be electric power companies 100 years from now. As long as I am making predictions, I also predict there will be no human-driven automobiles on public roads, no outdoor farms, and nearly all manual labor will be done by robots, including surgery.

  • I think it is unlikely there will be electric power companies 100 years from now. As long as I am making predictions, I also predict there will be no human-driven automobiles on public roads, no outdoor farms, and nearly all manual labor will be done by robots, including surgery.

    I tend to agree with all of those predictions and don’t think any of them are contingent upon whether cold fusion emerges as a useful technology.


    I do wonder a bit about automobiles strictly because there are many people who simply love to drive and would fight tooth and nail not to give up the ability to do so. At the very least, there will probably be at least some public roads where people can still drive themselves. The evolution of handing over control of vehicles to machines will be an interesting one that pits enormous public safety considerations against people’s subjective personal preferences. So far, as a society, we are not good at such tradeoffs.

    • Official Post

    I do wonder a bit about automobiles strictly because there are many people who simply love to drive and would fight tooth and nail not to give up the ability to do so.


    I think this depends where you live and how old you are. There are people who love to drive of course, but 2 out of my 3 sons cannot drive and have never expressed any interest in doing so. One lives in London, the other in Tokyo. The exception lives in the deep countryside, where there is no public transport. My other two sons consider that cars are an unnecessary expense - and often an encumbrance - when you live in places with great trains, buses and taxis. I have found that this attitude is very common among those who are referred to as 'millennials'

  • I think this depends where you live and how old you are. There are people who love to drive of course, but 2 out of my 3 sons cannot drive and have never expressed any interest in doing so. One lives in London, the other in Tokyo. The exception lives in the deep countryside, where there is no public transport. My other two sons consider that cars are an unnecessary expense - and often an encumbrance - when you live in places with great trains, buses and taxis. I have found that this attitude is very common among those who are referred to as 'millennials'

    I completely agree. But the demographic that really loves their cars (and trucks) is a loud and ornery one. It will be pretty tough to pry their cold dead fingers from their steering wheels;)

  • 59 W. That's remarkable.


    The fact that this product is available at Home Depot tells us there is a significant market for off-grid DC powered appliances. If there were only a few thousand they could not stay in business selling these things.


    Gas-fired refrigerators also serve this market, as I mentioned.

    Pay no attention to the 1,000,000 ac refrigerators that are available thru

    Home Depot.

    rhats 1,000,000/1 odds

  • Sure, you plug them into an AC grid connection, but the car carries its own AC/DC converter. However, you have totally got hold of the wrong end of the stick throughout this discussion. Nobody I know of expects the entire consumer grid to be converted to DC. The whole point and purpose of reintroducing DC is to use it at very very high voltages to improve the efficiency of long-distance transmission lines. Simple as that, you appear to have misunderstood the concept, and our subsequent comments may well have confused you further.

    exactly, Alan,



    Then use this DC current invert it to ac for local use

  • I do wonder a bit about automobiles strictly because there are many people who simply love to drive and would fight tooth and nail not to give up the ability to do so.

    In a few generations there will be no one left who loves to drive on public roads, any more than there are people today who love to ride horses in downtown Atlanta or on the public highway. There were such people in the 1920s, but they died long ago.


    At the very least, there will probably be at least some public roads where people can still drive themselves.

    Yes, I predict this. Just as there are still roads in national parks where you can ride horses. See my book, chapter 17.


    http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf


    The evolution of handing over control of vehicles to machines will be an interesting one that pits enormous public safety considerations against people’s subjective personal preferences.

    Public safety considerations are sure to win. A technology that will save 40,000 lives a year is unstoppable. People will not object to banning human-driven cars from public roads any more than they objected to banning pedestrians, bicycles and horses from the interstate highway system.

  • Pay no attention to the 1,000,000 ac refrigerators that are available thru

    Home Depot.

    rhats 1,000,000/1 odds

    More than 1 gas fired refrigerator and DC-powered refrigerator is sold per year. If the number was 1, or even 1000, the companies that make these things would go out of business. No doubt the number is small, but for that matter, the number of electric and hybrid cars sold per year in 1997 was small. It is now 4% of the total; 3 million units. In a generation it is likely to be 100%. Things can change more quickly than you realize, when there is no technological barrier to change, and no reason why the consumer should stick with the old standard.


    Customers have no loyalty to old technology, traditions, or to big companies. That is why, for example, north Atlantic passenger ships went out of business practically overnight, and most mainframe and minicomputer manufacturers went from being market leaders in 1980 to bankruptcy in 1990. IBM was the biggest and most powerful computer company in 1980, but it was almost gone by 1990. AT&T went bankrupt in 2001. (The present company bought the name only.) GM went bankrupt in 2009, after years of market share declines. The stockholders lost everything. If cold fusion or some other improved method of generating electricity locally becomes possible, electric power companies will be gone in 20 or 30 years. The fact that they have trillions of dollars in infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of employees will not sway a single customer. Not one person will continue to buy electricity from a power company if they can make it more cheaply and reliably with a home generator appliance. That is why PV electricity is driving power companies into bankruptcy in Hawaii, where power company technology cannot compete with PV. No one will care about that infrastructure or those employees who lose their jobs, any more than people cared about GM stockholders when they stopped buying GM cars in the years leading up to 2009.

  • I completely agree. But the demographic that really loves their cars (and trucks) is a loud and ornery one.

    They will be dead 20 to 30 years after self driving cars become prevalent. In the 1980s, there were still many business executive who did not like personal computers. They did not want to learn to type. They considered that beneath their dignity. They did not want to use e-mail. I knew such people. All the ones I knew are long since retired or dead. Martin Fleischmann was like that. He did use a computer, grudgingly. This was annoying for me and others who had to communicate with him. See:


    http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanlettersfroa.pdf


    Nowadays, for an executive or anyone else in business, not using computers or e-mail that would be unthinkable. The only person I know of who does not do e-mail or computers is Hillary Clinton, which is one of the reasons she lost. She has her staff print out e-mail and other electronic documents on paper.


    Here is another dramatic example of ornery opposition to the effects of new technology. One that was so prevalent it was universal. In 1980 I am sure that nearly every adult would have been scandalized at the thought of their neighbors, friends, children or employees posting naked pictures of themselves in public. Even today, many older people have conniptions and warn young people that images on the internet last forever, and you can never undo them, sexting will ruin your life, and blah, blah blah. They fail to notice that when millions of people do something, it becomes the norm and those who grow up doing it don't think twice about it. You can find naked photos of Angela Merkel on the internet from the 1960s, but I am sure that neither she nor anyone else in power cares about this, or thinks twice about it. (Granted, Germans have been blase about nudity longer than most Europeans and Americans.)


    This kind of technology-based sex panic has many precedents in U.S. history. Look at the effects of the Model T on dating and premarital sex, for example. It was a bigger brouhaha in the 1920s than sexting is today.

  • Jed,


    I agree 100%, technology matches on,

    Change happens, it is difficult to predict what will be invented tomorrow and how the intended and unintended consequences that will change our culture & behavior.


    All of your examples are noted, I use them myself in my presentations.

    However, in my personal opinion, in the industrial, commercial and residential markets, ac voltage will continue to be generated, transmitted, transformed and used for all of the above market places long after your book is in it’s 10 edition.

  • Arent these DC fridges mainly sold for use in RV and similarl?

    The ones I have seen for RVs are thermoelectric ones that look like oversized beer coolers, and also actual thermoelectric beer coolers. The one linked to above seem kind of large for an RV. Also it was a freezer, not a fridge. Who needs a freezer on an RV?

  • Perhaps the hot rocks in Cornwall are LENR?


    Expensive though... GBP 18 million


    Two wells will be drilled 2.8 miles (4.5km) and 1.5 miles (2.5km) into granite near Redruth, Cornwall, where the temperature is up to 200C (390F).

    Cold water will be pumped down to the hot rocks and then brought as heated water to the surface.

    Steam from the heated water will drive turbines producing electricity, perhaps enough for 3,000 homes.



    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-46100763

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