Wait, what?
Wikipedia[0] seems to disagree:
> Long-distance transmission (hundreds of kilometers) is cheap and efficient, with costs of US$0.005–0.02 per kWh, compared to annual averaged large producer costs of US$0.01–0.025 per kWh
Do you maybe mean that half electrical energy dissipate between production plant and consummer? But that figure seems quite large compared to what I can find online, and this would not be a problem with "free fusion".
Care to explain?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission
My point is that the infrastructure related to the delivery of energy to a physical location is a non trivial part of an energy bill, and that this part doesn't go away magically because "fusion".
Distributing tiny fractions of all that energy to each of millions of individual residences, then maintaining all the short/complex/low-capacity wiring needed to do that - that part ain't the least bit efficient.
One wonders if this is why Lockheed-Martin dropped their effort:
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...
(that page is still up, but news reporting indicates it has been dropped)
Say a house uses 10,000kWh per year at $0.10/kWH so $1000/year electrcitiy bill. Now say you get a solar system that produces 5,000kWh per year, focused in the summer months (where your power bill tends to be higher anyway). You may even export some of that power back to the grid. Have you cut your power bill in half? No. It's probably down ~20-25%.
Why? Because regardless of how much power you use (within limits) you still need a connection to the power grid and that needs to be maintained. You'll often even see this on the electricity bill: fixed charges like "access charge" per month.
We benefit from being on a connected grid. Your own power generation might be insufficient or need maintenance. It's inefficient if everyone is storing their own power. So it's unclaer what the future of the power grid is. Should there be large grids, small grids or no grid?
Renewables and something like Iron-Salt battery containers, would be pretty efficient over all. Easy to roll-out, very safe.
We'll still need some sort of base load somewhere and backup to restart everything obviously. But the big giant power plants (with the huge capital costs, delays and NIMBY headaches) might become less necessary.
This depends on where you live!
So if you build loads of wind & solar & battery all over - either (1) you've got to build so much battery capacity, all over, that you'll never need the grid, or (2) you've still got to build the grid to get you through occasional "calm & dark" periods.
Either way, you're looking at vastly higher capital expenses.
- moderately overbuild solar
- batteries for short term storage
- natural gas for seasonal storage
Another reason is that transmission costs are half of your energy bill... so even if you could theoretically get fusion energy generation for "free" (which is impossible) you've still only cut your power bill in half.