Aero wrote:
In other words, the economic wolves will twist the polywell into a cash cow for their benefit, to the detriment of the consumers of the world. That is, the consumers will benefit just enough to support the trend, the wolves will skim all the gravy. But they will pay taxes, so that will help from another perspective.
I tend to agree with Aero, but I also think that history shows us the trend with this sort of thing will be something like this:
* You can't build lots and lots of these overnight, and at first, investors will want to see results before building more. So, initially a few will be built as proof-of-concept. They may, possibly, suffer from some first-generation technical problems that keep them from being as cheap as they otherwise might (due to maintenance shutdowns, costs associated with repairs, etc). Also, first-generation will likely not be highly optimized. Additionally, the construction costs of the first generation will likely be higher than subsequent building
* But, assuming that even the first generation is able to produce energy at substantially reduced costs vs coal, nat. gas, oil, fission, wind, etc (I don't really know what the average cost of a kWh is, but let's say it's about 6 cents, just as an example). Let's say that the first generation of fusion reactors can produce electricity at a cost of around 3c kWh. Then I would expect the fusion producers to sell electricity, not based on the production cost, but based on the fact that the cheapest competitor is, say, 5.5c kWh, so they sell for like 5.0, or maybe 4.9. A significant markup, BUT, the important thing is that it would still be a price reduction as far as the consumer is concerned - so in a way, everyone wins - the consumer is paying slightly less (though not as cheap as they could, theoretically, because the corps/investors are skimming the gravy as Aero says - but that's just good business sense).
* As time goes on, economies of scale should come into play as more and more reactors are built by more and more companies. The initial cost to install a reactor may either remain fairly constant (e.g. doesn't increase with the rate of inflation, and so in real terms, becomes cheaper) or even drop somewhat. Also, probably, the cost of refined fuel will get cheaper as the companies involved in the fuel production and distribution process begin to get economies of scale in producing the fuel (although, since the fuel is such a small part of the cost, this might have a negligible impact on the cost at retail of the power).
* Also, the companies that took higher profit margins early, may pay off their reactor early from the initial high profits, and decide to implement further price cuts to undercut all the Johnny-come-latelies who just built new reactors, and still need to pay them off, and who will have to pay them off with lower profit margins (but who might have the advantage of having reactors which cost less to initially build, and might be better designed, so they can still compete with the older reactors).
* There will be still be a lot of 'legacy' gas, coal, and oil electric plants in existence for awhile. At first, there will be too few fusion plants to really make the legacy plants reduce their prices (much) - because there will be far more demand than the fusion plants can provide. At some point, as more fusion plants are built, there will be enough fusion reactors to force the other electric generation companies to reduce their prices, so coal/gas/oil sourced electricity will come down in price also. These legacy plants will start to be shutdown as the price per kWh their owners can sell the electricity at gets too low. Even as plants are shutting down, however, the reduced demand for coal/gas/oil will probably bring the price of fuel down, allowing a reduced number of hydrocarbon plants to keep operating at lower costs, again reducing the price of electricity for end-users. Eventually, almost all the hydrocarbon plants will probably be shutdown, but I would expect that to take 20-50 years.
* And. . . finally, the really big thing is that, eventually, patents expire - somewhere in the 20-50 year range after the first reactors are put online, the technology will become open to any company which has the technical means to manufacture them. Expect whoever is the equivalent of today's China/Mexico (that is, an economically depressed nation which has the capability to do lots of manufacturing much cheaper than most other nations - which might be the U.S. or Europe in 50 years, who knows) to start manufacturing them much cheaper. This will lead to a lot more reactors being built and installed by lots and lots of companies, governments, etc, and will probably lead to the floor falling on electricity prices as a glut of supply hits the market.
In summary, what I would expect is an initial slight reduction in price, followed by a relentless stair-case cycle: a period of price reduction, followed by a period of stable prices (neither rising nor falling, but remaining constant, even as inflation reduces the 'real' price of the electricity), followed by another cycle of price drop, then stability. Eventually, though, the price will get to a natural 'floor' - where the cost really cannot get any lower, because people won't want to invest in building additional fusion reactors anymore because there's no more profit to be had. That is, there will become an equilibrium between supply and demand where the price is high enough to be 'worthwhile' to the companies that operate and own the reactors, but not high enough to justify increasing market demand and thereby causing the price to go down more.
I might be completely, totally, wrong, but that seems, from my understanding of the history of industrialism and market economies, to be the sort of general pattern for how these things unfold.
Edit: Obviously, there are a huge number of variables which make it almost impossible to predict how things would actually unfold. For example, I should mention a (previously) unstated assumption which I just realized I made, and may not be true: I assume that whatever company(ies) hold patents on the fusion reactor core technologies will probably license their patents to more than one builder/manufacturer. The reason I assume this is that, at some point, there's going to be so much market demand for these things that any one manufacturing partner would not be able to fill the demand, so in order to increase revenue during the patent protection period, whoever holds the patents would probably want to license to as many companes as they can. That *might* be wrong, and could increase the costs and keep the costs high for a longer period of time.
Another unstated assumption I make above, is that only one fusion technology turns out to be viable. But, now, let's say that both Polywell and Focus Fusion work out, so we have two competing reactor designs - the competition might tend to lower prices that generation companies pay to have the reactors built and installed. Or it might not, but it could be a factor. Also, the people on these forums frequently discuss various fusion-fission hybrid reactor concepts, and Accellerator-driven fission being investigated (thorium, etc). If you have one or more fusion reactor designs also comepting with one or more fusion/fission and/or accellerator-driven reactor designs, that could bring prices down a little bit more also.