What If Electricity Were Free?

“You can observe a lot by just watching.” – Yogi Berra

On March 23, 1989, a most remarkable press conference was held at the University of Utah to unveil a stunning scientific breakthrough. The event was busting at the seams with authority and seriousness. No less than the president of the university himself spoke glowingly and with an unmistakable sense of awe at what was to be announced that day. The excitement in the air was downright electric. Here’s how the accompanying press release described the profound breakthrough that had allegedly been achieved (emphasis added throughout this piece):

“Two scientists have successfully created a sustained nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature in a chemistry laboratory at the University of Utah. The breakthrough means the world may someday rely on fusion for a clean virtually inexhaustible source of energy.

Collaborators in the discovery are Dr. Martin Fleischmann, professor of electrochemistry at the University of Southampton, England, and Dr. B. Stanley Pons, professor of chemistry and chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah.

‘What we have done is to open the door of a new research area,’ says Fleischmann. ‘Our indications are that the discovery will be relatively easy to make into a usable technology for generating heat and power, but continued work is needed, first, to further understand the science and secondly, to determine its value to energy economics.’

Nuclear fusion offers the promise of providing humanity with a nearly unlimited supply of energy. It is more desirable than the nuclear fission process used today in nuclear power plants. Fusion creates a minimum of radioactive waste, gives off much more energy and has a virtually unlimited fuel source in the earth's oceans.”

Pons and Fleischmann

It is difficult to describe the stampede of media coverage, wild claims, drama, and controversy this press conference catalyzed. The invention was given a catchy name – cold fusion – and academic, industrial, and government laboratories the world over rushed to reproduce the experiments described by Pons and Fleischmann. Less than three weeks after the infamous press conference, a cold fusion session was hastily added to the agenda at the prestigious American Chemical Society meeting in Dallas, Texas, and some 7,000 scientists attended. This was nothing short of a frenzy.

photo credit: C&EN/James Krieger

There was only one problem. Aside from a few hastily retracted false positives, no reputable institution could reproduce the claims, and the entire affair quickly dissolved into a historic scandal. Within months, a strong – and I mean strong – consensus of the scientific community emerged: the claims were false, and this embarrassing episode was, at best, an example of extremely poor science or, as many still suspect, outright fraud. As the history of human nature teaches, the former often evolves to the latter.

When the cold fusion fiasco was playing out, I was still an aspiring scientist who hadn’t yet earned the certifications or experience necessary to lay claim to that title, but the events had a profound impact on my personal and professional journey, nonetheless. I vividly recall riding the rollercoaster of emotions as I followed the soap opera of the scandal’s discovery. I haven’t stopped studying energy ever since.

A nearly unlimited supply of energy. Can you imagine?

What Pons and Fleischmann were after is an alternative form of nuclear energy that has long been a holy grail of scientific research: nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion differs from fission – the technology in place today, and what people generally mean when they say “nuclear energy” – in that it does not produce significant amounts of radioactive byproducts nor does it present a risk, however remote, of a reactor meltdown. But it also doesn’t work, and not for lack of effort. No laboratory has credibly reported producing positive net energy from a fusion reaction, and the conditions needed to run these experiments are rather extreme.

Successfully harnessing fusion in a commercially viable way would be a profound advancement for humanity, which is why the simple setup Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have discovered made the story go so viral. In the decades since the cold fusion fiasco, the more respectable science of hot fusion has progressed steadily, with billions being invested by dozens of organizations.

Just last week, in fact, the Financial Times published an article indicating that things are heating up again. The article describes how the field is attracting serious venture capital money with currently as many as 35 private companies pursuing this greatest of prizes. Andrew Holland, who heads the Fusion Industry Association, sums up the general feeling of the industry: “Fusion is coming, faster than you expect.”

While we are skeptical that nuclear fusion will be ready for commercial deployment anytime soon, we do love a good thought experiment here at the Chicken Coop™. Aside from the obvious disruption of the existing energy industry, what would a true breakthrough in nuclear fusion mean for the world? What second order effects could we expect? What unexpected consequences should we prepare for? What social advancements should come as a result versus what is most likely to actually develop?

photo credit: Forbes

We begin with the safe assumption that the predominate way nuclear fusion energy would be transmitted to society at large would be via electricity. It’s how the power of nuclear fission is harnessed today, and we see no compelling reason why this would change. We further assume that a nuclear fusion breakthrough would radically reduce the cost of generating electricity, perhaps even allowing it to approach zero. That’s the whole point, after all: cheaper, cleaner energy at scale.

We would expect developed societies to experience a massive increase in electricity use. In other words, we do not envision a scenario in which society pockets the gains. There’s a name for this phenomenon – it’s called the Jevons’ Paradox. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

“The Jevons paradox was first described by the English economist William Stanley Jevons in his 1865 book The Coal Question. Jevons observed that England's consumption of coal soared after James Watt introduced the Watt steam engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of the coal-fired steam engine from Thomas Newcomen's earlier design. Watt's innovations made coal a more cost-effective power source, leading to the increased use of the steam engine in a wide range of industries. This in turn increased total coal consumption, even as the amount of coal required for any particular application fell. Jevons argued that improvements in fuel efficiency tend to increase (rather than decrease) fuel use, writing: "It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth."

Nuclear fusion would be the mother-of-all steam engines, and electricity use would soar. It follows that another natural winner would be copper. If society is going to be moving a lot more electricity around, it is going to need a lot more copper.

If electricity generation were nearly free, there would be no meaningful benefit in transmitting it more efficiently. Existing aluminum- and copper-based transmission technologies do a fine job today and adding more of what you know is almost always cheaper than implementing a new technology. There goes the lead application for room-temperature superconductors.

With clean, abundant, and cheap electricity, there wouldn’t be much need for efficiency in use, either. Whole swaths of research and development projects meant to increase the energy efficiency of everyday items would be bricked.

What about electric vehicles? Surely, EVs would experience a surge of demand? We don’t think so. Quite the contrary. We submit that the development of nearly free electricity would mark the beginning of the end of electric vehicles.

Here is our logic. Nuclear fusion would make the production of green hydrogen nearly free, and nearly-free hydrogen in a pressurized tank makes for a far superior battery compared to lithium-ion technology. The key constraint to the development of the hydrogen economy has been the cost of producing it and the reliance on fossil fuels to do so. Nuclear fusion removes both barriers. A network of electrolyzers – systems that produce hydrogen from water using electricity – would have to be deployed, but once complete, hydrogen would cost almost nothing. The efficiency benefit enjoyed by Li-ion batteries becomes irrelevant in this context, and Li-ion will further suffocate under the weight of its need for green metals and their controversial mining practices. 

We further submit that hydrogen combustion engines – not fuel cells – would become the dominant technology that enables much of the transportation sector to take advantage of limitless electricity from nuclear fusion. Few realize that hydrogen combustion cars would require only minor changes to the way gasoline-powered cars are manufactured today. They involve no expensive batteries or fuel cells, emit no CO2, and use far less copper than electric vehicles (the release of which would be picked up by the infrastructure needs mentioned earlier). Toyota, a heavily invested leader in the technology, has a perfectly credible concept car out today. Other manufacturers stand ready to produce as well.

photo credit: The Drive

While limitless cheap and clean energy from nuclear fusion would be a wonderful thing, we are quite certain the developed world would not share this newfound excess with the poorest people on the planet. Cynical as that sounds, all evidence points to the reality that they would still be left to fend for themselves. For proof, we turn to another life-critical resource: water. Water is effectively free in the developed world already, and yet hundreds of millions of people in poor countries barely have enough to get by.

Putting the availability of the planet’s freshwater bodies aside, a gallon of clean water can currently be produced using seawater for a fraction of a penny at modern reverse osmosis facilities. This technology exists today, and it could economically provide drinking water to every living human on the planet. Water is so cheap in the developed world that we waste huge amounts watering our lawns. Every person who does so also knows deep down that there are people on the planet going without, but alas to waste is human.

We don’t expect this to change.

While you might disagree with some of the predictions in this piece, and we certainly left out many more we could have included, we close with one stone cold lock. No matter the benefit to humanity, no matter the impact on global warming, no matter how clean and safe the technology becomes, we are absolutely certain Greenpeace will steadfastly oppose all development of nuclear fusion.

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