Focus Fusion will greatly lower energy costs, raising living standards for everyone. How does this work? Take the U.S., the world’s largest consumer of energy, as an example. Right now, energy costs burn up about 16% of the typical individual’s income. That’s one dollar out of every six. For a median household with an annual income of $51,000 nearly $9,000 a year, about $22 a day goes to energy costs. Of that $22 about $4 a day is for household use of energy—in heating and electricity bills (or the share of rent that goes towards the landlord’s bills) $6 a day is for transportation—mainly gasoline, and $12 is for the energy costs of the goods and service we buy—all the energy that goes to producing our food, the things we buy at the store and the services we use.
For the world as a whole, about $2 a day per capita goes for energy of all sorts, most of that for petroleum alone, which right now is the most expensive source of energy. The median global income is harder to calculate than that for the U.S., but the best estimate is only $3 per day per capita. So for the world, the typical person spends nearly one dollar in three on energy, either directly or in the goods they buy.
With Focus Fusion, costs of living will come down by 16% in the U.S. and at least 33% globally. It’s unlikely that this will have to wait for Focus Fusion to completely replace oil, gas and coal. The price of petroleum is artificially inflated by the tight matching of production with supply. Once Focus Fusion even starts to become commercially available, such tight matching will become more and more difficult, and prices will likely drop rapidly towards the true cost of production—which in many oil-producing regions is only $5 to $20 a barrel, far less than the current $120-a-barrel price.
Energy Cost Comparison
Right now, solar is the most expensive form of energy, while coal is the cheapest. Focus Fusion would be far cheaper than any of them. Here are costs in dollars per million BTU of energy. The comparison is the cost of the energy content of the source, not the cost of producing electricity.
Source for cost comparison: https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020 Costs for wind and solar include our estimates, based on IEA and other data of storage costs for a base-load power system that used only solar and wind. Other sources don’t need storage as they are not dependent on the weather. | |
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