The fusion vs. SPS battle

> ...
>
> In view of costs, the fusion program has been drastically UNDERFUNDED
> to date, so progress in such a high cost high tech area as this has
> been abysmally slow!!! People seem to think fusion is popular, but
> it isn't with the funding agencies in the government - they will fund
> basic research and weapons related research, but barely fund targeted
> commercially related fusion research!! The electrical utility lobby
> feels the same way about fusion as SPS or other alternative energy
> forms... they don't like it, since you only need a very few facilities
> around the country to generate all the electrical requirements for the
> grid, and THAT doesn't sit well with local utilities.... especially
> when every state has one to a few private electrical generation
> companies who wonder what will happen to their profits if we went from
> local plants which they own to regional plants - which WHO? owns. So
> they lobby their best to keep SPS, and fusion, under-funded..
> regardless of how promising it may be.
> ...
>
I had never considered the local utility problem before. I am not even
sure that I believe that it is an issue. From what I have seen the
utility system is composed of
- consumers (industrial, home, business)
- distributors (the local or regional company that maintains the power
lines)
- grid operators (the people that move electricity between areas in a
grid: Texas, West, East, {is there a central grid?})
- power producers (companies that produce power. In Texas there are in
competition for consumers)
- resource providers (gas, oil, coal, natural gas)
- regulators

The people that you are talking about are the "distributors". In Texas
they don't get any input into who's electricity they are moving. It is
hard to see them as stopping basic research. There seem to be more
choices for power producers in Texas than I can keep up with so they
don't seem to be able to stop competition. I don't see anybody stopping
fusion or SPS in the power industry if either was able to show a cost
benefit acheiveable within the next couple of years and there certainly
is nobody trying to stop basic research funding if it didn't interfere
with their own research funding.

Now of course the power industry has been drasticly reorganized in the
last few years. So it may have been true thirty years ago, but not now
(at least limited to my knowledge of the few locales where I have lived).

Mitchell James