RE: Wireless transmission of power,

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: "Steve Conner" <steve.conner@xxxxxxxxxxx>

>power (really energy) is a commodity which costs
>money to create and the creator is entitled to recover fair profit on
>his creation.

That would only be true in a communist monopoly. In a free market economy
the creator of a product is not "entitled" to anything, he just has to hope
Joe Public will buy enough of it at a high enough price to let him turn a
profit. Patent offices are strewn with the corpses of clever inventions that
people just did not want to buy, and quite a few of them are Tesla's. Some
of them are mine and my colleagues' too :(


>I haven't been able to find any reference to anything Tesla
>might have said about the economics of his world power system

I imagine that is because he never thought about it. His financial backers
probably DID think about it, and I suspect that is why they pulled the plug
on Wardenclyffe.


>wires and pylons and extension cords are the most inefficient
>part of our present system.

I can't decide whether professor Toby Ballantine (whoever he is) is being
serious here or just having a laugh. But he brings up a few interesting
points.

To start with, power stations are the most inefficient part. The Second Law
of thermodynamics limits the efficiency of a practical heat engine to about
40%.

And, last time I checked, power lines were actually designed with the
efficiency required to make maximum profit. You set the cost of the energy
losses off against the cost of the repayments on the loan you had to take
out to buy all the wires, pylons, insulators, transformers, etc.

If you spend more on parts (thicker wires, bigger pylons to hold the extra
weight) you get a more efficient power line. So you lose less money in
wasted electricity, but you pay out more on the loan. Somewhere in between
there is an optimum where the total cost per unit transmitted power, over
the service life of the line, is a minimum and that is what designers aim
for. It works out around 80-90% efficient. In other words, the efficiency of
power lines has very little to do with technology, it all comes down to
money!


Steve Conner