Re: Wireless transmission of power,

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Ed Phillips <evp@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 :("

	No disagreement, but I guess I missed my point.  What I meant is that
no one would operated a Tesla power system (assuming it worked) without
being paid for its output; if there was no means in place for getting
that payment no one would ever build one.

" >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."

	That's exactly what I think, although in the case of Wardenclyffe it
went a bit beyond that.  Apparently he vastly underestimated the costs
of building the thing according to his original plans and kept going
back for more and more money to build less and less.  At least that's
the impression I get from reading "WIZARD", which seems pretty authentic
for this time period.

"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."

	Again, right on.  You're bringing up the subject of capital investment
and the cost of money, of which most "free energy" fans seem to be
totally unaware.

Ed