Stephen Bannister and Jed Rothwell - LENR Economics and Commercialization | LENR Forums Cold Talks

Transcript

foreign is a city in the northern Sweden for about 10 years ago I was starting I started a learning a community online community with name leonardforum.com [Music] at my side I have Ruby carrot she is an author and an artist and a sitting in Eureka in California and on my other side I have Alan Smith sitting in uh well quite close to London I not know how long but close to longer in the UK and I think everybody knows Alex Smith he's a well-known learner researcher uh so over to you Alan okay I I think it's my my duty now to introduce the rest of the panel members which is um of course our our old friend uh Lena archivist and uh friend and companion to many Lena researchers Jen Rothwell who uh who stars regularly On Lena Forum yeah he does like an argument and also our very special guest today Stephen Bannister who's a historian perhaps I should say economic historian and uh principally an economist at Utah University and both Jed and Steve have done very remarkably good presentations at iccf 24 in Mountain View California recently um and where Stephen and I had the pleasure of a long argument about the enclosure acts but never mind that's another story um I'll pass it back to Ruby now who's got the first question I believe well thanks Alan uh thank you very much I certainly did enjoy those presentations uh that both Stephen Bannister and Jed Rothwell gave at the conference and uh if you're out there you want to see these presentations just go to YouTube and search iccf 24 and you can see all those presentations but the first thing I want to ask you both uh and I'll start with you Stephen you referenced in your talk um energy and the economy uh Jed Rothwell cheap in referencing uh breakthrough technology what did you mean by that what what does JED Rothwell cheap mean and when you're finished I'd like to get Jed to respond of course so so um I what what I was referring to is a couple of things first of all Jed's paper of I don't know was it three or four years ago Jed you started that yeah and I've got a new version coming uh updated version I can't wait for this um a lot more detail great um and it and I pulled rightly or wrongly I you know I I generally don't pull facts out of uh you know background energy fields or anything like that so I read it somewhere or thought it somewhere anyhow I what I recall as Jed said in that paper that it was the new energy available through lanr related Technologies could be as much as 200 to 600 times cheaper than whatever we have right now yeah and then what with my macro background and research interests on energy and economic activity globally first of all I I studied the English Industrial Revolution and uh was very I I came to the strong conclusion that was an energy Revolution primary primarily a lot of other things happened but they were generally after the energy Revolution and knowing that and this strong correlation between energy inputs and economic output and therefore living standards I mean that's why we're all sort of rich now except for distribution you know asymmetries but anyhow um so I can convert that now so an estimate of Cheaper energy from this technology into what it means for two important things uh getting rid of carbon combustion fuels of all kinds so oil gas uh wood and what am I miss I'm missing one cold Cold's on the whale so those are the big ones and replacing it was something clean so this that those cost estimates help me with that to estimate that at least at scale the size of it a potential size not necessarily timing I'm still working out the timing we don't have a good method there yet but I'll work on that here uh so at any rate taking that that one of those estimates whatever whatever it ends up being if it's significantly cheaper than what we have now then we can estimate how much how much the new how quickly essentially or not quickly but at what scale will the new energy source replace carbon sources one and that's my primary interest from my research but secondarily the implications for future economic growth are stunning now like Second Industrial Revolution at much larger scale so it's very exciting and I really started quantifying all this at iccfs I appreciate you know the opportunities to um to share this with you well Jed uh what do you think about his use of this uh estimate and uh where do you think that's a pretty big range where do you see it's going to fall in that range well it goes in stages start with a cold fusion cell assume that looking at the cost of materials the cost of manufacturing similar objects such as batteries and you can begin to estimate how much it will cost uh look at also the highest power we've achieved so far and assumed they will all achieve that same level then okay what kind of heat engines are you going to use just assume that they will be the conventional mechanical ones we have now well we know how much they cost they sell thousands and they sell millions when you include automobiles so we can estimate the cost of those things today is 300 to 500 per kilowatt hour the cost of an automobile engine used as a generator is ten dollars per kilowatt uh kilowatt not kilowatt hour capacity that is so it's it's fairly easy to make a rough estimate of the cost of cold fusion after it after it becomes widely used when when you start manufacturing millions of generators uh it comes in at about a hundred two hundred dollars per kilowatt of capacity uh then when you develop more advanced heat engines such as thermoelectric devices things like that the cost starts to come down some more the initial cost would be around 20 times less than Today's Energy that would be 10 or 20 years after it's introduced that's how long it takes uh technology to become commoditized commodity that's what we call it in the computer business uh computers were introduced around personal computers around 1980 by 1990 or 1995 they they they were far cheaper and they were also interchangeable and the patents were expiring so anybody could make one that's what will happen with cold fusion that also happened with the Model T Ford the 1908 to 1924 the cost fell and fell and fell and then it reached the low point it happens with a lot of Technology uh so anyway that's after about 10 or 20 years it will be roughly 20 times cheaper than Today's Energy and then additional improvements can be predicted and a hundred years from now it'll probably be hundreds of times cheaper but that's the basis of the it's a very simple-minded analysis it really is I'm just looking at the cost of materials and we all know what generators cost because they sell lots of them already it's easy it's easy to project that that's all there is to it thank you thank you Jed I think we perhaps we could go back to Steve um you've you have talked and with great erudition if I might say so about how closely human living standards are related to the let's say affordable and available energy yeah about access to energy going right back to the Industrial Revolution perhaps before and you've also said the cheaper the energy the faster as as Jenna said perhaps yeah the cheaper the energy the faster it will be taken up does Jed's modeling seem feasible to you does it seem possible that uh 20 kilowatt generators for twenty thousand dollars oh no two thousand by after fifties after 20 or 30 years two thousand dollars absolutely I I mean I I think the um this is just what what is happening right now in in Leonard Community is just the beginning of as Jed has pointed out of a a transition to much cheaper and some very interesting possible new energy sources that will radically change essentially everything I mean everything living standards especially get rid of carbon fuels on and on those are two biggies for me um so that's very incredible yeah let me point out that I wrote a long book about this sort of a short book cold fusion in the future um full of ideas and they're not my ideas I stole them from other people I talked with the Arthur C Clarke and Luigi and malov and many others and put chapter after chapter describing the technology changes that might occur um but I don't take credit for them I'm not an expert I talked to an admiral in the British Navy and many other people so that's where all that stuff came from so it's it's got a lot more credibility than it would if it was just me that's right you you um talking of the future a clean planet in uh in Japan that they're testing a one kilowatt prototype and they've had they claim that they've had an experimental unit running for over a year now so this is our this r d r d that we're talking about now confusion r d is is contributing to their um 350 watt metal hydrogen Energy System as well which they're due to release in 2025 this could be the beginning let me ask both both of you what more do you think about this commercial effort people like clean planet and do you have any details of you do you know anything about what that might cost because I have no idea they've been a Bitcoin but Jed speaks Japanese he gets one he gets more scaffold back than me no it does not it does not need Palladium it's my understanding as long as you don't need precious metals the cost will be very low uh ordinary batteries use lead and they're very cheap uh and this gadget would have to be for to to generate electricity for a house you need about 20 kilowatts in the U.S or Europe which means you need 60 kilowatts of heat you can look at the prototypes and the diagrams and whatnot they put out and you can estimate that the gadget would be uh be the size of an air conditioning unit uh it's really not that I mean the external central air conditioning unit not that big and not that expensive the initial ones will cost a ton of money a hundred thousand dollars perhaps but there's no reason why a manufactured object of that nature cannot come down to um two to four thousand dollars after many years of development there's it's easy to estimate that and by the way regarding timing that's very easy to estimate because we know how long this stuff lasts around 15 years is how much any kind of home generator or refrigerator automobile less once you start selling them people are not going to want to buy anything else because it's so much cheaper after 15 or 20 years the power companies will be out of business there's no question about that you're possibly right yeah you have thoughts on that Steve sure sure sure so uh let me let me sort of introduce or reintroduce my you know my the importance of energy in history and the English Industrial Revolution is the most complete example historical example there are others but certainly England sort of discovered um the secret let the genie out of the bottle if you will so um and I've made an estimate uh you know a statistical estimate of for the English industrial revolution of how much each energy input changes economic output per capita so that's real living standards per person and it's about the ratio is about 1.54 so for every unit of energy you get 1.54 units of of uh economic output now I'm sure that's changed over the years and I have the data I just haven't had time yet redo it with more more modern data set but I will but just using that you can see the impact right and my strong sense after more than a decade of doing this is that it is energy that's the crucial input everything else can be substituted away from any other input essentially energy cannot now Source can change but you've got to have that unit of Jewel or BTU or however you measure it you got to have that or you get no activity so it's essential that's great um by the way I do think that Japan will be a phenomenal country in which to introduce Cloud Fusion because I so they're all early adopters in Japan it's part of the national culture and uh in fact Mitsubishi you've had tremendous success dishing out a little 500 watt fuel cells uh that run on Bottle Gas uh to places in the country places in the town and they just provide an emergency lighting circuit a bit of hot water and um enough energy to run a radio or a TV or whatever in case of earthquakes or emergencies but people just buy them and use them anyway they really like it because they see it as clean energy yeah and no exhaust and very just a little CO2 very easy that's a great great story I hadn't heard that but let me tell you one step further on sort of the economic side so given what I just said about energy and economic output um we can estimate and I I maybe now is a good time to throw a couple of numbers out is that the right time Ruby so so so the energy eia energy uh information agency in the U.S has an estimate of the price elasticity of fuel fuel source substitution right so that's elasticity no I hear you're less to see my my ears start burning as an economist and that in the long run long short run is tough because you got to change infrastructure this Jeb is Jed has pointed out but in the long run their estimate is a one elasticity that means for every oh I don't know 10 percent reduction in cost average cost you get 10 percent increase demand for that Source replacing presumably something else so that's why I get excited because Jed's number even 20 even 10. wherever we start but at 20 that's what a 2 000 percent decrease in the average cost of energy yep and at that rate I mean that's what I'm I'm thinking about how to estimate timing for for from a growth standpoint you know technology and infrastructure how quickly that could happen but I think it could happen pretty quickly I think Judd is saying you know um 10 to 20 years I think he said Jen is that right yeah after the after the mass production begins not not from now I understood I I understand but also what I know is an economist the bigger that price differential the quicker things will happen sure yes and also yeah also convenience is a big issue absolutely Model T Ford began to really clobber the railroads passenger railroads in the 1920s by the 1930s it was a crisis FDR had to introduce legislation to uh pension off all the railroad workers cars were cheaper than railroads but also they were far more convenient and more beneficial useful also if I may follow just follow on to that story um it may be a Pocketful but I think it's accurate in the U.S the um replacement in at least in urban areas of horse transportation with model T's and you know other other Autos took about 12 years that's about right my mother was at Cornell studying economics in 1938 and the professor there said that the Depression was caused by the replacement of Horses by cars and said that the peak was 1920 28 the same as the Depression started the peak of the horse population that is for the entire country and by the 30s of course horses were becoming quite rare in most places this is so interesting that we can see from the history and think about what will happen in the future because sure can we go over to the next question for sure this is another type of question uh we know that the war is all not always but often connected to to minerals or to energy or to this stuff and this question we need to zoom out a little bit and what do we think about the war in Russia connected to Ukraine if if we have a breakthrough can something happen oh I don't think it's over energy Russia's got tons of energy they don't need and they're not fighting for energy maybe for the grain but not um exactly they're using it you know as a oh yeah sure negotiating ship and threatening Europe essentially with cutting off energy supplies to try to gain that that leverage an advantage so over history again resource contention you know fighting over resources especially including energy and oil and so forth has been a major driver in geopolitical changes including Wars I mean the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because they were because the U.S cut off their oil that's correct you're a good historian next legit and there are some um reports I think very you know well done that world war one was fought essentially over cold and and that's credible to me and so this is not I mean this is not unusual so you know the other benefit of going to Jed Rothwell cheap I hope you don't mind me returning that appreciate it okay it you know you you sort of get rid of those those irritants in the International System and that's a big deal and and I should say very briefly that the implications Beyond I mean all the social economic system implications of such a change are going to be very dramatic to me unpredictable but they're going to be huge yep the technology changes we can predict many of them but nobody can predict them all because well to give an example we all knew that computers were coming on rapidly in 1980 but not many people realized that they would change um Hotel doors or bath you know bathtubs or kitchen gadgets phones actually that was somewhat predicted by Arthur Clark but the point of it is that technology always affects much more than you expect fundamental technology changes always go much farther than anyone realizes at when they begin things like railroads and Automobiles had a profound impact on them the whole landscape of the US so so just real quickly you know following on to Jed there the my estimate and it's rough I could improve but it's good enough for now the Industrial Revolution and everything followed on caused essentially an eight-time increase in global living standards uh Judd Rothwell Chief will start at 20 times so you can expect over time for two and a half or three times the uh impact on the global system from an economic standpoint and living standards which is what I focus on I was going back to that I hear these numbers um I think about how vastly different things are going to change and I wonder about how our use of these numbers will change we know how money has changed in the value of money has changed do you think when we get to a point where our energy is Jed Rothwell cheap that we could actually live without money like in Star Trek I have no idea I have no idea um I'm doubtful when you I mean I I know uh it's not quite my specialty but I know quite a bit about the history of the money and money in what some form or another goes back well at least to um Sumerian so that's what ten thousand years ago if you're not spending money on energy you're going to be spending on something else and you need a standard to compare apples to oranges so you know which which ones are more expensive and some people have actually proposed using energy as as that standard the numerator was it Arthur among other things I'd miss that I got to read your book now no I was in one of his books but he didn't anticipate the uh the the cost of Cold Fusion fuel over per year is about the same cost as bubble gum literally it's a couple dollars at most the average cost of bubble gum uh in the U.S so essentially energy will it will drop there'll be no need for Department of energy or anything else I'd like to point out two other important aspects of this first it does not require a distribution infrastructure of any sort right you just put it into the engine when you do when you make it and take it out when the engine is scrapped like like a battery like the acid in a battery and and second uh it can be decentralized completely which which means everybody can have their own source which means you don't have to have a power company and it also means the Russians can't possibly cut it off right there's no you can't it can't be used as a weapon at all those are some of the huge institutional changes we're going to face yeah truly I mean so um absolutely and and a whole change actually in the in the revenue base the the UK government fetch it you know gets 700 billion a year from taxes on on gasoline and and uh gas and so on yeah it's uh and and taxes on the companies that produce it uh it's going to be a big hole in their revenue anymore um perhaps will move to an age of smaller government but and more equal governments are usually very creative and lobbying taxes so yeah they'll find something to text yeah so yeah opinions probably yeah have a tax on opinions okay um is there anything else Ruby that comes to mind uh well I just want to thank uh both of you for coming on and talking uh about your specialty and um I hope everybody goes to the YouTube uh channel search iccf 24 solid state energy Summit and watches these videos uh Jen Rothwell has a number of computations that estimate the various costs as we move forward in this breakthrough economy and uh I know I've got to listen to it uh five more times to get it all so uh thank you both uh well I'm writing a paper you don't have to look at the videos I'm I will soon upload a paper with all of the calculations and and many others do we still have a little bit of time because I have a couple of other okay of course yes of course so you know I think again I think the uh my thoughts here all right first of all that that the um we haven't made greater progress in that L A and R and at least in terms of commercializing it yet and we're you know a lot of catalyzing ideas out there and I think that's a partially a lack of funding definitely for the underlying research and I compare the you know Ellie and our funding to something like hot Fusion funding which I think I probably raised some eyebrows at iccf saying that's not going to work folks for science reasons I don't want to go into that right now it gets pretty technical but they're using the wrong science so it's not it's not going to work and and that but that's just emblematic of any uh other replacement for carbon has a higher cost it's going to raise the average cost of energy virtually every scheme is like that hydrogen unfortunately the same way and um therefore this is what's so intriguing to me about Len R because it can be initially very cheap and getting cheaper through time so it is a very promising start I think there are other Technologies Beyond well maybe not Beyond a million r as we continue to evolve the definition but um you know I I'm very fascinated from a future Source standpoint with the what I call the direct electricity Technologies yeah and I think uh George eggley um is headed in that direction maybe a few others but that's an intriguing thing I've actually I'm aware of a device that works commercial in Mexico of all places that appears to be that you know it's just a chip the two-time multiplier input to output and I'm going well why don't we develop that but let's let's if if we can get enough funding and momentum behind lnr research to get a commercialized as soon as possible that will be a huge enormous step and I'm actually beginning to gather ideas funding ideas from the academic side which is where I you know I sort of live on on how to try to accelerate that so I'm I'm beginning to do a starting on a proposal to the National Science Foundation very much along these lines and I will be reaching out to you folks as part of that as it goes along I hope that's okay that's great well I'd like to point out one other thing that sort of semi-technical aspect of this uh the model T4 came along and it began lowering the cost of transportation and then they began inventing all kinds of what you call peripherals better tires better roads uh cheaper gasoline the the core technology was was the internal combustion engine but it gave rise to a whole many many other things that pushed the cost down over the next 20 to 30 years the personal computer began with the CPU chip a one chip computer 1975 I think but that's not why computers are so cheap it's not just the CPU chip that's the core technology but after that came along they began inventing cheaper hard disks cheaper screens cheaper printers all the peripherals began to go down in cost there would be no point to building a cheap printer when CPU when computers still cost 20 000 bucks a piece that would be there's no market for that cold fusion being the core technology when that gets cheaper it it Spurs the invention of many other Technologies uh heat engines and many other things refrigerators thermal refrigerators I mean one's driven directly by heat and a whole host of other things and that's why the cost comes down so much the core technology gives a market opportunity for other things to come along and that's what drives the cost down that's why it takes so long to absolutely Amen to that and as far as research donations uh go you know where I live okay um I think we're about ready to wrap up are we Ruby yeah thanks so much um uh David do you have uh any final thoughts uh I just need to say thank you so much so nice to have you here both of you are all five I need to say uh so for more information about the topic about learner you can go over to learnerforum.com and if you want to stay updated you can follow in the newsletter if you sign up at leonardforum.com you can get a newsletter one times a month with the with the most important parts so thank you so much let me let me just say I I hope I have a chance to at the next iccf um to you know have a more developed estimate based on Jed Rothwell sheep and I'll you know he'll be my co-author on this presentation so yes thank you so much I look forward to that it's all right calling it jedworth Rothwell Chief just don't get it the other way around there so thank you so much everyone okay thank you thank you everybody bye-bye bye-bye bye [Music] foreign [Music]