by godelski | 2025-08-02 20:22:26+00:00
Sure, maybe a hospital is not the best example, but it's just serving as a way to see how it is useful. Was just a stand in for something relatable where it was understood how much someone would be willing to pay for a backup. But I'll get to better examples in a second.

> Diesel generators are typically used for emergency power

Yes, but you aren't comparing the cost of storing and delivering diesel. Yes, grid power will be cheaper but is that difference than the costs of storing, transporting, and the need to constantly check? Is it cheaper than the handover time? The time lost when electricity is down. Can you smoothly hand over generation? Is it cheaper than the cost of the gas having spoiled? These mistakes happen and they can be quite costly when it does.

> but it doesn't seem like a huge market.

It definitely is not a huge market. That's why there's a premium. But there are people that need and will pay for it.

I'm also willing to bet you're significantly underestimating how many remote locations there are.

Let's test ourselves. (I got the answer wrong btw and I'm willing to bet most people do.) How many research stations are there in Antarctica? Make a guess first. Here's the answer and a link[0]. And here's for the Arctic[1] (there's more!). These don't even include secret sites! Hell, I'm sure there's even a few towns in Norway[2,3] and Alaska[4], or elsewhere[5] that would be lifetime customers. 1MW isn't close to enough power to supply some of those cities but I would be surprised if they didn't want a highly reliable 1MW source of power and 2MW of heat and weren't willing to pay a high price for it. That energy goes a long way in emergencies.

You're right that many of these locations have oil and gas as major industries but you are not considering two factors. 1) That still needs to be processed. You can't use oil or gas in their raw form (okay, sometimes gas but it still may contain contaminants that need to be separated). 2) You're eating your own supply. It's a lot easier to just export everything than to portion everything out. This is especially true when the product expires. If you don't rely on your own export then you never have to make the choice between "do I have enough for myself" when the product is in high demand elsewhere.

Things like this have extremely high demand for military sites. They'll pay way more to not have to have constant deliveries. We're not even just talking places like nuclear launch sites. There's hundreds of remote listening locations. There's plenty of places that you add one of these to and they could run completely automated.

If we're talking about a really remote location (there are quite a lot of these) then which is cheaper? Once every 5 years helicopter delivery or a constant delivery every 6 mo by truck? That first option could be a lot cheaper. You don't even need to even make a road! Certainly one of these options is much faster.

Again, you're right, in that this isn't a technology we're going to see everywhere (especially at a high price point). But that's a very different thing than "there's no point in building this". I'm just trying to answer the latter question because that's what you put into question. I'm still willing to bet there's a bigger market for this kind of stuff than you would think.

And to be clear, I don't think you're dumb or unimaginative or anything. I see you around here a lot, so I know you're smart. I just think with something like this it's a "everything is an edge case" type of situation, where it is very hard to actually get a good picture. First order approximations won't get you anywhere near the right answer. They're really hard to guesstimate without some expertise. I only know some surface level because I did some work with nuclear tech and we had to find applications. But what I know is that there's a lot of situations I'm not even aware of because even though they are edge cases we're talking about edge cases on the scale of billions. Even serving just 0.00001% of that is probably more than enough to warrant a product like this and make a profit.

[0] Wiki lists 44 permanently active stations and and 45 summer only ones. There's a map below the listing. I was at least 50% off on my estimate. I thought at most there would be 2 dozen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_stations_in_Antarctic...

[1] There's 57 active stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_stations_in_t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammerfest_(town)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honningsv%C3%A5g

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utqiagvik,_Alaska

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_northernmost_settlemen...