[taneq]

This is what gets me about fusion power being touted as “unlimited free energy.” The cost of the coal going in to a coal fired power plant is a tiny fraction of the final retail cost of electricity. If coal were free, retail power cost wouldn’t go down appreciably. So replacing the coal burner with fusion isn’t going to make it suddenly free from the wall socket.

[tuatoru]

Let's see. There's generation, transmission, distribution and final use.

The most costly part is probably distribution, taking electricity from the 11 kilovolts of transmission grid endpoints to street-level voltage and connecting up each house/factory. That's a lot of wire and a lot of maintenance.

If you can generate electricity and use it at the same place, you avoid transmission and distribution costs. If the cost of an extra kilowatt-hour is zero, as with PV once the systems are built, then the marginal cost for that use is zero.[1]

This implies we'll see large electricity users set up shop right next to, or in, PV farms.

1. It won't be zero zero, of course. Using the PV system's power control circuits (and possibly internal voltage step-up or step-down circuits) will affect their life. But those costs are pretty small in the scheme of things. Infinitesimal cost rather than zero, perhaps.

[Ekaros]

It really depends is the real answer.

Let's take a pretty low price of 50 per tonne from 2018. Tonne produces 2 460 kWh. Thus 2 cents per kWh.

But last year prices were at 400+ level and currently 170 I think. So about 6 cents per kWh. Not actually not that tiny fraction.

Ofc, this ignores fixed costs, and carbon credits that are huge price add.