61–70 of 309 posts
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> all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands Not without very large capacity gas/etc. plants available on standby (unless you’re fine with will below 99% availability)
We have to get fine with below 99% availability.
"Ever" is a very long time. Will we get fusion power in the next few decades? I wouldn't bet on it, but I also wouldn't bet against it.
China are churning out regular old fission plants, and have 27 under construction right now. Even still, the average build time is 7 years.
So even if we get some breakthrough and figure out how to build a commercial fusion plant, it's a certainty it won't be up and running for something like 10-15 years. Solar and batteries will be so cheap there won't be any discussions.
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> all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands Not without very large capacity gas/etc. plants available on standby (unless you’re fine with will below 99% availability)
We have to get fine with below 99% availability.
If we had one hour per day without power that would be about 95% availability. Most of us wouldn't even notice that if it happened in the middle of the night.
If we had 100% availability with an 18-day stretch without power that would be about 95% availability, but it would be hugely disruptive.
We already have a zero maintenance fusion power plant that will last billions of years and that outputs millions of times more energy per second than humanity uses in a year. We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic waves this fusion power plant produces and directly convert it into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like boiling water to turn a turbine. This technology is relatively…
I think it's clear that solar panels, while working today, clearly haven't been able to solve today's problems, or else this discussion wouldn't be happening. But we should keep investing in them, one way or another. Similarly, we should keep investing in the prospect of commercially viable fusion reactors. The harnessing of fusion reactors would be instantly revolutionary as opposed to the incremental progress solar…
Solar power can 100% solve our energy needs today. It’s cost effective at the unit level. It works at scale. It decentralizes nicely. Did I mention that it works? Every home could have rooftop solar for less than it costs to produce centralized power plants. (I have rooftop solar and it cost significantly less than a new car now my power costs won’t go up for 20 years at which point the panels might need a refresh but that part of the system is the cheapest part)
We could easily flip from subsidizing fossil fuels to subsidizing rooftop solar today and realize significant gains (higher roi by shifting the investment). If you spent one years investment in fusion and fossil fuel subsidies on deploying rooftop solar and grid scale batteries you’d change the energy story permanently. Energy would suddenly be plentiful. Fossil fuels would permanently shift out of relevance. Fission reactors would look like quaint and staggeringly expensive tools of a bygone age. And fusion which DOES NOT WORK. Would look even more like a silly dream.(We are no closer to fusion than we were 30 years ago.)
Why the fuck are we still talking about fusion when we have something that works?
We already have a zero maintenance fusion power plant that will last billions of years and that outputs millions of times more energy per second than humanity uses in a year. We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic waves this fusion power plant produces and directly convert it into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like boiling water to turn a turbine. This technology is relatively…
Will orbiting solar panels ever work? Now that starship is viable, payload cost to orbit will dramatically drop. Is it cheaper to have orbiting solar plants than solar/battery(or whatever long term energy storage)? It’s that baseload problem which makes the manmade fusion/fission attractive.
"Ever" is a very long time. Will we get fusion power in the next few decades? I wouldn't bet on it, but I also wouldn't bet against it.
At this point I would bet against commercial fusion power plants. It was always questionable if they would be cost competitive with fission power plants, but now even those are being replaced by renewables and grid storage. The bigger problem is that fusion plants aren't useful for making weapons. Fission plants were basically a side project of the nuclear arms race, which is why they're a dying industry now. The wor…
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> all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands Not without very large capacity gas/etc. plants available on standby (unless you’re fine with will below 99% availability)
We have to get fine with below 99% availability.
Suffice to say, less then 99% available is pretty terrible. You should come down and talk to a South African.
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Just by buying an electric vehicle I already have more than enough batteries to solve these problems for my household. The transition to EVs - which is a hard necessity to solve climate change, and well on the way - implies battery production that’s already within an order of magnitude of storing enough solar to supply power year round. As long as you’re not too close to the poles, but most people don’t live there an…
> Just by buying an electric vehicle I already have more than enough batteries to solve these problems for my household. Not if you live in Northern Europe. Solar is basically worthless there during winter. I’m not even talking about polar nights, just places like Denmark where the difference in production between January and June is 20x. No batteries (that we know of) would solve that.
Would love to see comments that actually respond to the article! Everyone here seems to be sharing their general opinions on fusion or a reaction to the article title. The article is actually very detailed!
1. I think it's highly likely that, at some point (and probably in the not-too distant future with ITER and DEMO), humans will produce fusion reactors that are self-sustaining with net positive output (ignition).
2. Given the inherent complexity and difficulty with fusion, I think it's unlikely to ever be cost competitive with simpler power generation technologies.
3. Perhaps most importantly, at least in the next human lifetime, I think fusion will be largely irrelevant in the quest for carbon-free power generation, mostly as a result of the timescales required. I think right now that everyone pretty much understands that the problem with decarbonization tech is base load and storage: carbon-free renewables like solar and wind are already the cheapest form of energy generation, but they're intermittent and unreliable. Given the latest climate data, I think it's imperative that we develop base load and storage tech in the text 10/20/50 years, or we're REALLY f'd. But I haven't heard even fusion's biggest boosters say that fusion will be ready for large scale deployment in those timeframes, at cost-competitive economics. Point being, by the time I think fusion might be ready for large scale deployment, we better have already solved the base load and storage problems with cheaper tech.
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Just by buying an electric vehicle I already have more than enough batteries to solve these problems for my household. The transition to EVs - which is a hard necessity to solve climate change, and well on the way - implies battery production that’s already within an order of magnitude of storing enough solar to supply power year round. As long as you’re not too close to the poles, but most people don’t live there an…
> Just by buying an electric vehicle I already have more than enough batteries to solve these problems for my household. Not if you live in Northern Europe. Solar is basically worthless there during winter. I’m not even talking about polar nights, just places like Denmark where the difference in production between January and June is 20x. No batteries (that we know of) would solve that.
4 months of the year (almost 5 if it's a really bad year like last year), there's virtually no production.
I work in the smart energy field, including with home batteries. The de facto standard size is still 10 kWh because the promised drop in price hasn't yet materialized on this market. I'd fill that up in 45 minutes during a sunny summer day. I maybe can use half of that during the night. If I were to charge my car during the night, then sure, I could use that, but it's just 10 kWh. That's like an 1/8th of the car battery.
50 kWh? Okay great, I'd fill that up in 5 hours. Don't really know what I'd use those 50 kWh for. Charge my car? Okay sure, but I don't drive every day, and never in the morning, so it makes so much more sense to do solar surplus charging once or twice a week. You rarely want to charge to 100% SoC anyway, and you should probably leave some additional capacity for FCR purposes.
100 kWh? The problem is that in summer when I can fill that in a day (assuming max power scales with the capacity), I cannot really empty the battery because my consumption is so much lower during the summer. I will only top it up a little bit every day at best.
What I really need is a fucking 10 MWh sand battery underneath my driveway that I can seasonally charge and then use during the winter for heating. Maybe it could also keep my driveway snow and ice free? Who knows.
And A/C in the summer I guess. That is actually what I'm going to get, because it turned out to be more stressful and agonizing to see 100 kWh go out on the grid for almost no monetary gain than I thought it would. Call me egotistical I guess.
Domestic solar is kind of a scam. I knew that going in, but I didn't anticipate the accompanying stress.