>You can't have [access to sunlight] constantly due to the rotation of the earth. This is the main counterexample to me, since it applies to commercial power g

>You can't have [access to sunlight] constantly due to the rotation of the earth. This is the main counterexample to me, since it applies to commercial power generation on Earth. Even underwater/underground, in probably 99+% of cases, a simple cable is easier than a self-contained fusion reactor, and for the remainder of cases (submarines, aircraft carriers, space colonies, etc) it has to compete with mature self-contained fission reactors on cost/safety/mass/volume/longevity/acoustics. With that in mind, couldn't anovikov's question be trivially rewritten to "Any chance fusion could beat that price, even taken into account solar's dismal load factors and the Li-ion batteries it needs to deliver constant power?" Remember too that energy storage has been following a slow Moore's Law (halving in price every decade), and looking ahead in the R&D pipeline it shows no sign of slowing. Solar is the lazy person's (hacker's) fusion. Who needs to put the Sun in a box when we have the Sun itself? Seriously, why waste money on the box? (again I refer to commercial power here, not space or military) Understatement of the century here, but gravitational confinement has been rather extensively demonstrated. With this fundamental laziness advantage, I expect mature commercial solar to economically beat mature commercial fusion in the long-term. Heck, fusion doesn't even have a scaling advantage over solar. They're both limited by the Earth's heat rejection capability. If you built enough fusion power to exceed the power of the sunlight that hits Earth, oops you just fried the surface... TL;DR for grid electricity, solar+batteries will inevitably "win" over fusion.