> I'd love to see some numbers here because without them it's easy to assume this is not cost competitive with solar+battery in +5 years given current trends.

> I'd love to see some numbers here because without them it's easy to assume this is not cost competitive with solar+battery in +5 years given current trends. [On nuclear fusion] “It's kind of as instructive to ask what's not the problem as it is to ask what is the problem. There is a problem. The problem is not cost. It's not that energy generation technologies are expensive. The cost is lower than it has ever been to generate electricity. It's also not intermittency, and there are a lot of studies out there looking at getting to very high penetration of renewables, and how you manage that grid with those intermittent sources, and the answers sort of range between, let's say, 60% penetration of renewables to 100% penetration. I can't argue about that, but fundamentally I think it is possible to manage that grid and, even more so, the cost of doing so is not prohibitive. [A consultancy called Systemic] added on the cost of intermittency, basically paid for with lithium ion batteries and gas peakers to deal with the hardest intermittencies to deal with—which is not when the sun goes in front of a cloud, but when it's summer or winter, that difference. So this isn't a carbon-neutral grid, it still has gas in it, but the total cost of intermittency adds about $15/MWh to the levelized cost. So you take solar, for example, from 35 to 50. Well, gas costs 80, so this doesn't change the picture. Solar and wind are still the cheapest sources of electricity. The problem, and this is where fusion fits, and this is where any new energy technology fits; the problem is scale. This is looking at the growth in deployment of solar and wind in a global sense. [...] This is the total sum of wind and solar based on current policies. We wanted the most aggressive scenario for the deployment of solar and wind, because we wanted to know the answer to the question: do we actually need fusion? So we took these curves, this is continued exponential growth. We did this last year; reality is already behind this model, because last year, 2018, growth in renewables flatlined for the first time. We assumed continual exponential growth. You add all of that up and you compare it to the total demand for electricity. [...] Renewables can get us to half the required electricity generation. A lot of the stories you see in news take that number and compare it to how much electricity we need now, but you know electric cars are coming, right?, electricity demand is going to increase. If we're going to get to net zero, whilst overall energy consumption might be falling, the demand for electricity is substantially rising because actually only about 20% of energy is electricity, so, you know, the energy in my car I drove here this morning was not electricity. That is what creates this clean power gap and this is why ultimately we need new technologies. We cannot get to the scale required to meet net zero by 2050 with the technologies that we currently have.” https://youtu.be/DtvcEkIb4D4?t=653 https://youtu.be/DtvcEkIb4D4?t=653