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> solar and wind are wholly up to the task, and just need building out. This. Every time I read a fusion "breakthrough" story I imagine the history books of th

> solar and wind are wholly up to the task, and just need building out. This. Every time I read a fusion "breakthrough" story I imagine the history books of the year 3000: "Back in the early 21st century, they spent billions trying to build a star on Earth, when there was a perfectly good one in the sky that produced 1000W per square meter that they could have used for free."

zaphar 5y ago
We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet. Both are intermittent producers so to get truly reliable power from them we need storage capacity. There are projects that promise to meet that need but positioning solar and wind as all we need is not a true statement.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  > We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet. How is this an interesting argument? Of course we don't have things before we build them. That's true of nuclear power plants, too. We can likely build out storage faster than NPPs, with more aggressive cost decline with cumulative production.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    I put numbers in another comment, but this isn't a "just build some more batteries" type of problem. The scale of storage needed completely dwarfs our current production capacity. This problem cannot be solved in the near future, with current production/technology.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      It is dishonest to pretend batteries are the only viable storage method.
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    >We can likely build out storage faster than NPPs First, this is yet to be determined. Even assuming it is true, which I'm not sure it is, The problem is not limited to storage - you also need massive transmission system upgrades that will cost on the same order of magnitude as an Apollo program. I think in the long term it should certainly be done, but pretending that the cost of solar and wind power is the cost of solar panels, or even the cost of solar panels + storage is not comparing apples to apples.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      We are down for many, many times the cost of Apollo, regardless. The only question is how much available power we will get for that. The very best one running is solar+wind+storage, far ahead of the others.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Energy is huge. The world will likely spend the equivalent of approaching a quadrillion dollars over the next century on energy. The Apollo program, in comparison, was less than a rounding error.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  Yes dispatchability is an issue with renewables. We need more transmission too. Both can be solved (and are being solved) with existing technology today, and both are improving all the time. It's both practical and economical today to build an off-grid house with PV and enough Li-Ion storage to bridge the nighttime gap and charge an EV. With distributed electricity generation e.g. microgrids, the need for big, centralized storage decreases, as does the need for large-scale transmission. By the time fusion generators exist in a practical form (at least 20 years from now), we won't need them.
dahfizz 5y ago
Imagine if we went the other way: "they spent billions on solar infrastructure, so that they could keep the lights on only when the sun was shining". We don't have the storage. We are not close to sniffing the amount of storage we need to be 100% reliant on solar + wind.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  To get a sense of scale: The USA uses on average ~76 twh per day. Tesla produced ~100 gwh of batteries over the whole last year. So if we nationalized all the tesla gigafactories, it would take us over 760 years to produce enough batteries to store a single days worth of electricity. I do not think grid storage is solvable with current technology.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    What a terrible argument. A global energy supply system is a huge thing. That means it will make sense to spend literally trillions of dollars on it. This will mean building enormous capacity to build its components, including as many battery factories as we need.
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      Once we agree that the solar + wind solution will cost trillions and take decades to scale up anyway, the benefits of fusion start to shine through. We may as well invest all that time and money in scalable production that doesn't exhaust the earth's supply of natural resources.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        What benefits? The fusion solution would be even more expensive, and not available for decades, if ever.
      - zardo 5y ago
        That sounds like a proposal for just not de-carbonizing until fusion is ready. Is that what you mean? When do you think we could have say 5% of the worlds power coming from fusion reactors?

zaphar 5y ago

We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet. Both are intermittent producers so to get truly reliable power from them we need storage capacity. There are projects that promise to meet that need but positioning solar and wind as all we need is not a true statement.

pfdietz 5y ago
> We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet. How is this an interesting argument? Of course we don't have things before we build them. That's true of nuclear power plants, too. We can likely build out storage faster than NPPs, with more aggressive cost decline with cumulative production.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  I put numbers in another comment, but this isn't a "just build some more batteries" type of problem. The scale of storage needed completely dwarfs our current production capacity. This problem cannot be solved in the near future, with current production/technology.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    It is dishonest to pretend batteries are the only viable storage method.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  >We can likely build out storage faster than NPPs First, this is yet to be determined. Even assuming it is true, which I'm not sure it is, The problem is not limited to storage - you also need massive transmission system upgrades that will cost on the same order of magnitude as an Apollo program. I think in the long term it should certainly be done, but pretending that the cost of solar and wind power is the cost of solar panels, or even the cost of solar panels + storage is not comparing apples to apples.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    We are down for many, many times the cost of Apollo, regardless. The only question is how much available power we will get for that. The very best one running is solar+wind+storage, far ahead of the others.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Energy is huge. The world will likely spend the equivalent of approaching a quadrillion dollars over the next century on energy. The Apollo program, in comparison, was less than a rounding error.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
Yes dispatchability is an issue with renewables. We need more transmission too. Both can be solved (and are being solved) with existing technology today, and both are improving all the time. It's both practical and economical today to build an off-grid house with PV and enough Li-Ion storage to bridge the nighttime gap and charge an EV. With distributed electricity generation e.g. microgrids, the need for big, centralized storage decreases, as does the need for large-scale transmission. By the time fusion generators exist in a practical form (at least 20 years from now), we won't need them.

dahfizz 5y ago

Imagine if we went the other way: "they spent billions on solar infrastructure, so that they could keep the lights on only when the sun was shining". We don't have the storage. We are not close to sniffing the amount of storage we need to be 100% reliant on solar + wind.

dahfizz 5y ago
To get a sense of scale: The USA uses on average ~76 twh per day. Tesla produced ~100 gwh of batteries over the whole last year. So if we nationalized all the tesla gigafactories, it would take us over 760 years to produce enough batteries to store a single days worth of electricity. I do not think grid storage is solvable with current technology.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  What a terrible argument. A global energy supply system is a huge thing. That means it will make sense to spend literally trillions of dollars on it. This will mean building enormous capacity to build its components, including as many battery factories as we need.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    Once we agree that the solar + wind solution will cost trillions and take decades to scale up anyway, the benefits of fusion start to shine through. We may as well invest all that time and money in scalable production that doesn't exhaust the earth's supply of natural resources.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      What benefits? The fusion solution would be even more expensive, and not available for decades, if ever.
    - zardo 5y ago
      That sounds like a proposal for just not de-carbonizing until fusion is ready. Is that what you mean? When do you think we could have say 5% of the worlds power coming from fusion reactors?