7 ms·
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 u
by choilive 2y ago
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 cheap to produce, extraordinarily safe, can last for decades with minor maintenance, can scale almost indefinitely, and there are many practical improvements we can make to it that are going to applied commercially in years and not decades.
I don't doubt that trying to achieve commercially viable fusion is a worthy engineering and science challenge and that we will learn and develop many useful technologies along the the way - but fusion is probably the hardest engineering challenge humanity has ever attempted and after many decades of R&D there is still no clear path to commercial viability.
Solar panels today work, and they work well, and we can practically throw endless amounts of money building them and it will work. Today. And we needed solutions that work today, not 50 years from now... maybe.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- arrowsmith 2y ago> Solar panels today work But not tonight
- choilive 2y agoLuckily about 50% of the Earth is lit up by the sun at any moment and energy storage capabilities are advancing much faster than fusion's capabilities are. Distribution and storage are way more tractable problems than fusion. If you want to be really ambitious you can go to space and have 100% capacity :).
- okanat 2y agoUnless you colonize it, you cannot utilize 50% of the Earth's energy. If it proven anything, what the war in Ukraine showed us is how terrible of an idea to outsource energy, especially to nations who don't share interests with us.
- janalsncm 2y agoIt would be interesting if there was a global grid and market for (hopefully clean) energy so that a joule of energy could be sold anywhere instantaneously, just like any other commodity. This would allow countries to quickly power up without even building a power plant. It would also allow large base load power stations (like nuclear) to have permanent demand. Of course there are technical challenges of building out UHVDC everywhere. This probably means a joule isn’t perfectly fungible. Perhaps Europe’s problem was being overly reliant on only one supplier.
- IMTDb 2y agoA global and free market for electricity means that African citizens are going to have to outbid bitcoin miners and ai trainers for electricity. I would much rather see a world where governments are at least partially in charge of the grid to ensure that their population gets their share of the capacity.
- npoc 2y agoIt will be almost impossible to not outbid bitcoin miners for electricity due to the fact that mining is a non-geographically constrained free market where miners are not profitable unless their electricity cost is very close to zero (i.e. otherwise wasted energy). As soon as there's other demand for the same energy, bitcoin mining will instantly become unprofitable in that area and they will need to relocate.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoWell they didn't say a free market. I would certainly hope for some treaties making sure everyone gets a baseline before extras get put up to bid.
- Larrikin 2y agoNeeding the sun for energy and improving solar panel feels like trying to make the best ICE engine ten years ago or working on an expert system for AI in the 90s. There are obvious immediate gains in the short term, but research has shown there is something else better out there and its best if someone is doing the R&D now so we can get a leap frog moment eventually.
- bruce511 2y agoImproving solar panels might be nice, but the panels themselves are a cheap part of the system. And the big gains have already been made. Solar panels are now being produced and install at gigawatt scale. Per year. (Over 400gw per year, and climbing). Capital is being supplied by individuals (rooftop) and companies (utilities). I'm not sure what leap-frog tech you have in mind, but its not fusion. In the 60s fusion was touted as "free energy for all". But fusion is very (very) much not "free". The cost of a fusion plant will make your eyes water. The lead-time to build it will be measured in years. The output from one plant won't move the needle (we'd need hundreds of them). Electricity from these plants will be expensive, because at the very least it'll need to generate a return to the investors. And that's before we factor in running costs which (I guess) won't be cheap. The problem with fusion is not physics, it's economics. As long as we present fusion as a physics problem interest remains. Because once we view it as an economics problem it dies overnight.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- RAM-bunctious 2y agoI 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 promises. Therein lies the difference. Once is not necessarily better than the other. And it's not a zero-sum game.
- audunw 2y agoI would say it’s clear that solar panels are absolutely working extremely well today, at least as long as you don’t live too close to the poles. Renewables all together is growing faster than nuclear ever did. And solar is now a huge part of that. We have models where solar or solar+wind is providing all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands. Some small countries and regions are getting close too. It’s clear that we have all the technologies we need to do 100% renewables. There’s studies that indicate that the long term costs of this is lower than the traditional fossil and nuclear energy infrastructure. We just need to build the factories to continue scaling up. And of course the transition is more expensive than it’ll be when we just maintain and expand on the system.
- ffgjgf1 2y ago> 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)
- rowanG077 2y agoSolar panels clearly don't work wel enough to be able to solve our energy demands. A very significant portion of the day they don't work at all.
- burnished 2y agoWe call that the 'night' and our battery tech is improving enormously. Personally I hope solar becomes so cheap that mechanical batteries become popular - pumped resevoirs, inexplicable wood flywheel
- ffgjgf1 2y ago> We call that the 'night Or winter sufficiently close to the north pole (i.e. significant proportion of Europe). Days get short and it’s usually cloudy so solar becomes extremely inefficient.
- immibis 2y agoLuckily, most people don't live there and they are well connected to a big grid that isn't like that.
- ffgjgf1 2y agoWell… over 80 million of people live in Germany: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/monthly-generation-of-solar-pv-in-germany https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/monthly-gener... Over-provisioning by 7x might not be extremely practical. I guess there is a lot of space in Spain that could be filled with solar panels (production only falls by ~50% there in winter so it’s not to bad) but there is certainly not enough grid capacity to transfer all of that north (and building new infrastructure is painfully slow and expensive in Europe so it will take a few decades to solve that) My point is that solar is only a part of the solution and wind/etc. is probably more practical and more important in much of Europe.
- 2y ago
- jmpman 2y agoWill 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.
- mr_toad 2y agoFor a space based solution you have all the costs of solar, plus launch costs, plus the receivers are very large and costly themselves. It’s never going to be cheaper than solar, but it does have the advantage of working at night and through cloud cover. In the very long run it might make more sense to launch whatever’s using the power into space as well, saving on the cost of the transmission and receiving infrastructure, but also removing further sources of pollution from Earth.
- ComputerGuru 2y agoNo heat dissipation is a huge con.
- SoftTalker 2y agoSo you have orbiting panels that will do what? Beam the energy back to earth? Isn't the sun beaming energy to earth directly? What problems do orbiting panels solve?
- choilive 2y agoI actually don't think space based solar to beam it back to Earth will ever really be practical short of a space-elevator style tether to transmit the electricity down. But some of the pros would be as follows. * Capable of 100% capacity - power generation can be 24/7/365 if in orbits around the sun or stationed at the Earth-Sun Lagrange points. * Greater panel efficiency - less energy lost to the atmosphere that can be captured by the panels, closer orbits will increase efficiency even more due to more power/area * Surface area - minimum 1x10^20 square kilometers of area you can build panels There are of course many cons - but it could be a vital part to a space based industry - you need a lot of fuel or power to really do anything in space, and the power from space based solar could to be used to kickstart a fuel production facility off Earth. Fun stuff but not very terrestrially relevant. EDIT: Some more numbers: You get about 40% more power/area in space vs on the ground. You need about ~22 TW to "power" humanity. So you need about 70,000 km^2 of space based solar assuming 25% end to end efficiency, which might be a generous estimate. So lets round it to 100,000 km^2. But thats a significantly smaller area than the terrestrial equivalent of about 500,000 km^2. Right now it costs about $1B installed for a square kilometer solar installation, so we if can build solar panels on the Moon or something anywhere close to the same cost as on Earth (very very BIG if), potentially a difference of $400T dollars at todays terrestrial prices.
- ethn 2y agoSchockley-Quiesser limit
- Qwertious 2y agoOnly applies to single-junction cells. 68%-efficient solar panels are quite theoretically possible, they'll just be incredibly difficult to manufacture cheaply. The current world record for solar panel efficiency is 47.6%.
- ethn 2y agoI agree, however the author is convinced about current popular solar panel technology. Indeed even theoretically we can do 86% multi and 99% with quantum dots——in the current state of technology these remain science fiction considering the commercial manufacturing processes available.
- lambdaone 2y agoThat's certainly a hard limit for a cell with a single P-N junction. However, with a bit of ingenuity, we can do much better than that; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limit#Exceeding_the_limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...
- ethn 2y agoSure there are many novel solar technologies that subvert the SQ assumptions thereby avoiding the conclusion. However, the author of the parent post believes that existing technology today is sufficient.
- numpad0 2y ago[flagged]
- choilive 2y agoI think claiming that it is an ecological disaster is catastrophizing at best and certainly subjective. The ecological impacts involved in coal mining, oil drilling et al., are much worse than installing some solar panels that can easily be ripped out and let nature recover the land if we so wanted. Humanity will get the energy in one form or another, solar panels certainly seems less damaging than fossil fuels. The land will either be dug up for resources, or paved away for a power plant regardless. In addition, solar panels can be put up basically everywhere in an urban environment - an area already "destroyed" by human occupation - there are many many viable locations for solar outside of deserted wastelands. replacing it with endless sheets of silicon wafers literally injected with heavy metals of your preference, be it gallium or cadmium or arsenic(PVs are photodiodes; it's created by doping silicon coated substrates), which is polar opposite of environmentalist attitude. Doped silicon is a solid and stable material - it can't leach out into the environment. In addition, the dopants are in very low concentration (on the order of 1 atom per million), you can ground the silicon to dust and not make a significant impact to the soil's concentration of the dopants. Also, gallium/cadmium/arsenic are not common dopants for silicon based photovoltaics, so you might be conflating dopants and GaAs based PVs, which are not used in large installations due to their cost. Silicon is cheap, plentiful, and safe. basically zero environmental resistance too[2] and don't last a year. In case it's not clear, `less than a year` is at most 10% of a decade. This is blatantly false. The vast majority of solar panel installations last longer than a year. Is your point that nature will find a way to destroy a man made creation therefore it is a poor choice? Sorry to say that NOTHING is immune to the whims of the environment. Conversion efficiency of solar panels is also capped to ~30% by "chemistry" of Si-based PV, which is lower than even typical hybrid ICE cars. The conversion efficiency of most power plants are limited by the Carnot cycle - and in practice are about ~40% efficient. So yes - while a Si only panel that only captures that single bandgap is capped at about ~29% - most forms of power generation are not THAT much more efficient relative to the complexity and cost of operation. There are no other commercially viable forms of energy generation that is a solid state material with no moving parts. Solar cells had only ever worked in extremely mild climate such as California, surfaces of Mars, and inner orbits[3] of Solar system. There's no prospect that that will change soon. I would not say Mars has an "extremely mild climate". I certainly would not go outside in my beach outfit. Solar cells work basically anywhere where the sun shines.
- sdenton4 2y agoExactly this! Fusion power is eight minutes away. Always has been.