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It's not viable. The goal of producing fuel is for explosive, quick release energy. Things like cars, tractors, heavy machinery need fuel. Lighting your home a

It's not viable. The goal of producing fuel is for explosive, quick release energy. Things like cars, tractors, heavy machinery need fuel. Lighting your home and things like that work fine with predictable trickles of energy that can be produced easily with solar. The energy density of a fuel like hydrogen means that you need significant surface area to produce usable quantities at scale, quantities that then are burnt quickly. You have to make it at the rate that you use it, which means it's just added complexity in the stack of getting solar energy to where it will be used. It's just solar power with extra steps. Add to that, solar power isn't this unproblematic perfect solution. It has a whole host of problems. First and most obvious is the mineral requirements to produce it, and extracting those minerals is incredibly destructive. Disposal of waste is also destructive. But another problem nobody talks about that is dismissed because it is seen as a small problem, is the problem of surface area. A limited amount of energy hits the surface of the earth, and life uses every drop of it that it can. Energy production with solar scales two dimensionally. You can't scale this up without significantly damaging ecosystems. A little box you pump very little resources into that produces absolutely massive amounts of energy, something with a very small footprint that scales extremely well, that's what you want. Solar isn't it. Solar is great, but it's a stopgap for fusion. Everything is a stopgap for fusion.

Kon5ole 2y ago
Nothing at a global scale is without downsides, but solar has fewer problems than any other energy source. It is cheap, easy to deploy anywhere, can reuse existing “ruined” land (buildings, farmland, bodies of water) without needing any new area for the foreseeable future, and is easily dismantled too. Within few years it seems likely it’ll be trivial to recycle it as well. The only downside is that it’s intermittent, which hydrogen solves. The “extra steps” convert intermittent solar to predictable energy, useable 24/7/365. It’s not a device to transport solar to _where_ it will be used, but _when_ it will be used. Even if fusion actually worked, it would be inferior in a major way - it concentrates too much energy in a single point. With solar and gas, energy could be distributed and redundant. No sabotage or failure can cut the energy supply to millions of consumers at once, and energy would be created where it’s needed. Fusion could still be useful for science experiments requiring enormous amounts of energy but IMHO it’s not a good idea as a grid source.
binary132 2y ago
Photovoltaic is only one way sunlight can be made to move electrons.

Kon5ole 2y ago

Nothing at a global scale is without downsides, but solar has fewer problems than any other energy source. It is cheap, easy to deploy anywhere, can reuse existing “ruined” land (buildings, farmland, bodies of water) without needing any new area for the foreseeable future, and is easily dismantled too. Within few years it seems likely it’ll be trivial to recycle it as well. The only downside is that it’s intermittent, which hydrogen solves. The “extra steps” convert intermittent solar to predictable energy, useable 24/7/365. It’s not a device to transport solar to _where_ it will be used, but _when_ it will be used. Even if fusion actually worked, it would be inferior in a major way - it concentrates too much energy in a single point. With solar and gas, energy could be distributed and redundant. No sabotage or failure can cut the energy supply to millions of consumers at once, and energy would be created where it’s needed. Fusion could still be useful for science experiments requiring enormous amounts of energy but IMHO it’s not a good idea as a grid source.

binary132 2y ago

Photovoltaic is only one way sunlight can be made to move electrons.