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I mentioned this yesterday, but storage is the new holy grail for cheap energy. If humans could focus on building safe and reliable battery tech instead of AI a

by 1970-01-01 2y ago

I mentioned this yesterday, but storage is the new holy grail for cheap energy. If humans could focus on building safe and reliable battery tech instead of AI and bitcoin, we will have solved the energy crisis until fusion is ready.

Ringz 2y ago
There are studies (at the bottom of my post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43424310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43424310) showing that storage is mostly a political issue.
epistasis 2y ago
We already have safe and reliable battery tech being deployed in massive amounts as is in plentiful evidence in this article. Solar with IRA subsidies is $30/MWh in the US, without subsidies it's $50/MWh. Current storage prices are probably no more than $60-$70/MWh for storing solar for later. New natural gas is $95/MWh at current gas prices. Similarly, fusion does not promise cheaper energy, at least I have never seen a numerical argument that could support that. If you have one, I'd love to see it. Fusion is mostly interesting because it doesn't exist so people can project whatever characteristics they want on it.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Helion hasn't released details, but they imply they'd be much cheaper. At this point I can't disprove that, as their scheme does do away entirely with turbines and generators and could have much lower cooling requirements.
kibwen 2y ago
Fusion is ready, and it's been ready for about 4-ish billion years. Once you deploy the panels needed to collect space-based fusion, there will likely never be an economical argument for Earth-based fusion. There's only so much simplication you can apply to a machine designed to contain a miniaturized star, especially compared to a dead-simple dirt-cheap solar panel.
- gridspy 2y ago
  You say "likely never" but eventually we'll have covered the earth's surface in solar panels. Unless we are transitioning to space based solar and transmission we'll want fusion to increase energy generation beyond surface irradience of earth. In the meantime, solar panels for massive generation also incur transmission costs to centralize that energy for any major energy usages. We might want to keep having high power generators next to super-high energy consumers. For instance our (theoretical) hyperspace communication and computation array. Right now those usages are things like Arc Furnaces, Aluminum smelters, data-centers, ... Plus, we'll want to have figured out that fusion tech so we can build it into our spaceships travelling out beyond Mars as an energy source and hopefully also a thrust source. We want to master that tech on Earth's surface for sure.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    > covered the earth's surface In any discussion of far-future considerations like this we need to remember that thermodynamics requires all energy used for work to become heat. Covering the Earth's surface in solar panels is one thing, but by the time we're covering every inch in fusion power plants, we've turned the Earth's surface to lava from all the waste heat. There's a physical upper bound on energy usage within the Earth's biosphere that prevents useful energy production from scaling to infinity, and as a result we'll find ourselves optimizing for economics rather than being limited by energy production per unit of area. As for industry, yes, it seems likely that industry will still represent a large and relatively centralized consumer of power which may benefit from a large dedicated installation. But I'm not convinced that fusion will ever be more economical than even traditional nuclear fission energy (just because your fuel is relatively cheap doesn't mean a thing if the plant itself is essentially disposable because of the energies involved). As for space, maybe, though considerations of space exploration aren't driven by economics, so whether or not anybody ever figures out a viable fusion reactor design for a spaceship could have as little relevance to civilian power generation as your classic RTG did.
    - pyrale 2y ago
      Plot twist: the death star was originally conceived as a contraption to regulate waste heat in artificial planets.

Ringz 2y ago

There are studies (at the bottom of my post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43424310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43424310) showing that storage is mostly a political issue.

epistasis 2y ago

We already have safe and reliable battery tech being deployed in massive amounts as is in plentiful evidence in this article. Solar with IRA subsidies is $30/MWh in the US, without subsidies it's $50/MWh. Current storage prices are probably no more than $60-$70/MWh for storing solar for later. New natural gas is $95/MWh at current gas prices. Similarly, fusion does not promise cheaper energy, at least I have never seen a numerical argument that could support that. If you have one, I'd love to see it. Fusion is mostly interesting because it doesn't exist so people can project whatever characteristics they want on it.

pfdietz 2y ago
Helion hasn't released details, but they imply they'd be much cheaper. At this point I can't disprove that, as their scheme does do away entirely with turbines and generators and could have much lower cooling requirements.

kibwen 2y ago

Fusion is ready, and it's been ready for about 4-ish billion years. Once you deploy the panels needed to collect space-based fusion, there will likely never be an economical argument for Earth-based fusion. There's only so much simplication you can apply to a machine designed to contain a miniaturized star, especially compared to a dead-simple dirt-cheap solar panel.

gridspy 2y ago
You say "likely never" but eventually we'll have covered the earth's surface in solar panels. Unless we are transitioning to space based solar and transmission we'll want fusion to increase energy generation beyond surface irradience of earth. In the meantime, solar panels for massive generation also incur transmission costs to centralize that energy for any major energy usages. We might want to keep having high power generators next to super-high energy consumers. For instance our (theoretical) hyperspace communication and computation array. Right now those usages are things like Arc Furnaces, Aluminum smelters, data-centers, ... Plus, we'll want to have figured out that fusion tech so we can build it into our spaceships travelling out beyond Mars as an energy source and hopefully also a thrust source. We want to master that tech on Earth's surface for sure.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > covered the earth's surface In any discussion of far-future considerations like this we need to remember that thermodynamics requires all energy used for work to become heat. Covering the Earth's surface in solar panels is one thing, but by the time we're covering every inch in fusion power plants, we've turned the Earth's surface to lava from all the waste heat. There's a physical upper bound on energy usage within the Earth's biosphere that prevents useful energy production from scaling to infinity, and as a result we'll find ourselves optimizing for economics rather than being limited by energy production per unit of area. As for industry, yes, it seems likely that industry will still represent a large and relatively centralized consumer of power which may benefit from a large dedicated installation. But I'm not convinced that fusion will ever be more economical than even traditional nuclear fission energy (just because your fuel is relatively cheap doesn't mean a thing if the plant itself is essentially disposable because of the energies involved). As for space, maybe, though considerations of space exploration aren't driven by economics, so whether or not anybody ever figures out a viable fusion reactor design for a spaceship could have as little relevance to civilian power generation as your classic RTG did.
  - pyrale 2y ago
    Plot twist: the death star was originally conceived as a contraption to regulate waste heat in artificial planets.