The Future of Energy Isn't Fossil Fuels or Renewables, It's Nuclear Fusion
forbes.com
forbes.com
The whole point is to make it not a commodity you have to constantly buy and transport, but something everyone at all levels of infrastructure could make themselves locally.
There's a Moore's law of solar called Swanson's law which is on track for what in today's terms we'd effectively call "free energy" sometime in the nest few decades.
Another big idea is that these don't require any manual capturing, transport, and feeding of fuel. You install them, make sure they are clean and essentially that's it. Nothing more to mine or constantly load into the machine.
A robust, fault tolerant, dynamic system of community and family power is the actual future and only dramatically decentralized things like that will ultimately be politically viable and sustainable.
They will more likely survive wars and infrastructure collapse; something that a model reliant on a few multibillion dollar plants will never be able to do.
Sustainability is not only about ecology but also about decomodifying energy and not having to be constantly reliant on some large group of people maintaining an infrastructure to keep the lights on.
Anyway, my friend asks the insurance assessor how often he has a power failure at his house "Oh, only a couple of times a year" says the man.
In 10 years living off grid, my friends have never had a single outage.
Unfortunately, he pays something like $1900/month, because he is distant from the nearest fire station, and again, city-based insurance companies see that as a big problem.
The house is in the Yukon, far out there.
This post of mine has a photo of their "cabin" that is just down the road from their house. http://theroadchoseme.com/chillin-yukon-style
I just went through my photos, I don't actually have one of their house online anywhere.
I took these on a walk from their house: http://theroadchoseme.com/northern-lights-1
Also, "off-grid house in the Yukon" is extremely common :)
Not only is local, sustainable low cost energy production getting cheaper and easier but the post-industrial household energy use is going down.
We've replaced CRTs and incandescents. Our new buildings have better weather proofing and even our kitchen appliances have dramatically improved.
Even in places like Los Angeles, the public have been clamoring for and enthusiastically voting to gasp tax themselves to build mass transit systems. The average vehicle fuel economy has been going up consistently for years. This trend towards lower cost, more efficient things is one consumers have been wildly supportive of and will continue.
The future of low energy at low cost is the stated reason that companies like PG&E are moving away from nuclear based primarily on financial forecasts.
People can have their own wells, or collect and store rainwater, but most don't if utility water is available.
Every home in any remotely civilized area is already wired for utility power. Utility scale renewable energy, if that can be done cost-effectively, probably makes the most sense for the most people.
Otherwise you have an expensive purchase and installation of solar panels, a transfer switch if you keep utility power connected as a backup, battery installation so you have electricity at night, etc.
It's just more complexity and expense than most people want to deal with, compared to paying a hundred dollars or so a month to the utility.
By this time, the cost threshold of things in the class of solar is perhaps a few hundred dollar fixed cost for your needs. Just like you don't need to be an energy-saving enthusiast to get a non-crt computer screen today, low-cost commodity energy generation hardware will dominate the marketplace and essentially be the only consumer-facing option.
If you are an "I don't care" consumer like most are, the cheapest and best business model would be to have either someone come by and put the thing in or to franchise it out like 7/11 so every neighborhood gets their own low-cost plant.
Either way, large power-generation infrastructure projects are likely to give way to an even larger consumer-facing power-generator infrastructure.
In the shorter term someone somewhere (maybe reading these words right now) will come along and make a version of solar or solar-equivalent tech a sexy luxury toy for wealthy people to show everyone how rich they are. It will get hyped-to-hell-and-back. Big players will slap their head and say "oh darn that was obvious" and quickly move in to snatch the market and there will be a wild ride for all the VC groups involved. It'll mint a few 22-year old billionaires from either MIT or Harvard who will be paraded as visionary geniuses for our time. So lovely.
Don't know when, don't know where, but it's coming. (ok, my real guess is geopolitics will destabilize oil prices and create a climate for adoption within the next 3 years - the cost metrics have just started working out in the past 12 months)
The thing is, a water collection system requires constant upkeep. A solar power system requires some maintenance once in several years (like your roof). Even if they want to stay connected on the grid (batteries still require maintenance), they'll probably want some solar power.
He has replaced the entire battery bank once, and now has more panels that track the sun.
Although I'm a big fan of distributed solar, I don't think it's by any means so clear it'll become dominant. Utility scale solar is half the cost on a leveled basis. Given existing institutions, market structure, and the very non trivial problems involved in a P2P grid I think a federated model is much more likely, with some very localized distributed stuff in the mix.
YUP
any concept of 'sustainability' that ignores politics and human complexity is silly
And industrial energy consumers may need hundreds of megawatts for each plant. metal smelters, cement factories, ammonia synthesis, desalination, hydrogen production, transportation, ...
There are lots of non-electricity energy consumers that we want to transition off fossil fuels too.
And if we want to actively put CO2 back into the ground we might need even larger amounts of energy.
So fusion may still have a place to supply these base loads, especially in northern latitudes.
Fortunately, they seem to be growing in both efficiency and capacity/cost in a superpolynomial fashion. But they are still expensive, short-lived and require maintenance.
All funding for fusion was far below the level needed for breakthroughs to be made, so until the motivation and funding are at the level needed, I think we will probably not get fusion as soon as we need it. Eg 20 years from now instead of 10
But it seems like one experimental design failing shouldn't rule out the entire concept? It seems like it's physically possible, no? Ie nothing in physics rules it out.
A common misconception about fusion is that containment is all about keeping the particles from leaving. But often, it is more about keeping the energy from leaving. A momentum-based containment design like sonofusion uses is subject to Rayleigh instabilities which carry the energy away in fast moving particles.
Remember "Quantity has a quality all its own", but what that quality is isn't always easy to tell before you have it.
(For the record, I am very bullish on solar power, having worked and consulted in the industry. But I am also grounded enough to realize that the revolution will be gradual, not done in 10 years. 10 years is not much time for something so capital-intensive. It's not like phones or computers.)
I regret even commenting in the first place, because I hate feeding the dynamic of giving attention to poor quality and ill-founded comments. I wish I was discussing something constructive instead.
When the transistor arrives, vacuum tubes are just swept aside despite the fixed costs. Ten years did that, less in fact, I was there. There's a rather extreme threshold effect, once the right price point is passed, the old tech just falls off a cliff. There's a great chart of that happening to Kodak due to digital photography, extremely suddenly, despite all the fixed costs. They were making their best profits one year, staring at death the next. This link is close to the chart I remember seeing. Note the extraordinary difference one year makes! Every mall had a very expensive photo developing plant, then not. Scrap value only. https://macromon.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/creative-destructi... Because solar power effectiveness varies geographically the cliff will be a bit smoother, of course.
Only in a real banana republic could you hold new tech off for a half-century, and you'd need to halt trade to do it.
I'm old, I've seen a lot of change, and tons of valuable things - including large amounts of infrastructure, become valueless very suddenly, not to mention my collection of VCR tapes.
There is such a thing as first-mover advantage, but that applies to new tech not old, so I'm assuming you don't mean to refer to that.
I regret your stooping to vituperation. It wasn't necessary, or accurate.
Let's look at some facts:
* No one in the market agrees that energy will abundant and cheap in 10 years due to solar and batteries becoming far cheaper than natural gas. Natural gas companies have not been shorted to zero. Utilities are continuing to make capital expenditures. Natural gas plants are continuing to be built. Corporations are continuing to sign long-term power purchase agreements with renewable generators that lock in prices for 20 years. Maybe everyone is suffering from a collective delusion, or maybe energy transitions take decades.
* The EIA projects roughly flat energy consumption out to 2040, with natural gas and renewables taking share from coal and nuclear. Hardly abundant.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/0383(2017).pdf
* For natural gas power plants, about 1/3 of the levelized costs are capital costs.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
* There are strong dynamic effects that will slow the transition. As the penetration of solar grows, the non-solar consumption peak will move to night-time and the marginal value of solar falls by about 1/2. Conversely, as natural gas plants shut down, their cost of fuel will fall and the value of their spinning reserve and other ancillary services will rise.
* Building a transmission backbone for new utility-scale solar will take decades. San Diego's Sunrise PowerLink took 5 years of environmental review and construction, for instance:
https://www.irwaonline.org/eweb/upload/web_novdec_12_Sunrise...
* Increasing the supply of large power transformers to build out a new transmission backbone for utility-scale solar will face significant supply constraints:
https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transfor...
* Today no energy storage solution is economical. Probably the solution with the great hope of scale-based cost reductions is batteries. How many batteries would we need? World electricity consumption is about 50,000 GWh per day. If solar displaces natural gas, then for overnight and peak backup, we need storage on that scale.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+electricity+consu...
* Can we hope to even approach producing 50,000 GWh of batteries within 10 years? Global annual production of batteries is around 30 GWh a year right now. There are factories under construction now to bring that up to around 100 GWh around 2020. Given that factories take years to design and build, that means we need to scale lithium production by roughly a factor of 1,000 and scale battery production roughly a factor of 1,000 and get the plans and investment lined up in the next couple years. Is Tesla ready for 1,000 Gigafactories? Absolutely not.
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/l...
Regarding your transistor example - First, according to Wikipedia and Science magazine, the transition was gradual over the 50s and 60s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/05/return-vacuum-tube
Second, the size of vacuum tube industry was never the size of the global energy industry. Building new transistors factories can be done. But building new factories to ramp up to trillions in battery and solar cell production within a single decade is ludicrous.
P.S. I would appreciate it if your comments didn't assert to me 'You're saying' or 'Maybe you're trying to say.' It's more polite if you say 'What I think you are saying is....'
If you don't want to be asked what you're saying precisely, you just have to provide more detail earlier, or at the very least the proper rubrik. I just don't understand the hostility here mixed into factual matters.
There's little to answer in your last post. Your definition of gradual was decades; re solar power it's already been decades, but the actual transitions to new technologies - the mass adoptions - happen quickly - so you're really changing the subject. The first consumer product (radio) to appear in my city with transistors came in the early sixties, at a price of $79 - a fortune then - but only a few years after that, you couldn't buy a regular radio with tubes. The transition was very rapid. Kodak's stock took a long time to fall to earth, but the loss of revenue was sudden, and massive.
Re transmission - solar will strongly tend to be local. Batteries: you can look up discussions of Vanadium batteries (just one novel tech) elsewhere on HN, but note that individual batteries are now being built that are nearly 1GW - so 50,000 GW is very far from impossible - even if that figure turns out to be accurate. Not impossible at 5 cents a watt. Betting that this or that is impossible is usually a bad bet. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium-...
Actually, far larger "batteries" exist - reversible dams, many built only for energy storage purposes. Analogous mass systems have also been proposed using air and salt.
Also, even if Vanadium flow batteries achieve commercial success and drop energy storage costs down to 5 cents a kWh, that's still above wholesale electricity prices of 2-4 cents a kWh:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_mar...
Lastly, the EAI disagrees with your assertion that solar will be local (which I interpret to mean rooftop). It forecasts lower costs and higher volumes for utility-scale installations, which benefit from greater economies of scale.
Trillions of dollars are being invested in infrastructure now - and yes, it is mostly investment into renewables already.
He'll do this all in a cave of course.
Fusion, hydrogen fuel cells,...