Cost of ITER is gonna be around $20 billion.
That's 8 Topaz solar stations, together putting out 10 TWh annually. That would give 1.5 San Franciscos electricity at the cost of maintenance/staffing.
If fusion will ever become economically viable is an open question.
...and that's a good point. After working on fusion for a while, fission certainly looks attractive! I mean, it just works! And for all the hemming and hawing about safety, it's actually remarkably safe (in real terms) compared to just about any other energy source.
Makes ITER look like a drop in the bucket.
I'm merely saying that if we have $20 billion laying around you can imagine the practical route of powering the Bay Area completely on renewables right now.
How many $20 billion experiments are we away from fusion reaching those numbers?
And also, why not expand Fission production. We have 5000 years of global energy powering Uranium fuel supply in the oceans. Power everything with nuclear and you have a cool 1000-2000 years of no scarcity to figure out Fusion.
Cheap storage that scales far enough to run civilization isn't really a solved problem. We may solve it, but it's a research problem just like fusion is.
Another possibility is to get the planet out of the way by putting our solar power stations in geosynchronous orbit. If SpaceX delivers on the extremely low launch cost they're promising for the BFR, this looks surprisingly economical with current solar power satellite designs; a good book about this is The Case for Space Solar Power: https://www.amazon.com/Case-Space-Solar-Power-ebook/dp/B00HN...
I actually agree that space based solar power may make more sense than fusion, though. The path for space based solar power is through well-understood engineering. The path for fusion (while I'm certain it's possible) lies through less-well-understood plasma physics.
Cheap storage is much easier than either problem, IMHO. We've already pretty much solved it to the extent needed for civilization, it's just not as cheap as our existing sources of industrial energy. But we're very close.
If you actually spent significant time looking at what fusion and space based solar power require, then cheap storage looks much easier.
I read the above book cover to cover so you could say I've spent a decent amount of time looking into space solar. It's well worth a read. The early designs from the 1970s would have been hugely expensive even if launch were free, but new work since the late 90s has changed matters enormously. One key innovation is a change from a monolithic design to a self-assembling modular design, with a limited number of component types that are churned out in factories in large quantities. Another is retrodirective arrays, which use a ground signal to allow an array of small microwave transmitters to return a coherent focused beam to the signal source. The book estimates a retail cost of 15 cents/kWh; substituting the estimated BFR launch cost takes that down to 4.5 cents.
Tokamak scaling laws are very well established at this point, and MIT's ARC design actually looks quite practical. The construction is modular, the inner wall is 3D printed and replaced annually, the coolant/blanket is FLiBe molten salt, and the whole thing is about ten times smaller than ITER with similar power output. The JET reactor is about the same size and was built in four years.
It really, really does if you look at the challenges of making either fusion or space based solar power cheap enough in real life. In fact, it's so easy we're already doing it in places. For the other two, we're decades away from useful commercial output.
I've also done considerable calculations about space-based solar power. It's obvious why Elon Musk doesn't consider it a good idea. Even if your launch is free. (I still hope people try to make it work, though...)
Since you're interested enough to have done those calculations on SPS, I really think you'd like that book, which works out the cost and efficiency numbers in great detail.
The only comment I've seen from Musk was "You'd have to convert photon to electron to photon back to electron. What's the conversion rate? Stab that bloody thing in the heart!"
Meanwhile he wants to convert photon to electron to chemistry to electron.
To answer his question, the overall conversion rate is 40% with today's tech, and probably 60% with some more R&D. That's not bad given that you don't need storage at all, and at all times you have 30% more energy hitting your solar panels than if they were on Earth at noon on a sunny day. You're in sun 99.5% of the time.
The system works especially well with other renewables, because the ground stations are a small portion of the total cost; you can build extras, and point the power to the places you need it most.
And it's not even the conversion efficiency that's the problem. It's the cost of the conversion equipment. The power electronics, the microwave amplifier, the array, the receiver array, rectifiers, and power electronics as well as transmission all has a MUCH higher cost than the actual solar cells. Additionally, the minimum size space based solar power satellite and receiver station is super expensive, and the situation only starts looking like it might be worth it when you approach multiple Gigawatts per installation.
In some ways, space based solar power is based on the idea that solar cells are expensive and scarce and their output should be maximized. Nowadays, that's a strange thing to believe because solar cells go for 16 cents per Watt on the spot market, so we tend to emphasize the constancy. But really, even that is falling prey to technological advances in battery technology.
As far as "ground stations are a small portion of the total cost" and "point power to the places you need it most," that's simply not true. The ground stations would rival an equivalent solar array in cost, not even counting the space-based portion at all! But I suppose the in-space portion WILL be crazily expensive, so you might still have the ground-stations a "small portion of the total cost" while still being crazy expensive.
And due to the diffraction limit and required safety margins, your ground stations will have to be huge. You're not just going to beam power into the middle of cities with high aircraft traffic and safety concerns. The exception to this would be if you used much shorter wavelengths, such as mm waves or lasers, but there the cost of everything (amplifiers, optics, etc) is much greater, the realistic round-trip efficiency drops to like 10-20%, and you become much more susceptible to weather. Oh, and what you're building now looks a HECK of a lot like a weapon.
The cost of a 2GW ground station is $700M, which is pretty decent for a peaking plant that doesn't require fuel.
The idea isn't so much that you have to minimize solar panel size, as that you can entirely eliminate the need for storage, which is a big deal once we try to get past fossil backup. To see the scale of that problem, read A Nation-Sized Battery, by Berkeley physics prof Tom Murphy. Even if he's too pessimistic by a factor of ten, storage looks like a daunting problem.
The answer to season storage for solar, for instance, is to make the solar array larger, not to have a nation-sized battery. That means you only need a day or so of battery, not a week or months.
Also, why would you want to eliminate storage? Just like nuclear power, you'd want to use storage at very least to help convert a constant baseload power source into one that can follow day vs night demand. That is ultimately cheaper. And his complaint that batteries might require service? Well first of all he's off by at least an order of magnitude in cycle life, and second of all, yeah, why wouldn't we do a lot of service on batteries like we do on the rest of our energy infrastructure? That's a weird thing to focus on.
As far as material shortages: I find this highly doubtful. Lithium is not fundamentally rare. "Proven reserves" might be, but that is almost entirely a function of demand (provided your mineral isn't fundamentally rare, which lithium isn't). Other metals used in batteries, like cobalt, can be substituted by other more abundant minerals if desired, especially in grid storage. (LiFePO4 is one such chemistry.) That the author of that blog seems to not realize this pretty obvious fact strikes me as naivete dressed as "skepticism."
> There's a big sun throwing it's energy at us all the time.
Efficient fusion power would be absolutely fantastic, but I'll believe it when I see it.