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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Yes now put in the missing part. What is the maximum effeciency we can hope for and what is the areal plus inventions that needs to be done, the cost and the environmental consequence of large solar farms etc etc. fusion has a much better chance of being a reality than solar or even solar and wind together. You are living in a fantasyworld.

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Lets not look at the maximum we can hope for ever. Lets look instead at figures for what is commercially available now. So, say 27% maximum conversion.

Average insolation gives us ~6kWh over a square meter over a day, 27% of that gets us to 1.62kWh, divide by 24 to get the wattage, that's a 67.5 watts per square meter average before we get to storage or transmission.

HVDC has losses of ~3% per 1000km. Now lets look at round trip efficiency for storage. Typically you see a quoted figure of around 70% depending on technology type. So lets say a 65% loss (edit - this should read 65% efficiency, or alternatively a 35% loss) from storage and transmission.

We are now at ~44 watts per square meter, which gives us 456,000 square km from the 20 terawatt rating of humans. So ~5 Portugals, which is admittedly higher than my original figure of 2 Portugals, though you would presumably site your panels somewhere that gets better than average insolation, places like the Sahara, for example.

Also, for comparison, the Sahara desert is ~100 Portugals and the area currently used by humans for agriculture is ~550 Portugals.

And nuclear can do 1000w per m2 just to put things in perspective here and that's currently.

Now add to the problem of solar that it's unreliable, we haven't actually solved creating proper fuel cells and have no proper grid to distribute it through which is why ex. Denmark had to get their energy from the Germans this summer because Denmark who is based most on wind didn't get any wind and had to get from Germany who didn't actually use solar but instead coal. So you would need to actually solve that kind of problems too which we aren't even close to.

In other words. Whatever reality you or others imagine with solar or renewables you are far away from showing anything close to it being a realistic solution.

I am all for renewables but let's make it support a more fundamental and solid energy base like nuclear and then add solar on top instead proposing an inferior energy form when betters are out there.

>I am all for renewables

You have stated elsewhere that you think wind and solar are to do with communism. I am not sure exactly where you were going with that as an argument, but I really don't believe that you meant it in a 'yayy, communism' kind of a way.

No I haven't said that at all.

I have said that the claim that wind and solar is the way forward is to do with the "communism has never been tried" argument.

Why do you need to lie about what I actually said.

That may have been what you meant, but it was not what you said.

pjc50 said: This is very much the "true communism has never been tried" argument, isn't it? Unless you know a way of building it without people?

Then you said: "No its not at all the same cause thats not what i mean. I mean that people are ignorant to the dangers not that its dangerous. Has nothing to do with communism, wind and solar on the other hand do."

The way this reads it is as though you have skipped the reference and have started talking about communism itself as opposed to the "true communism has never been tried" argument. Now this may have been unintentional on your part due to poor English, but if I have misunderstood it was not due to me trying to conflate your words in any way. You did the conflation for me.

Fusion has pretty much no chance of being a reality, in the sense of being economically competitive. And this has been known for more than 35 years.

http://www.askmar.com/Robert%20Bussard/The%20Trouble%20With%...

(See? That's how you give a reference to back up a claim.)

And yet the Chinese just succeded with an important step.

You are using something written in 1983 as your support enough said.

The Chinese succeeded at something that doesn't do anything to address the devastating, fundamental argument Lidsky gave back in the 1980s.

Lidksy's argument is as valid today as it was then.

They succeeded in one of the steps toward a solution.

How far is wind and solar with realistic fuel-cells?

https://steelguru.com/metal/korea-zinc-installs-ess-to-power...

https://www.ewe.com/en/media/press-releases/2017/06/ewe-plan...

In other words. Not far.

When you write "EWE plans to build the world´s largest battery" you know you are dealing with PR not with reality.

Lets see how well that theory goes up against recent history.

---

Tesla to build world's biggest battery

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/07/07/tesla-buil...

Tesla mega-battery in Australia activated

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-42190358

---

Hyundai Plans World’s Largest Grid Storage Battery In Korea

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/12/05/hyundai-plans-worlds-la...

Hyundai Electric completes world's largest ESS

http://komec.kr/eng/Board.asp?menucode=0503010000&mode=2&no=...

---

I don't think Korea Zinc or the people of Adelaide are storing their power using public relations. I think, in reality, they had a battery delivered.

Again not far. Fuel cells to be used that allow for storing solar reliably, by all means, provide the evidence of the fuel cell industry making this possible not wishful proprietary technologies

>provide the evidence of the fuel cell industry making this possible

Hang on, so, you want fuel cells but dismiss someone building the world's largest battery using redox flow technology?

I take it that you don't know that redox flow batteries are a type of reversible fuel cell? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery#Redox

I want fuel cells at scale that can work anywhere just like batteries, otherwise you dont have a useful solution to the already utopian all solar world you guys dream of.

That would be cheap redox flow batteries, like the EWE project I linked you to.

One thing, I take it you don't see lithium scaling. Why is that? There is enough of it.

If someone's argument is that something is wrong and has been known to be wrong for a number of years and here is an article explaining why, you cannot really use the fact that the article being used as explanatory evidence has been around for the amount of years stated, as some kind of winning move against their argument.

You do know this, right?

Yup, I also know that we are actually seeing progress in that field because the Chinese are investing in it and which then obviously needs to be factored in like everything else.

The point was that fusion is as far of as 100% solar is. So again unless you show some actual proposals for how to get 100% solar to work realistically you are in no better position than the Fusion crowd is.

I'd be interested to know more about the Chinese research you are referencing. Could you point me to the research and explain how it overcomes those arguments of Lidsky? Is it using something other than Deuterium and Tritium, or has it found a way around the problems that Lidsky enumerated with the DT approach?

He's probably referring to this:

https://www.universetoday.com/140540/chinese-fusion-experime...

It's nothing very notable.

That thing is interesting for plasma physics though. It isn't really trying to be a fusion reactor, as far as I can tell from following the links past the article. Is more of a scaled down testbed. I have often wondered if the people working on tokomaks are more interested in the science you can do with them, than the potential for generating electricity, even if the people providing the money aren't entirely aware of this.

Its a step toward solving how to control the plasma. So yes its a pretty important step.

Better plasma control doesn't do much to Lidsky's argument though, if you have a look through it.

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