"We should put more resources into breeding faster horses now, internal combustion can wait." - someone in late 19 century.
Railroads run off of coal, but steam-engines were huge. ICE engines were miniature engines that also ran off of a fuel source (eventually settling upon oil, but many different fuel sources were considered in those early days, including electricity).
---------
Such benefits are not immediately obvious with solar/wind. In particular, USA doubles its electricity usage each day, and then it shrinks down to 50% by nightfall (which does NOT time with the sun, its slightly offset: the 5pm sun loses most of its solar-power but homes are still hot and using a ton of electricity for A/C)
As a baseload plant, solar/wind, even with storage, is a bit unreliable. That's fine, they're a cheap source of energy but you need to consider things like hurricanes: winds too fast so you need to shut off the wind plants (otherwise they'd spin too fast and damage themselves), and the cloud cover so thick you lose most of your solar power.
Since there's no storage mechanism that lasts for days (ex: hypothetical hurricane), you end up needing to build a 200MW gas turbine ("just in case"), +200MW of clean energy.
Note: this is fine. This is probably the best path forward for now. But nuclear is reliable and doesn't need this "natural gas assist". Even if a hurricane sweeps over an area, the nuclear power plants will keep working.
EDIT: The issues come up if someone builds 200MW of solar panels / wind but fails to build any "just in case" energy sources. Which is happening. Their grids will fail when solar/wind inevitably cuts off.
Because the "opposite" of air conditioning is just a heat engine (taking "hot" and "cold" source, and using the difference to generate locomotion). In fact, all engines are glorified heat engines: be it a steam turbine, ICE, geothermal, or whatever
When air gets hot, it expands. When air gets cold, it contracts. So heat up air through some mechanism (hot side) to push a piston up. To pull the piston down, either use momentum or the cold-source (cold air contracts, pulling the stuff down).
The sterling engine is the best general purpose demonstration of this, and you can buy such engines for $20 to $100 or so.
ICE engines use gasoline as the hot source. Steam engines use steam (water at 100C) to transfer the heat from the hot source to the needed locations (heat can be from nuclear, coal, or other sources)
----------
Air conditioning is just this process in reverse. Expand the air forcibly by applying force to the piston. This cools down the air. "Gather" the coldness through some mechanism, which heats up your air inside the A/C unit while cooling whatever is on your "cold plate".
Push the hot air and compress it down. This heats up the air even further: "transfer" the hotness through some mechanism (aka: heat something else up, like the air outside the house). This cools down the air inside your A/C unit.
Now find a fluid that's more efficient at this process than oxygen. Then realize that fluid is terrible for the Ozone layer and write a regulation for a newer, crappier fluid that's less damaging to the Earth, and you have modern A/C units.
> It seems like you’re removing energy from the air.
You're just transferring the hotness somewhere else. Go feel the air that your refrigerator outputs: its far hotter than the air inside. If you measure the energy, its the energy that was "stolen" from inside the refrigerator + the energy "spent" on the heat pump (that compression / decompression cycle takes work, and work generates heat)
We can transfer heat around, but it costs energy. Alternatively, a difference in heat can be used to gather energy, but it will "Average" the temperatures and eventually the hot-source and cold-source will be the same temperature.
We can use fuels to make the hot-source stay really, really hot for long periods of time (as long as we have a source of fuel), and that's basically the design of steam engines / heat engines.
You might enjoy a physics course, especially if you enjoy calculus, although an entry level course won’t require it.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if someone thought that, but given the frequency with which oil was being discovered, it seems reasonable that people would have assumed it to be effectively unlimited.
But by the time ICE engines were getting invented, it was a done debate IIRC. Horses used to pull trains after all, the steam engine replaced horses in train-usage decades earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway, for the animal-based predecessor to trains)
Nikola Tesla spoke glowingly about how we don’t need coal, oil, or gas if we just harness the energy around us (what he meant here was quackery, unfortunately, but wind and solar accomplish very much the same thing). People understood from the beginning that coal, oil, and gas are finite.
Interesting off-topic: according to Vaclav Smil, the number of horses in the USA peaked in the 1930s. In Europe, later still. David Edgerton's book The Shock of the Old talks about horses as well, among other "outdated" technologies.
Actually, they don't.
"As a precaution measure, the reactor shall be shut down at least two hours before the hurricane’s strong winds arrive at the location. Generally this happens when the speed reaches between 70 and 75 mph (between 113 and 121 km/h)." (https://www.foronuclear.org/en/nuclear-power/questions-and-a...)
Also, they need electrical power to keep the reactor cool---typically the power grid and co-located diesel generators, not necessarily the best redundant backup system.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/27/136920/the-new-s...
They'd need to start shutdown sometime before that.
Fun fact - Rudolf Diesel's first engines were running on cooking oil. In fact, many diesel engines can operate on vegetable oils without modifications (not long term though). That sounds odd, but from the perspective of "burn hydrocarbons to generate heat", petrol, diesel, oil, body fat, coal or kerosene are all very similar to each other.
"Why breed faster horses now when maybe my grandchildren will get to zoom around in cars?"
Keep in mind horses and cars co-existed as mainstream transportation choices right up till the end of world war 2.
Actually, jhallenworld's comment was saying exactly this: "We should put more resources into storage now, fusion can wait".
That's what prompted my response about horses in the first place. Analogy is apt, because first engines were wildly inefficient compared to horses, yet, if people back then would never pursue them, we would never have eventual progress. So no, while we should invest in storage, fusion CAN NOT wait.
And how many times have we heard the phrase "a decade" in this field?
That’s a substantial, qualitative change in the state of the art of fusion technology. Now we need to do it dozens of times per second and make steam from it, while using efficient lasers and breeding tritium from the lithium jacket.
Works kind of like the EUV light sources TSMC uses to make the highest end computer chips, except a fuel pellet instead of a drop of tin. Like so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy
1. Sabine Hossenfelder, How Close Is Nuclear Fusion?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY&t=8s
2. Nicholas Hawker, A simplified economic model for inertial fusion, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33040650/
SPARC/ARC would enable a tokamak at a smaller scale (and self-sustaining from bootstrap current, most likely) but ITER is so far out of the running that something can be much better than it and still not be practical. ITER's gross fusion power density is 400x worse than a PWR's reactor vessel; ARC would only be 40x worse.
The first commercial production system will be an alpha build. The second and thirds are betas. It's only after those are completed that there's enough information to make commercial plans.
As of now, this system the GP is talking about hasn't even been built yet and won't be operational until at least 2025. And even when it is built, it is just a lab experiment designed to run in 10 second bursts. There are numerous more steps after this design phase before we get to commercial application.
Ten years is a pipe-dream for commercial application.
I'm excited to see progress in this field. But we are doing it a huge disservice by spreading misinformation about it. There are still a lot of problems to be solved before these are ready for prime time. And these problems will require a lot more funding to solve. If people sit around and talk about how this will be ready to go in 10 years, then who is going to want to fund it into year 11?
Scientific funding is directed largely by politicians. And there are many, many political opponents to science in our current Congress. Giving them ammo in the form of empty promises doesn't do advocates for fusion energy any good.
The honest answer is, we still don't know if tokamak will ever make for a viable commercial power plant. Best can be said is that it has been demonstrated to produce net positive energy for short periods of time, and that there is confidence that improvements can be made. That's it. The viability of commercial application has yet to be demonstrated and may never happen.
Now, suppose you live in one of those areas. Two questions:
1) What year was solar first ready for commercialization? 2) Would you ever consider that year's solar tech outside of extremely niche applications?
Fusion seems a good illustration of this. Work started on it about half a century ago. Its motivation was "fission will be cheap, but uranium will get scarce, so let's build fusion reactors that have cheap fuel!" Except fission didn't get cheap, the cost turned out to be dominated by the cost of the power plant, not the fuel, and fusion reactors don't solve that problem AT ALL.
I think that that's a better technology comparison because internal combustion was able to leverage the theoretical insights originally derived for steam. There's no shoulders-of-giants effect going on for nuclear fusion, as there wasn't for steam.
The Watt design is when we finally saw steam engines replace animal power in the late 1770s. So not quite 100 years.
But yes, ICE development benefited from all the problems solved by steam power generation. I believe the ability to machine pistons to an accuracy of 0.1" wasn't developed until around 1750. Prior to that, people just hammered iron roundish and called it a day. Good enough for large steam engines, but not too valuable with an ICE.
CO2 emitted by horses comes from the food they eat, which is absorbed from the atmosphere in the first place by the plant when it grows.
And a ton of the greenhouse gases from agriculture come from using oil, a major component of that being from tractors and crop dusters (which wouldn't exist in a horse-only world).
[1]: https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-m...
But to address methane: That's cows not horses. Cows produce far more methane than horses.