OK so with fusion everybody loves it because the fuel would be clean and nearly endless.
Isn't that what solar power offers?
Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However, wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?
Isn't that what solar power offers?
Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However, wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?
Solar has the upside of actually producing a power surplus already, though.
First off, the daylight cycle is an obvious concern and there still isn't a great way to store solar energy during the day for use by cities (or generally large consumers) at night. Not to say it's not possible, but people are largely still trying to figure out what the right solution for that is.
Second, the startup requires a significant amount of land in advantageous locations for sunlight. There's a lot of the planet that just won't see the same advantages as others, and transporting energy long distances to them is another unsolved problem.
Lastly, and this is more for fun, but solar won't be as useful when we as a species aren't exclusively on earth anymore. Fusion would be a pretty nice step forward for things like space travel.
Both have a really high startup, but achieving fusion would mean 24/7 clean energy that works regardless of environment.
Solar makes great sense for places where energy consumption is higher during the summer than during winter.
Not a concern at all. Google renewable energy storage. It is there but there is profit merit, so it is not welcome
CSP has been dying for years however because Photovoltaics are cheaper. However, this is largely due to regulation. Solutions are picked based on price per kWh. CSP cannot compete on that with Solar cells. However today government have started modifying regulation so that a premium price is paid to those which can deliver power at night.
CSP projects then become competitive since unlike solar cells they can deliver power at night. In the past CSP projects delivered power the whole day. Now they are increasingly only delivering power at night, thus getting the premium price.
This goes to show that to get desired development in renewable energy it is crucial to get regulation right. Until now, regulation has not properly rewarded projects which can deliver power on demand.
However once that is in place, thermal and cryogenic storage of power will become competitive and be built.
The main issues with renewable energy sources today are electricity storage and transmission. If it weren't for these limitations, wind and solar would already be superior to other means of energy production.
Most likely problems with storage and transmission will be solved first, before fusion energy is proven to be commercially viable. However, there is no guarantee that they will be—especially in the case of transmission, which is primarily a political problem.
Both of these are solved with fusion power.
Energy market operates on the assumption that whoever unbalances the network has to pay for balancing it. Providing too much and too little energy is both bad - you have to pay someone else to use more/less or to produce less/more to balance the mess you made. There are specialized powerplants for this, they are "on standby" and jump in when needed - and they charge much more than the normal powerplants. When there's a big shortage they can charge absurd prices for energy. And if you caused the shortage by mispredicting weather - you have to pay for it.
This makes the energy provided by solar panels much less valuable than the energy provided by a predictable, controllable source. Often by 1:10 factor.
I would say solar’s problem is controllability. You can only turn it up to the limit of the amount of sun received, which is none at night, and sometimes very little in the day.
It remains to be seen how controllable fusion power will be. Will it be for base load only, or will it also be useful to flexibly dial up and down for variable load? Much of current nuclear power is base load only. Clean base load power is still super useful, but it is not a complete solution.
Meanwhile solar is unexpected on the scale of minutes to hours, every day. It's not the same.
Also thermal storage and cryogenic storage can easily provide enough capacity. The problem is that they are not as efficient as batteries. If you buy electricity but only get 50% of that electricity back after storage, then you need to sell at 200% the price you paid.
Electricity prices don't swing enough today to make the feasible. But if far more wind and solar was built, then you would get much cheaper power at peak, which storage providers could buy and sell with a profit.
Maybe thats acceptable in some deserts, but pretty terrible in other places. 1 step forward, 1 step back.
Plus that figure is for our current energy usage, which is only going to increase over time.
Production is very near the usage sites (for BEVs, very near). It keeps the cars cooler in summer. And you can't make the parking lots any uglier.
(I am aware there aren't enough parking lots, but this deals with a fraction of the needed space.)
29000 sq km = 2900 TWh
Which is 10x the current electricity use of UK.
I think they may be overestimating the numbers by taking the petrol, oil and gas verbatim - whereas they should consider that electric cars have way higher efficiency, and electric heating can be done also way more efficiently than gas heating (because heat pumps).
In the end, my mother will have a significant surplus of power during summer (even with storage), and will still need to heat up house in winter using gas, or grid electricity (coal :/).
I read about some Nordic researchers developing long-term heat storage, which would be way better.
how is a factor of 4 "only". It's absurdly high.
You only get 3 times less power/area of solar in Scotland than in California. That's pretty surprising (part of it is higher efficiency of photovoltaic cells in lower temperatures) and pretty great for our future.
For example it means once we switch from fossil fuels pumped out of the ground to fossil fuels generated with surplus renewable energy (and it's not that far - it will probably be profitable in most of the world in next decade) - there will be much less incentives for fossil fuel dictatorships.
https://nextjournal.com/erik-engheim/renewable-energy-calcul...
They show that you need roughly 25 m2 to cover energy use of a family. That easily fits on most roofs. A regular apartment is at least 80 m2, so you only use a fraction of the roof space. That means regular roof could in principle cover a 3 story apartment building with all the needed power.
Of course industry and business also use power. But if every house had 50 m2 solar panels on the roof on average you would cover that as well.
Thus roofs are in principle more than enough for most countries. Sure this will not always work, but it actually works quite well to combine solar power and agriculture: Agrovoltics. It can actually improve yields and give extra income to farmer which can sell electricity.
These kinds of things is not taken into consideration when comparing land usage of nuclear power and solar power. Solar power can be mixed with residential areas and farms. Nuclear power can't. You are not going to place a fusion power plant on people's roofs.
But we really need more energy storage, and there are plenty of good ideas in this area too: better batteries, gravity bases systems, crowd sourced storage, etc.
Dealing with the instability of solar and wind energy is very complex and requires numerous measures, such as better integration of wide-area electricity grids, more electricity storage, more generation reserves, etc.
But even nuclear power generation is dependent on the weather. During heat waves, nuclear power plants located on rivers in Germany and France repeatedly had to shut down because there was not enough cooling water available or the water in the rivers would otherwise have become too warm.[1] During cold spells, nuclear power plants had sometimes to be shut down because the supply of cooling water was no longer guaranteed due to ice.[2]
[1] For example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...
[2] For example: https://fortune.com/2019/01/31/ice-shutdown-new-jersey-nucle...
Meanwhile Australia has retooled for 10% Solar and batteries in a matter of years, that number is rapidly increasing, and is turning off their coal plants.
Minutes, even. Perhaps you meant fission?
Meanwhile, we have massive grids of solar and battery being installed _today_, and existing installations replacing coal plants.
I'm tired of people talking about fusion (or even nuclear, as it's so mired in public FUD) as if it's some panacea. We have a solution right now: Solar and batteries. It works in places with cloudcover. It works in cold and hot climates. It works at night. It's getting cheaper every year.
Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective. They're getting better. But you can't just handwave away real problems from your armchair viewpoint and assume thats all fine.
We don't have working fusion power, at all.
> Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective
"Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the "standard" against which things are judged.
Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can make it, but its not commercially viable.
> "Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the "standard" against which things are judged.
Ah yes, think of the children.
Yes, coal is problematic, but the reality is that energy is expensive and we need a lot of it. If we tried to go full solar right now it would cost trillions of dollars, and the grid would still fail in the winter when heating is most important, and the economy would enter a massive depression as the cost of doing things gets both more expensive on average and extremely volatile.
You say this is a judgement call, not physics, but then go on to just broadly make assumptions about all of the relevant facts. You're not the one being logical and fact based. You're the one observing, yes, we have a climate crisis, and thus assuming that a radical solution for which you have no particular understanding of the economic or infrastructure implications is the right one because it's at least different from what we have now.
Renewables are good. They are getting cheaper. They're growing in capacity. And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now. And I also guarantee that you do not have nearly sufficient of a view of the system dynamics to be making statements as bold as you are. This is hard. It's not just evil greedy coal mine operators ruining everything.
Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more energy to make the energy that was produced, than was produced). We do not have working fusion power, if "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you put in".
As for the rest of this, I have no idea who you think you're replying to. Just one follow up, neverthless:
> And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now.
The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.
That's not what it means. Working means it works. Can you produce fusion power? Yes. Can you do so in a commercially viable way? No. Q is obviously a part of this. Uninteresting semantics.
> The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.
And I'm telling you, no, we could not, because that's not how the world works. From many perspectives, including economics of how to actually acquire all these solar assets many of which are already being consumed as fast as produced and dependent on limited metals supply chains; land availability with reasonable transmission setups; grid capacity to absorb these new generation facilities on the transmission lines; power availability during non peak times; and the preposterous externalities of trying to rapidly undermine the global energy market.
If it takes more than 1W of input power to produce 1W of power from fusion, then I'd say the answer is no. The distinction is not "commercially viable", it's "net energy production". We're not there yet (and are actually quite a lot way from it).
> And I'm telling you,
... that US$2T is a lot of money, and that's just what we spent on 1 war. Yes, there would be complications and side effects and what have you. Money, in our system, combined with the other abilities of the federal government, can do a lot.
Solar is getting so much cheaper, at such a fast pace, that I really don't understand how one can disagree that it's the future of our energy grids. Installing solar is a no-brainer in some parts of the world now, and in the very near future (extrapolating from the last 10 years), it'll be every part of the world soon.
What problems am I hand waving away?
https://www.statista.com/chart/26085/price-per-megawatt-hour...
But this chart is the levelized cost of energy. Its not the price at which you can get it. Energy demands are higher in winter. They are non trivial at night. The cost of energy might be low, but the price at which you can get it may be very high if not enough is available.
I use 6kWh / day. (not sure how! but that's what the power company says)
A decent EV battery holds 20 kWh or more.
Boom. There is my night time storage buffer.
Battery tech and solar is great, but its not the perfect solution.
It's like being back in the 1700s and arguing that research into petrol is a waste of time. I absolutely do not understand this mindset.
We will not be here in 200 years to enjoy fusion if we don't adopt solar and battery _right now_.
Technically, none of us will be here in 200 years.
I very much doubt if climate change will lead to an end to the human species, so I think a better way talk about this stuff is to frame it in terms of our descendants living in an impoverished, less beautiful, more strife-filled world.
But yes, FFS, action yesterday or last week, and make it trillions of dollars worth of action, like an actual war, but for infinitely better reasons.
When I was 16 I remember reading a Scientific American article that was describing how nuclear fusion was around the corner. Within the next 2 years!
It's always been clearly communicated to me that fusion is extremely hard and we're not that close to getting it working.
Solar, even under ideal conditions, needs backup and much more manpower and management to make it work... and even then, it is not reliable.
So, solar is not a replacement for fusion, or nuclear or coal for that matter. It is great for supplementation though.
While Fusion obviously has merits I think it is overhyped as a solution. Molten Salt Reactors are a much more sensible solution if nuclear power is the desired solution. Why? Because they actually generate LESS nuclear waste than Fusion power plants.
The big selling point of Fusion reactors is that they don't generate any nuclear waste. Except they kind of do. Molten Salt Reactors (MSR) in contrast actually "eat up" nuclear waste. You can power them on nuclear waste and get less waste out. Thus an MSR has negative radioactive waste production. Fusion has positive waste production.
Unlike Fusion reactors we have already proven that we can build MSR reactors. It doesn't mean I think we should give up Fusion research. I just think that if we want to get cheap, clean and reliable power today, then solar, wind and MSRs are probably the most sensible options, not fusion.
https://erik-engheim.medium.com/yes-clean-nuclear-power-exis...
Fusion is having our own little portable sun that can be utilized more efficiently.
Also, the lifespan is 25-30 years, but after that time the panels will still maintain 50-80% efficiency - so they can be reused for different purposes (or shipped to Africa, where there is a plenty of cheap space, sunlight, and they will work well).
Yes, we should take the problem serious, but it is also grossly overrated. It is certainly not a reason to avoid solar panels.
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/recycling-solar-panel-wa...