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Comment by immmmmm | Hacker News Reader

> There are no silver bullets, but all of these innovations add together in order to create a combined solution to the worlds energy problems.

i worked all my professional carrer in science and innovation, if you have a reference for that statement i'd be glad you share it. maybe i missed something.

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Solar and wind will be effectively free in the next decade compared to any other energy source with realistic projections as low as $10/MWh in high production areas and lots of promising battery technologies that may be able to timeshift energy for a similar cost by hours or days.

As we reign in the gratuitous subsidies to the fossil fuel sector, the question then becomes can we provide the plant and operational costs to store electricity chemically for $30/MWh (or as fossil fuels get more difficult to extract, $60 or $100).

Given that it's a brand new industry and you can do it right now with hydrogen for $200, energy included, then we only need to price in a fraction of the externalities right now and airline operators are going to be looking pretty hard at various green fuel options.

If fuel from air can be made efficient, then combined with highly economical fusion, I could see it being viable. I'm not sure it will ever be cost competitive with long tail oil and gas, though. And that's at least 30 years out.

> then combined with highly economical fusion

If we had some ham, we could make ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.

"Highly economical fusion" is probably an oxymoron.

There are multiple companies closing in on highly economical fusion. Enough so that they're receiving hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from very savy private investors. My money is on Helion getting there first.

Are you aware that tritium like hydrogen is very hard to contain as it's as small as hydrogen and very nasty as it's highly radioactive. That alone prevents this technology to become cheap any time soon (assuming they get Q>1).

None of the DT approaches are going to be highly economical, for fundamental reasons. I do agree that Helion is the least dubious contender.

Do you mean that there is a silver bullet,or that innovations don't add together to provide solutions?

there's none. and (unfortunately for me) the best solutions often involve less technology rather than more.

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