If that's 600 MWe, running at 80% capacity factor, amortized over 30 years, then the $2B becomes: 2e9/(600 * 1000 * 0.8 * 24 * 365 * 30) = $0.0158 / kWh -- the $2B capital cost amortizes to 1.6 cents per kWh of electricity sold. Not zero, but 1.6 cents is far less than the current market price of a kWh.
If you're going to compare to utility-scale solar or wind, be sure to include their much lower capacity factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#/media/File:US...
(Admittedly: we don't yet know the capital cost of a working fusion heat source, or its capacity factor. Both will determine whether this is economically competitive.)
On page 15 note "This analysis does not take into account potential social and environmental externalities or reliability-related considerations", and that solar and wind do not get the checkmark for "baseload" -- only "intermittent".
Pages 13 and 14 show Fuel Costs as:
Wind: 0
Solar: 0
Coal: $13-$18/MWh ($0.013 - $0.018 per kWh)
Fission: $9/MWh ($0.009 per kWh)
Natural Gas: $21-34/MWh ($0.021 - $0.034 per kWh)
Fusion has the potential to be very low on fuel costs. But the capital costs are an unknown. In my original comment, I tried to show that when amortized over enough kWh for sale, even $Billions in capital costs could make sense, if they give us a machine that produces zero-carbon baseload electrical generation at scale.
That's why we are considering placing a converter above the sky to more efficiently pierce the sky with energy.
I hope we have a bright future growing into space, creating a Dyson ring, orbital habitats, etc.
Replacing our current use of fossil fuels has plenty of strong ground-alternatives. I like the idea of Thorium salt reactors for base load, hydro stored energy and lots of local wind and solar.
(for the uninitiated: https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM)
https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Solar_energy_to_the_... Demonstrates otherwise. About 30% is lost to the atmosphere, 70% reaches the surface.
The UK is building two of these pump uphill things. Four more and it could sustain a 99% carbon free grid on solar and wind alone.
Actually thinking about it figuring that out would make fission a lot more tenable too
But we already know that fission, too, is uncompetitive, moreso each day as costs for renewables and storage continue relentlessly downward.
Fusion has no chance of ever catching up.
i.e. one needs to prevent the neutrons from escaping or degrading the material the reactor is made out of, so instead of just adding a throwaway shielding layer, would it work to use something that is not only super dense, but is currently a waste product[1], and also becomes more valuable in the process of being used as the shield? Seems like it would be vaguely equivalent to a photoelectric collector for neutrons, but I am not a physicist or reactor engineer.
[1] I do think it's a shame that we stopped building breeder reactors, but that's a separate discussion.
The overarching requirement on fusion neutron absorption material, besides delivery of heat to process steam, is that it needs to produce more tritium to burn. You don't get that if the neutrons are absorbed in something other than lithium.
Though you'd need something very different from existing photovoltaics to capture the energy from those x-rays.
It will never produce so much as one kWh of commercial power.
These photons can’t usefully be converted directly into electricity with the photoelectric effect, but they sure could be converted indirectly via the same mechanism that the fusion in the core of the sun is reduced to the band that current PV runs at.
Not sure if it’s worth doing that (may well be such a diffuser would be so large it would be easier to do something completely different), but that’s very different thing to your dismissal.
Cooling? an IR barrier in the reactor to stop IR from reaching the cells should solve about 80% of the issue - assuming you can make something transparent at the right wavelengths for the cells - and capable of withstanding the heat of the reactor. The other 20% is already doable with current technology, and we do it from large-scale solar farms to single-family homes - water tubing on the backs of the devices to a radiator or storage tank. Hell, while using them to harvest light energy, that water loop can be used to harvest heat energy, thus improving the overall system efficiency!
So?
> Nobody has put forth a credible theoretical model on how to do it.
HVDC global grid, mentioned loads of times on this forum. 60% antipodal loss with existing components that were optimised for much shorter connections, but even that loss is fine given how cheap optimally placed PV is. Cost about a trillion USD (ok) and a few decades of current global aluminium and copper production (meh), but that’s still absolutely in the realm of the “we could afford it, shame about the politics”.
It is, in fact, not. And, you are no reliable judge of it. Your assessment will have exactly zero effect on how the transition to renewables plays out.
Either we transition to renewables fast enough, or global civilization collapses first. Nobody can say which.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
> Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive.
Of course, this is actually desirable imho, but yes, both geopolitics as well as cost, stops this from happening.
So, storage is just a part of the grid, and the grid may be fed by wind, solar, hydro, and geo "alone".
strictly speaking, sure. But it's a source for all intents and purposes, because in order to achieve the same outcomes using renewables as with fossil fuel powerplants, you'd need to pair it with storage. Or produce so much renewables, and be able to distribute it so widely, that no single location would lack power at any given time.
The fact remains that the physics of a grid powered only by distributed non-dispatchable wind and solar resources simply does.not.work. full stop without massive investments in storage and transmission upgrades. The physics isn't even debatable - it's simple. You only have to look at the very limited transmission infrastructure that currently exists and understand the simple fact that the power grid is a zero sum game. Power in = Power out or very bad things happen that lead to power out = 0. Zero sum generation + aging transmission = not enough power where you need it, when you need it if you get rid of traditional baseload sources.
It's good to champion renewable generation, storage, and transmission upgrades. It's necessary infrastructure for the economic and actual health of our nation. It is not going to be inexpensive by any definition of the term. It's going to be monumentally expensive even if it's completely necessary.
a) Once it's done, you're pretty much self sufficient energy wise. Sure, you may need the raw materials from other countries to make panels, turbines and batteries. But once you've achieved a 100% renewable clean energy grid, you're getting a fairly decent lifespan out of everything so you're not going to be as subjected to the whims of the market like most of Europe is experiencing with gas. The market should generally be more stable.
b) Once your citizens have free energy, they have a massive chunk of disposable cash they were once spending energy. They will spend that or invest it: and both general spending and investing are taxed at higher rates than fuel spending (5% VAT on fuel spending in UK compared to 20% general VAT rate). Yes that is a massive loan for the government to put on the books, but they will probably get it back much quicker than expected.
What arm of the USA government do you trust most to get this job done efficiently and fairly? What do you think will happen when you use "more than your share" of electricity for a month or two and your (undoubtedly centrally controlled) account is deemed unacceptable? Or is it your thought that providing electricity free will reduce consumption?
As for the second part, privately owned houses would get as much energy as the solar panels and battery on their property can provide. Additional power would come from the grid and would have to be paid for as normal. For people in apartments, presumably you have records of normal energy usage for every house and apartment, you could use those to work out the amount of solar panels needed to add to a solar farm or the equivalent for wind. The government pays for the installation of that and the citizen gets the energy generated for free. Additional energy they use is then paid for out of their own pocket.
Once we have built the machinery to harness that energy, it does become pretty much free and we can use as much or as little of it as we like. The cost of maintaining the machinery will become ever cheaper due to the amount of power we can get for little to no effort. It becomes self sustaining.
There are literally ongoing efforts right now to replicate Asimov’s vision which was to create space based solar farms and transmitting the energy back down in radio waves to specific points. We could literally harness our entire planets energy use from just a few of these in strategic locations if it was done right:
https://www.getsunsights.com/will-the-concept-of-space-solar...
It turns out your ability to harness energy is kind of important. We're nowhere near that level of energy capture. We can't even handle transmitting solar from one corner of one smallish continent to the other, we're nowhere near the level of technology and infrastructure development you're talking about.
If you give people an unlimited amount of free power they're going to use it to mine cryptocurrency in a massively wasteful and expensive way.
So, we build storage and transmission. Storage cost is falling even faster than generation, and there are zero physics problems to be solved, just practical civil engineering.
The cost of this much civil engineering will be very large, but much smaller than e.g. for that much nukes, and we will pay it, because the only other choice is global collapse when the degraded biosphere becomes unable to sustain our population.
> Storage cost is falling even faster than generation,
> and there are zero physics problems to be solved,
> just practical civil engineering.
[1] https://cleanenergynews.ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/grid...
> Alchemy is not a solved problem
Ah, trolling. OK.
What form of grid/utility energy storage do you expect will dominate in 20 years?
I provided a reference to back up my assertion. Do you have any?
Everything comes down as manufacturing volume goes up.
I'm seriously hoping that aluminium-chalcogen batteries [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04983-9] can be scaled and commercialized soon
Other exciting chemistries include molten antimony/calcium, zinc/bromine, and iron/air. The antimony/calcium one would never wear out or catch fire. Zinc/bromine is most compatible with current lead/acid battery tech. Iron/air is very, very cheap. None are very attractive for cars, so utilities will not be in competition with the car industry for access to batteries.
We can make it -- in a fusion reactor :)
Oh is that all. How could nobody have thought of this yet?!?!
Remember they were replying to a claim that it would be "inexpensive"
At issue is how this cost compares to that. Renewables and storage costs, as big as they will be, will be overwhelmingly less than alternatives, and can be fielded faster.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
> Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive.
Anyway, I now expect you will apply the same level of skeptical criticism to anyone stating renewables are insufficient, and demand they supply peer-reviewed references.
Seriously though. Maybe, if we solve the large capacity storage issues and are able to build a storage system to scale. So 3 or 4 decades if we are extremely lucky. But right now in reality....
And it's still not clear if it would be enough in the end. We'd need cover everything in panels and put towers everywhere. The amount of resources needed for solar and wind is actually realistically insane at the scales needed. (one of the many problems usually ignored by wind/solar evangelism)
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35097.pdf
"In the United States, cities and residences cover about 140 million acres of land. We could supply every kilowatt-hour of our nation’s current electricity requirements simply by applying PV to 7% of this area—on roofs, on parking lots, along highway walls, on the sides of buildings, and in other dual-use scenarios."
"We would need only 10 million acres of land—or only 0.4% of the area of the United States—to supply all of our nation’s electricity using PV."
And renewables happily coexist with other uses of the same land, so none is used up.
That doesn't mean it's made clear in statistics. I've read plenty of people say "X generates as much as Y", where X is intermittent and Y is suitable for base load. Certainly enough to disagree that everyone knows it and is able to discern that from context-free statistics.
I'm not saying if people think it through they won't understand it, I'm saying that context-free stats like that create false impressions in some people's minds based on whatever the assume about the stat, and annoy people like me who'd like to know where the stat came from.
That’s 10 million acres of wires, maintenance, habitat and all kinds of mischievous creatures, not least of which are humans. And it only works when the weather is good. And not all countries have the grid or engineering and maintenance capacity of the United States.
It’s not a realistic solution.
By all means, lets put solar panels everywhere we already have buildings and roofs and power hookups and make a dent. Maybe at some point it’ll be possible to use solar alone, and we can keep up the maintenance.
Going all in on solar right now would be suicide. It’d be worse than the effects of anthropogenic warming. People are going to freeze to death this winter in Germany because they bought into the promise of renewables before it delivered and didn’t diversify their energy supply.
You should only phase something out when you can meet demands without it. Nuclear is a way to do that. Natural gas is a way to do that. Renewables are a way to do that. But you have to actually exceed demand and have a solid diversified base before you panic switch because of climate change. Otherwise you kill and impoverish more people than climate change.
Agriculture is already working, or was until its been starting to be shut down and curtailed due to alleged environmental issues like in the Netherlands. You can manage much larger chunks of land with plows and combines and other vehicles because of how you interact with the land when farming.
You can’t plant solar panels and have them just grow out of the ground and repair themselves and reproduce largely independently. It’s a totally different type of land use. Managing solar farms is magnitudes more effort to build and maintain than agriculture.
They require less money to build, and less to operate, than nuclear (per unit of energy output).
So, your talking about land could only be a valid objection if land itself was the constraint. And that's what my snark about eating was aimed at.
This claim that 10 million acres of solar panels is cheaper to build and maintain and actually put into use and store power from vs extremely high energy output nuclear plants with tiny footprints that can produce continuously reeks of extremely biased accounting.
That does not mean you’re wrong, I simply don’t trust your hand wavy dismissive argument about it being cheaper.
If I see a report that looks at the long term maintenance cost of an actually deployed modern solar farm, not hypothetical ones, and compares it to an actually deployed modern nuclear reactor, I’ll take that one.
I have an affinity for whatever actually works, the main reason I think nuclear looks good is I trust basic physics and understand how much astronomically higher the energy density of nuclear power is in comparison to like everything else.
A renewable grid includes storage. Storage is cheap and getting cheaper.
In fact, it's long been addressed, and the cost of dealing with intermittency of renewable sources appears acceptable.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
> Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive.
As explained elsewhere, a mix of energy sources is necessary.
And your statement is devoid of context. Solar is already working well in North America (and elsewhere), and uptake will continue to increase. It won't be a panacea for the rest of the world, and solar+wind won't replace all other generation types.
Not sure why you're dismissing it so out of hand. I agree it's not the panacea that many want it to be, but it's still very important, especially given its recent cost declines (solar specifically here).
Also Texas, another state where they pushed green energy (wind) and slowed the investment in fossil fuels.
We all want cleaner energy, but we must acknowledge that it is not easy.
On the contrary, Germany has met their goal of 80% full natgas storage several weeks early despite the French nuclear reactors being offline due to higher than expected renewable energy supplies.
They invested a lot in solar power, which is expensive, so they couldn't afford to invest enough in transmission and backup generators, and now they have expensive electricity and unreliable grids. Ignoring current year, I think Germany is second in the world in regards to expensive electricity (after Denmark) and California is one of the most expensive states in the US.
Of course they have not finished building out, which takes time. And, Germany counted on access to NG as backup while they build out. The war interfered. Had they invested any other way they would be even worse off.
This is an outright lie, let me dig in a bit. They're cheap only if you look at watts generated, if you ignore extra grid costs and backup supply. For 1 MW of solar, you need 1 MW of backup. If you use solar for most of the day and use the backup just for 20% of the total electricity required, then the backup plant will look like it's very expensive to build and operate, while the solar seems cheap. But solar cannot operate without backup.
What needs to happen is that you have to transfer some of the money generated by the solar plant to the backup plant. How you do that will make it look like solar is either very cheap, or expensive - and this is all political and a PR move. In the end, consumer will pay for both anyway, which is why Germany and California have such high electricity bills.
A real life equivalent example would be to say that your truck can downhill with 100 MPG and very cheap to run, and this is absolutely true...if you ignore that the truck must also climb the hill.
> Had they invested any other way they would be even worse off Germany is lucky that EU just implemented the unified energy market, otherwise they would have been absolutely obliterated this past winter + wartime.
It's like buying a BMW and then not having enough money for groceries...it's not just the groceries being too expensive, the nice shiny car might have something to do with it.