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Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't think of wind and solar as competition to fusion. Fusion power would have a different role in future electricity grids. Both would be complementing each other, rather than being a replacement.

Solar and wind are comparatively cheap and quick to deploy and are great solutions for decentralised power generation. Wherever reliable continuous power is required, however, other methods of power generation have to step in. This could also still change of course, depending on how storage technology progresses. But the cheap super-battery is probably just as ambitious as fusion power is today.

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They really are competitors, in the sense that intermittent sources, and fixed cost dominated sources, are both inflexible, and compete with each other on that basis. Cost optimized solutions for the grid typically contain a lot of one and little or none of the other.

The interesting point this author makes is that nobody is building a future electricity grid. There is nobody who can make such high-level choices about the mix of energy resources - choosing to allocate such-and-such here, thus-and-so there, to get an optimal blend - in the way that all of us armchair engineers tend to think about the problem.

What is actually happening, according to this author, is that bankers are evaluating specific energy projects, individually, and choosing to fund the ones which look like they will offer the best return on investment. That's it: there is no system. The future grid will consist of whatever happened to get built along the way, and our economy will adapt to the emergent characteristics of that "system".

There is no need for storage technology to "progress". It just needs to be built out.

It would be stupid to build out storage before you have built enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from: when renewables are not producing enough, you fill in with gas turbines, as now. As renewable generating capacity rises, and storage is built to take up the surplus, you rarely need to run the turbines. The turbines will eventually be converted to burn ammonia or hydrogen cracked from ammonia, when that becomes cheaper.

There is never a time when you have enough storage for all possible scenarios. Instead, you plan to fill in with other methods when storage runs low. Storage is a cost-cutting measure. Importing ammonia from tropical solar farms is always on the table.

> I wouldn't think of wind and solar as competition to fusion. Fusion power would have a different role in future electricity grids. Both would be complementing each other, rather than being a replacement.

How would that work? Solar is very cheap. Nuclear is several times more expensive. Ergo, if the sun is shining at all the economically rational decision is to buy as much solar as you can.

Same goes for wind.

This means renewables will cut into nuclear, a lot.

The whole "base load" ideal only works assuming nuclear is dirt cheap, but inflexible, and is supplemented with expensive but flexible sources for the times it's too slow moving. That would be the ideal scenario.

The unfortunate thing is that nuclear isn't cheap, and renewables aren't expensive.

The less time you are able to find buyers for your nukes' output, the more expensive that power becomes, in a vicious cycle. Soon no one will buy any.

When the nukes are mothballed, every kWh they ever produced becomes suddenly more expensive.

That renewables are not expensive is not unfortunate.

> That renewables are not expensive is not unfortunate.

I mean unfortunate for the intended business model of nuclear

I think we are not that far away from the "cheap super-battery": https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/10/catl-will-mass-produce... Does this qualify as "super-battery", you tell me, but it's pretty good and cheap and could easily scale for storage of solar and wind.

We don't need a "cheap super-battery". Most utility storage will not be chemical batteries.

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