
The Future of Energy Isn't Fossil Fuels or Renewables, It's Nuclear Fusion - mpweiher
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/04/12/the-future-of-energy-isnt-fossil-fuels-or-renewables-its-nuclear-fusion/#3e3d62f33bee
======
kristopolous
Renewables decentralize energy.

The whole point is to make it not a commodity you have to constantly buy and
transport, but something everyone at all levels of infrastructure could make
themselves locally.

There's a Moore's law of solar called Swanson's law which is on track for what
in today's terms we'd effectively call "free energy" sometime in the nest few
decades.

Another big idea is that these don't require any manual capturing, transport,
and feeding of fuel. You install them, make sure they are clean and
essentially that's it. Nothing more to mine or constantly load into the
machine.

A robust, fault tolerant, dynamic system of community and family power is the
actual future and only dramatically decentralized things like that will
ultimately be politically viable and sustainable.

They will more likely survive wars and infrastructure collapse; something that
a model reliant on a few multibillion dollar plants will never be able to do.

Sustainability is not only about ecology but also about decomodifying energy
and not having to be constantly reliant on some large group of people
maintaining an infrastructure to keep the lights on.

~~~
grecy
My off-grid friends struggle to get house insurance, because without "grid
electricity" insurance companies don't consider a house worthwhile (it's
actually a really, really nice house, worth close on a million dollars now).

Anyway, my friend asks the insurance assessor how often he has a power failure
at his house "Oh, only a couple of times a year" says the man.

In 10 years living off grid, my friends have never had a single outage.

~~~
kristopolous
We'll get there. The decentralization is the actual revolution more than the
mechanism of solar power.

Not only is local, sustainable low cost energy production getting cheaper and
easier but the post-industrial household energy use is going down.

We've replaced CRTs and incandescents. Our new buildings have better weather
proofing and even our kitchen appliances have dramatically improved.

Even in places like Los Angeles, the public have been clamoring for and
enthusiastically voting to _gasp_ tax themselves to build mass transit
systems. The average vehicle fuel economy has been going up consistently for
years. This trend towards lower cost, more efficient things is one consumers
have been wildly supportive of and will continue.

The future of low energy at low cost is the stated reason that companies like
PG&E are moving away from nuclear based primarily on financial forecasts.

~~~
ams6110
Most people are not renewable energy enthusiasts. They don't want to install,
maintain, and be responsible for their own electrical generation plant if they
can just pay a utility to provide it.

People can have their own wells, or collect and store rainwater, but most
don't if utility water is available.

Every home in any remotely civilized area is already wired for utility power.
Utility scale renewable energy, if that can be done cost-effectively, probably
makes the most sense for the most people.

Otherwise you have an expensive purchase and installation of solar panels, a
transfer switch if you keep utility power connected as a backup, battery
installation so you have electricity at night, etc.

It's just more complexity and expense than most people want to deal with,
compared to paying a hundred dollars or so a month to the utility.

~~~
kristopolous
Totally agree. Unless there's a super-easy way to retrofit very few will
bother. However, let's think 100 years out.

By this time, the cost threshold of things in the class of solar is perhaps a
few hundred dollar fixed cost for your needs. Just like you don't need to be
an energy-saving enthusiast to get a non-crt computer screen today, low-cost
commodity energy generation hardware will dominate the marketplace and
essentially be the only consumer-facing option.

If you are an "I don't care" consumer like most are, the cheapest and best
business model would be to have either someone come by and put the thing in or
to franchise it out like 7/11 so every neighborhood gets their own low-cost
plant.

Either way, large power-generation infrastructure projects are likely to give
way to an even larger consumer-facing power-generator infrastructure.

In the shorter term someone somewhere (maybe reading these words right now)
will come along and make a version of solar or solar-equivalent tech a sexy
luxury toy for wealthy people to show everyone how rich they are. It will get
hyped-to-hell-and-back. Big players will slap their head and say "oh darn that
was obvious" and quickly move in to snatch the market and there will be a wild
ride for all the VC groups involved. It'll mint a few 22-year old billionaires
from either MIT or Harvard who will be paraded as visionary geniuses for our
time. So lovely.

Don't know when, don't know where, but it's coming. (ok, my real guess is
geopolitics will destabilize oil prices and create a climate for adoption
within the next 3 years - the cost metrics have just started working out in
the past 12 months)

------
dzdt
The future of energy is nuclear fusion -- carried out in a tremendously
massive reactor at a safe distance of 150 million km from the nearest civilian
population. Technology to convert radiation from that reactor directly to
electricity is already cost-competitive with other energy sources and the
price is still declining rapidly. Together with secondary capture techniques
that drive turbines based on air or water flows driven by the energy of that
reactor, the majority of humanity's energy needs will be met by that one
source in a few decades. Smaller reactors will never reach a cost scale to be
competitive, even if they can eventually be made to function.

~~~
vorotato
He said with little to no evidence.

------
rini17
Compare and ponder "Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202488)

------
viggity
DotNetRocks (a popular .net podcast) does "geek outs" every so often on
science/technology. They've done a couple on Nuclear Fusion. It gives a great
overview of all the different companies and their approaches to nuclear
fusion. Highly recommended.

[https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1415](https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1415)

------
arca_vorago
The main issue I see with fusion is a chart I saw (that I'm not sure how
accurate it was though), that showed the amount of funding needed to achieve
breakthroughs over time.

All funding for fusion was far below the level needed for breakthroughs to be
made, so until the motivation and funding are at the level needed, I think we
will probably not get fusion as soon as we need it. Eg 20 years from now
instead of 10

------
mrfusion
I was just reading about bubble fusion. From the info I found it seemed like
the whole reason it won't work is because the researcher that discovered it
was dishonest. (And it couldn't be replicated)

But it seems like one experimental design failing shouldn't rule out the
entire concept? It seems like it's physically possible, no? Ie nothing in
physics rules it out.

~~~
FiatLuxDave
Taleyarkhan's failures alone shouldn't rule out a concept, agreed. A bigger
problem is that although sonofusion does appear capable of creating small
plasmas which in theory could be hot and dense enough for fusion, the amount
of time during which the plasma remains at that temperature and density seems
to be too small. In other words, there seems to be insufficient containment.

A common misconception about fusion is that containment is all about keeping
the particles from leaving. But often, it is more about keeping the energy
from leaving. A momentum-based containment design like sonofusion uses is
subject to Rayleigh instabilities which carry the energy away in fast moving
particles.

~~~
mrfusion
Interesting point. Is that basically the same problem NIF has albeit in a
different medium?

~~~
FiatLuxDave
Basically.

------
anovikov
I am getting to feel that fusion runs out of time. They already barely have
enough time for large-scale rollout before renewables overtake everything. In
10 years from now, if someone achieves net energy positive fusion, it will be
solution in search of a problem - cheap and abundant electricity will be a
reality.

~~~
tedsanders
That is a bizarre claim to make. Energy will not be far cheaper and more
abundant in 10 years. Trillions of dollars are invested in infrastructure that
has lifetimes of 50+ years. It is not economically or technologically feasible
to undergo an energy revolution that quickly. Even if we gathered the
political and financial will, our production facilities and supply chains
could not feasibly handle the load of rebuilding the world's energy
infrastructure in a single decade.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guXaWwQpe4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guXaWwQpe4)

~~~
Nomentatus
Infrastructure becomes obsolete and is scrapped all the time, disappointing
investors. Newcomen steam engines didn't get to their end of life or anywhere
near it, they were mostly scrapped when Watt's revolution happened no matter
how new they were. You're saying that investors have been caught short by
present trends. I think that's true.

~~~
tedsanders
That's not what I am saying. I am saying that if you are competing against
something that has already been built and has 50 years of fixed costs already
sunk, the hurdle to surpass it is enormous, far more enormous than competing
against new marginal construction. I am also saying that energy infrastructure
is a thing that costs trillions. We literally do not have the capacity to
replace it in a mere 10 years, even if we built 10x the solar and battery
factories and ran them 24/7\. Current trends extrapolated forward have no
indication that this will happen.

(For the record, I am very bullish on solar power, having worked and consulted
in the industry. But I am also grounded enough to realize that the revolution
will be gradual, not done in 10 years. 10 years is not much time for something
so capital-intensive. It's not like phones or computers.)

I regret even commenting in the first place, because I hate feeding the
dynamic of giving attention to poor quality and ill-founded comments. I wish I
was discussing something constructive instead.

~~~
Nomentatus
Maybe what you want to say is that obsolete tech and plant has the "advantage"
that it can now operate on marginal costs and ignore replacement costs since
that won't be happening, making many previous "fixed costs" suddenly free and
therefore not costs at all - something I well remember being taught in
economics classes at university. This is true as far as it goes, but that path
assumes relatively low marginal costs - not the case for energy. Coal isn't
that economical - as for fracking, that's new tech not old; it may be a big
part of the picture for a long while, and save some but not most of the old
plant (large numbers of gas generators are a fairly recent phenomenon
themselves.) From your selective choice of terminology, I don't think you've
looked at economic theory in depth, here. In any case, all of this is
perfectly consistent with what I said earlier.

When the transistor arrives, vacuum tubes are just swept aside despite the
fixed costs. Ten years did that, less in fact, I was there. There's a rather
extreme threshold effect, once the right price point is passed, the old tech
just falls off a cliff. There's a great chart of that happening to Kodak due
to digital photography, extremely suddenly, despite all the fixed costs. They
were making their best profits one year, staring at death the next. This link
is close to the chart I remember seeing. Note the extraordinary difference one
year makes! Every mall had a very expensive photo developing plant, then not.
Scrap value only. [https://macromon.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/creative-
destructi...](https://macromon.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/creative-
destruction-2-0/) Because solar power effectiveness varies geographically the
cliff will be a bit smoother, of course.

Only in a real banana republic could you hold new tech off for a half-century,
and you'd need to halt trade to do it.

I'm old, I've seen a lot of change, and tons of valuable things - including
large amounts of infrastructure, become valueless very suddenly, not to
mention my collection of VCR tapes.

There is such a thing as first-mover advantage, but that applies to new tech
not old, so I'm assuming you don't mean to refer to that.

I regret your stooping to vituperation. It wasn't necessary, or accurate.

~~~
tedsanders
Yes, that's what I wanted to say. Which is why I said it.

Let's look at some facts:

* No one in the market agrees that energy will abundant and cheap in 10 years due to solar and batteries becoming far cheaper than natural gas. Natural gas companies have not been shorted to zero. Utilities are continuing to make capital expenditures. Natural gas plants are continuing to be built. Corporations are continuing to sign long-term power purchase agreements with renewable generators that lock in prices for 20 years. Maybe everyone is suffering from a collective delusion, or maybe energy transitions take decades.

* The EIA projects roughly flat energy consumption out to 2040, with natural gas and renewables taking share from coal and nuclear. Hardly abundant.

[https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/0383(2017).pdf](https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/0383\(2017\).pdf)

* For natural gas power plants, about 1/3 of the levelized costs are capital costs.

[https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....](https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf)

* There are strong dynamic effects that will slow the transition. As the penetration of solar grows, the non-solar consumption peak will move to night-time and the marginal value of solar falls by about 1/2\. Conversely, as natural gas plants shut down, their cost of fuel will fall and the value of their spinning reserve and other ancillary services will rise.

* Building a transmission backbone for new utility-scale solar will take decades. San Diego's Sunrise PowerLink took 5 years of environmental review and construction, for instance:

[https://www.irwaonline.org/eweb/upload/web_novdec_12_Sunrise...](https://www.irwaonline.org/eweb/upload/web_novdec_12_SunrisePowerlink.pdf)

* Increasing the supply of large power transformers to build out a new transmission backbone for utility-scale solar will face significant supply constraints:

[https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transfor...](https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transformer%20Study%20-%20June%202012_0.pdf)

* Today no energy storage solution is economical. Probably the solution with the great hope of scale-based cost reductions is batteries. How many batteries would we need? World electricity consumption is about 50,000 GWh per day. If solar displaces natural gas, then for overnight and peak backup, we need storage on that scale.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+electricity+consu...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+electricity+consumption+%2F365.24)

* Can we hope to even approach producing 50,000 GWh of batteries within 10 years? Global annual production of batteries is around 30 GWh a year right now. There are factories under construction now to bring that up to around 100 GWh around 2020. Given that factories take years to design and build, that means we need to scale lithium production by roughly a factor of 1,000 and scale battery production roughly a factor of 1,000 and get the plans and investment lined up in the next couple years. Is Tesla ready for 1,000 Gigafactories? Absolutely not.

[http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/05/l...](http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/05/li-ion-featured.jpg)

Regarding your transistor example - First, according to Wikipedia and Science
magazine, the transition was gradual over the 50s and 60s:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube)

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/05/return-vacuum-
tube](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/05/return-vacuum-tube)

Second, the size of vacuum tube industry was never the size of the global
energy industry. Building new transistors factories can be done. But building
new factories to ramp up to trillions in battery and solar cell production
within a single decade is ludicrous.

P.S. I would appreciate it if your comments didn't assert to me 'You're
saying' or 'Maybe you're trying to say.' It's more polite if you say 'What _I
think_ you are saying is....'

~~~
Nomentatus
No you didn't say it, there was no way to tell that you hadn't factored in
threshold effects from your first post, nor that you had glossed over high
marginal costs for energy. Points you then pointedly ignore when replying.

If you don't want to be asked what you're saying precisely, you just have to
provide more detail earlier, or at the very least the proper rubrik. I just
don't understand the hostility here mixed into factual matters.

There's little to answer in your last post. Your definition of gradual was
decades; re solar power it's already been decades, but the actual transitions
to new technologies - the mass adoptions - happen quickly - so you're really
changing the subject. The first consumer product (radio) to appear in my city
with transistors came in the early sixties, at a price of $79 - a fortune then
- but only a few years after that, you couldn't buy a regular radio with
tubes. The transition was very rapid. Kodak's stock took a long time to fall
to earth, but the loss of revenue was sudden, and massive.

Re transmission - solar will strongly tend to be local. Batteries: you can
look up discussions of Vanadium batteries (just one novel tech) elsewhere on
HN, but note that individual batteries are now being built that are nearly 1GW
- so 50,000 GW is very far from impossible - even if that figure turns out to
be accurate. Not impossible at 5 cents a watt. Betting that this or that is
impossible is usually a bad bet.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium-
flow-batteries-the-energy-storage-breakthrough-weve-needed/#a6ee7675bde8)

Actually, far larger "batteries" exist - reversible dams, many built only for
energy storage purposes. Analogous mass systems have also been proposed using
air and salt.

~~~
tedsanders
I apologize if I came off as hostile. I don't feel hostile. In any case, I
think it's fine to ask folks for clarification. But I think it's rude to
assert: "What you're trying to say is..."

Also, even if Vanadium flow batteries achieve commercial success and drop
energy storage costs down to 5 cents a kWh, that's still above wholesale
electricity prices of 2-4 cents a kWh:

[https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_mar...](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_markets.cfm)

Lastly, the EAI disagrees with your assertion that solar will be local (which
I interpret to mean rooftop). It forecasts lower costs and higher volumes for
utility-scale installations, which benefit from greater economies of scale.

~~~
Nomentatus
Again, nobody can tell where your argument went wrong if you don't provide the
steps, so all anyone can do is ask.

------
sidcool
Would be great if we could harness fusion energy. But in present and near
future, renewables are the saviours.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Renewables are simply fusion capture at a distance ;)

~~~
marssaxman
I like the joke that my house is fusion-powered; the reactor is of course
located in a remote industrial area, for safety, and I rely on an array of
roof-mounted receivers for long-range wireless power transfer. Conveniently
enough, this reactor happens to be a deregulated and tragically
undersubscribed public utility service...

~~~
toomuchtodo
Love your comment. Reminds me of something I'd read in a Douglas Adams book.

------
isoprophlex
Isn't the power production inside the sun on the order of 300 W/m3? Is it at
all reasonable to think we could scale this process to 0.1-100 MW/m3, to
become economically viable?

------
bcaulfield
Fusion is the future of energy... and always will be.

~~~
Semiapies
Always just 20-30 years away, always lots of new and promising experiments
results that are _just about_ to pay off.

~~~
bcaulfield
zactly.

