Looking at the picture, I wonder if complexity of these devices will significantly be reduced once it finally works. I assume a lot of the bells and whistles are needed to find the way, but once it's found..
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Economically all the cost of building a "boil some water and turn some turbines" plant is _already_ in the "boiling some water and turning some turbines" part of the generation, and even if the heat part of it was _free_, the rest of it would be too expensive to bother building a plant for it, compared to just building solar and wind generation and some better batteries.
And there are efforts to make building out transmission and interconnecting with the grid more streamlined, so maybe some of those problems will be gone by the time fusion’s ready.
Someone said recently that it’s nicer to have bad laws and good tech than a bad tech and good laws, solar+storage seems like it’s in the former now, and if we can clear the bureaucratic hurdles, we’ll see it boom here like we’ve seen elsewhere.
This is difficult to say when comparing an emerging technology with an established technology in an emerging economy.
Based on every historical prior, it would be surprising if there weren't diminishing returns to solar and wind. And I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which power is, in part, fashion. Today we value emissions. Tomorrow it may be preserving and expanding wild spaces.
On a practical level, fusion research doesn't compete with solar and wind deployment. Pursuing both is optimal.
Currently the cheapest non-intermittent energy source is gas; solar costs about half as much, and nuclear costs 50% more than gas [0]. Battery storage is currently competitive with gas for storing around 4 hours of electricity [1].
If we would want to replace the baseload with solar + batteries we would need to store 12 hours instead, during the dark half of the day, so it would cost 3x as much, 200% more than gas.
Maybe we can hope for battery prices to drop, but extrapolating from a Wright's law curve, for them to become cheaper by a factor of 3 we need to produce 32 times as many of them [1, again], it won't happen in the near future.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/... [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnaEgW9JgiochnES2/2024-was-t...
For every other way of producing energy you need separate land for PV you don't. You can put them on rooftops, over parking lots or even vertical in a field. The last one increases the crop yield. Crops get less harsh sun, lose less water and the evaporation cools down the panels, which increases their production.
Today we value costs of energy production and tomorrow we will to. Especially if it results in energy independence. You don't need to buy fuel for PV and wind. As with nuclear fuel only a few countries are probably going to manufacturing the fuel needed for fusion reactors. Producing enough of it and in a sufficient purity needs specialized facilities and they will only be profitable if they produce a lot of it.
Turbines are also mass manufactured. (Albeit less than PVs.)
> You can put them on rooftops, over parking lots or even vertical in a field
The first power plant burned coal in Manhattan [1]. You can put turbines on top of buildings. We don’t because we don’t want to.
I think wind turbines are pretty. But lots of people don’t, and many wouldn’t want their rooftops to be shaded by panels, or wide open fields and natural expanses turned into something that looks more industrial. (I personally think looking down on rooftop gardens is far prettier than panels.)
Maybe there is a perfect power source out there, one which justifies a monoculture. I haven't seen it. I don't believe it's solar or wind.
I'd be shocked if we max out on insolation before area we're willing to cover with solar panels and windmills.