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0 pointsepistasis4y ago0 comments

It seems extremely unlikely that fusion will be able to compete in any way with solar for the next 30-50 years. It is on a completely exponential cost decrease curve, and we haven't even seen a hint of bottoming out yet.

New technological and manufacturing advances happen nearly daily. We may have panels that last for 60-90 years within a decade, meaning that costs will drop even further.

Solar also has the advantage of being extremely scalable and decentralized, so that a massive installation can be put in cheap land far from any people, without having to run transmission lines to a big centralized power generator. Of the current average cost of $0.13/kWh in the US for electricity, $0.08/kWh is for transmission and distribution costs, and only $0.05 is for power generation. That 8 cents isn't falling in cost, and so halving the cost of generation, or even making it a fifth of the cost, doesn't help a lot unless the power generation can be located closer to where it's needed.

For super cheap energy, it's going to be nearly impossible to beat solar PV.

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yuppie_scum4y ago

How do you feel about wind farms?

epistasisOP4y ago

I have been surprised at how they have been able to continually cut costs as well. 10 years ago, the idea of somehow improving cost efficiency to our current levels seemed like a fantasy. The solution was apparently to just build bigger and bigger and model a lot more. The current limitation to terrestrial wind turbines seems to be transportation of larger and larger parts.

Floating and sea-floor-mounted ocean wind turbines are also getting super cheap.

For regular grid use, iron batteries are really coming along well too, both flow batteries and solid batteries look like they will be economical with current grid costs. So the glue needed to last for a low-wind week seems to be nearly ready.

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