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A comment on Fusion Foolery. Parent comment

Re:Fusion Foolery by jacquesm on Thursday August 17, 2023 @09:39AM (#37161377)
Indeed. It's raining soup, all we need is more spoons. We are awash in energy but we're totally focused on making it in the most complicated and expensive way possible. It's fascinating in a way, how all of these tools are available and yet there are fairly powerful lobbies that keep pulling us away from the solution just so they can make a bit more money.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Fusion Foolery by concordDance on Thursday August 17, 2023 @10:46AM (#37162512)
No, the problem isn't some conspiracy it's the very real problem of "how do you store electricity when days are cloudy and still?".

Look at these graphs: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

You need to either overbuild 10x or you need lots of storage.

Even a 3x overbuild means you need weeks of storage if you want to avoid once a year brownouts.

And electricity storage still costs 100-400$/kWh per 10 years. An extra £60 billion per year while ALSO building 3x more solar and wind than we will use during peak times is a lot of money for the government to spend.

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Re:Fusion Foolery by jacquesm on Thursday August 17, 2023 @10:54AM (#37162643)
This is really old hat by now. Everybody is aware of the fact that when it is cloudy and there is no wind that you will need other sources. But on balance for the planet as a whole there always is plenty of wind and there always is plenty of sun. We are just not capturing it and we are not transporting it effectively across longer distances.

People used to say that you can't make baseline power with solar and wind. Slowly - and often grudgingly - they've come around and now realize that it isn't about 100% availability, that will always be a mix. The question is simply how much of that mix can be offset by renewables and the answer is 'much more than you originally thought'.

And as the price of solar and wind drops further and further that fraction only increases.

Every KWh that is produced by solar and wind does not need to be generated by fossil.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Fusion Foolery by concordDance on Sunday August 20, 2023 @12:53PM (#37200864)
How are you transporting that power from thousands of miles away through unstable countries containing people that love to take your power hostage?
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