Who cares? How much were the solar cells on the market recently? 22 cents a watt? Any chance fusion could beat that price, even taken into account solar's dismal load factors?
But you need access to sunlight for solar panels to work. You can't have that constantly due to the rotation of the earth. Or if you move further away from the sun. Or into the constant shadow of a planet or moon, to shield your scientific equipment from sun radiation. Or even underwater/underground on earth. Etc.
So there will always be a use case for fusion energy, if it works.
>You can't have [access to sunlight] constantly due to the rotation of the earth.
This is the main counterexample to me, since it applies to commercial power generation on Earth. Even underwater/underground, in probably 99+% of cases, a simple cable is easier than a self-contained fusion reactor, and for the remainder of cases (submarines, aircraft carriers, space colonies, etc) it has to compete with mature self-contained fission reactors on cost/safety/mass/volume/longevity/acoustics.
With that in mind, couldn't anovikov's question be trivially rewritten to
"Any chance fusion could beat that price, even taken into account solar's dismal load factors and the Li-ion batteries it needs to deliver constant power?"
Remember too that energy storage has been following a slow Moore's Law (halving in price every decade), and looking ahead in the R&D pipeline it shows no sign of slowing.
Solar is the lazy person's (hacker's) fusion. Who needs to put the Sun in a box when we have the Sun itself? Seriously, why waste money on the box? (again I refer to commercial power here, not space or military) Understatement of the century here, but gravitational confinement has been rather extensively demonstrated.
With this fundamental laziness advantage, I expect mature commercial solar to economically beat mature commercial fusion in the long-term.
Heck, fusion doesn't even have a scaling advantage over solar. They're both limited by the Earth's heat rejection capability. If you built enough fusion power to exceed the power of the sunlight that hits Earth, oops you just fried the surface...
TL;DR for grid electricity, solar+batteries will inevitably "win" over fusion.
True, there may be uses cases for it. But with renewables price collapse in the last 10 years, and very likely further at least 2x price reduction of solar and slight on wind, this is no longer a make or break thing for humanity. More research and commercialization of advanced batteries would further reduce importance of fusion. I am getting to think that fusion has nearly ran out of time. 10 years down the road, potential market for it may become too small to justify the immense expenses - and by that point, 'mainstream' projects are not expected to bear fruit yet.
It's easy to make the leap you're making but while intermittent renewable costs have indeed been falling, they're doing it in an environment with cheap dispatchable backup natural gas. Once you get to around 50% intermittent renewable penetration the storage costs get crazy. In a four-state area in the Pacific Northwest from December 5 to December 15th, all 4 billion watts of wind generation sat dormant because of a wind lull. Batteries for that would cost $90 billion and take up a football field 100 stories tall.
Batteries for that would cost $90 billion and take up a football field 100 stories tall.
Cost is certainly a reasonable argument to make. But not the "football field" argument for how much area it would take. Given how small a number that is, I just can't see how that is concerning at all. And besides, nobody is going to place $90 billion of batteries into a single structure.
A football field is 5351.2 square meters.[1] Instead of a single 100 story tall structure, how about 100 separate single story structures? That's 535120 square meters.
Let's consider a site in the Pacific Northwest that has lots of excess land available, the Hanford Site[2] (for some reason, nobody wants to use it for shopping malls or residential subdivisions). That site is 1,518 square kilometers.
You could place those 100 football fields of batteries onto 0.035% of the land area of the Hanford site. There are probably still functional high voltage transmission lines there, and if not, then building new lines to get that battery power to BPA's nearby grid wouldn't be difficult or expensive.
Anyway, I'm just being silly. It doesn't make sense to put those batteries into either a single $90 billion dollar 100 story building, or onto cheap land at the Hanford site. But having 20 or even 100 separate battery sites scattered throughout the area is certainly feasible.
Your overall point is valid, even though batteries will eventually become much cheaper. It's currently difficult to store large amounts of intermittently generated power.
You're definitely right that no one would but then in one building. I chose that analogy because it's easy to visualize, whereas lots of smaller building are not. My cost estimate included raw lithium only and assumed the land and building were free to be conservative. Also This is just for 4GWe, a tiny fraction of the PNWs total energy capacity.
Problem is : even they're cheap, you have to build massive amounts of them... So fusion energy (or anything nuclear) is still required I think. But well, I'm no expert, just repeating what I've heard (check Jean-Marc Jancovici, french guy)
Abundance and very cheap energy enable energy inefficient (so far) and crazy projects as well. For example, put some coil under the road and power electric vehicles.
