Next generation will have nano-nuts and the one after zero sperm counts.
The girls will finally have no need for us at all.
Positive power generation from nuclear fusion has been decades away for decades and will continue to be so.
One of the leading experiments is ITER which is a Tokamak fusion reactor.
They are targeting producing 10 times the power output to what goes in. 50MW power in to create the plasma required and will get 500MW heated plasma.
What is hardly ever mentioned is that around 360MW of power will be required to support the reactor for a few seconds. Running it for more than 30 seconds will require over 600MW.
Also, converting that plasma heat into electricity requires power. I havenāt seen a number for this but it will not be trivial.
And there will be a loss of power converting the plasma heat to electricity which is estimated to be around 50%.
In other words, best case ITER will consume at least 2.5 times the power than it could theoretically potentially generate as electricity.
Thatās the best fusion option / project out there and wonāt even be online until the mid 2030ās.
Alternatives will need to be found.
Alternatively, carbon capture solutions to offset fossil use. Nothing that can be scaled is currently available to my knowledge.
Either way, EVās will be better than ICE.
Itāll be decades away until it isnāt. Once it happens the fossil fuel and fission industries will die overnight
But definitely not a viable solution to the climate crisis
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IMO, Fossil fuels will not be used for energy by the time fusion at scale could be realised.
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Nuclear is an important part of the future energy mix in places without good wind and solar resources. Itās also massively expensive, so something you avoid if possible. Australia is fortunate to have some remarkable wind and solar potential, which is the cost effective path for our niche.
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Ahead of the next election, Iām going to see how many you have to repeat the above. I think youād get close to the number of times we allow teams to go coast to coast.
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I have read papers claiming the 20-30 year cost of renewables may be significantly higher than advanced nuclear.
From what little personal experience I have, I am aware of at least some issues. Tassie wanted to put large numbers of wind generators on ocean area. They were told that there sea life studies may preclude where they were looking to put them, which was initially scoffed at. Once they had completed impact studies, it became untenable to place them where they had planned.
My best mate in Sydney has a friend who bought a piece of country land to put a shed on and go motor bike riding with his sons. Soon after he bought it, a company came and asked him if they could place a single wind turbine on his land. They paid him the entire purchase cost of his land, just to hire a small part for their use over 3 years.
I believe long term costs of current wind generators, particularly over sea water, are much greater than initially expected when they were first built.
I think we will see some alternate wind generators go mainstream before too long, as there are some pretty innovative smaller projects in the works.
I work for a company that does private weather forecasting. Most of our work is for oil & gas research sites. We have some work for wind generation, and weāve done work for companies doing trials on wave generators.
World wide now, renewables are paying more for weather forecasting than the oil industry does. But most of that is due to many countriesā high levels of funding for renewables. In the meantime, work for continuing oil research isnāt dropping off. Weāre doing more work for China and smaller countries, but overall, there doesnāt seem to be a shortage of spending on oil research.
I have a friend who runs a company producing solar inverters in Melbourne for the last 20 years. He says the biggest short to medium term issue in their industry is that government keeps changing standards, and has little knowledge when setting new standards, so often starts in the wrong direction, before having to revert back closer to what their industry was trying to advise. Meanwhile, they have to manufacture to required standards, even if they know it makes little sense, and will likely change before long.
With the right standards in place, and industry all then pulling in the same direction, we can then overcome the grid issues weāll need to deal with during the transition away from coal fired to renewables. But inexperience in that area has already delayed exit dates for coal generators, and may continue to for longer than weād like.
Suffice it to say, renewables have challenges at all levels, from finding suitable sites, cost of setup and maintenance, and Industry standards. Governments are spending extraordinary money in this field, but where expectations arenāt met, or funding runs out, countries have, and will cut funding, which slows the process further. I think weāll see continued growth and innovation in renewables. But I wonāt be surprised to see cost and timeline blowouts, because there are many unexpected challenges along the way.
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They do and they can be overcome.
Itās not like the fossil fuel status quo doesnāt have any issues or impacts on all of us.
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Yeah, thereās going to be some big hiccups on this journey with dead end technologies and inefficient projects. I am a huge believer in our ability to innovate our way out of difficult situations. Wind generators are currently maintenance heavy beasts, which is making the economics far poorer. Thereās a huge incentive for improved designs in that space, so I expect we will see it flow through.
Renewables really depend on the resource they are built to extract. Solar in Tasmania is going to be fairly mediocre, but in Alice Springs will be far more cost effective. I think weāll see a race to obtain the best locations.
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Of course they can, and Iām all for it.
Itās just that in a field that requires many solutions that arenāt yet in place, and where countries are spending big to try to meet optimistic targets, setbacks can be pretty discouraging. At worst, they can lead to the sort of cynicism weāre seeing displayed by a Trump government, where economy ātrumpsā innovation.
I know Holland has realised the cost of renewables and meeting carbon targets is greater than they expected. They changed their building code a few years ago to triple glazed windows and a large heat pump for all heating/cooling for all new houses. But theyāre discovering that the heat pumps have a much greater maintenance cost than theyād planned on.
My suspicion is that nuclear, although expensive, is a known quantity, and may allow us to reach time targets that may prove more elusive for renewables. It might even turn out to be cheaper in retrospect.
The longer term goal should continue to be renewables.
Solar in our large desert settings makes a lot of sense to me. The biggest issue for solar is battery storage for power delivery. Tasmania already uses Great Lake as a battery system for power by pumping water back up during power excess. And the Tassie government has a dream of being āthe batteryā for the mainland. Done right, this could be an excellent solution. And Iām sure there are other hydro sites we could use elsewhere in Australia.
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Thereās a few ways weāll deal with storage needs:
- make the most of Tassie Hydro using new undersea cables.
- some limited extra pumped hydro, theyāve fallen away recently due to batteries dropping in price.
- oddities like compressed air storage in old mines and stuff like that.
- oodles of commercial scale batteries.
- more oodles of residential batteries.
- even more oodles of grid connected EVs.
- hydrogen bulk storage for use in power generation.
Additionally, weāll use different ways to avoid demand when generation is low:
- smart charging of EVs during daytime or windy times.
- variable demand from industry, scaling back use when power prices are high. Entrepreneurial approach to take advantage of electricity when it is cheap.
- variable demand heating and cooling, smart devices that scale back all households by a degree when demand is too high.
Finally, not have all our eggs in one basket for generation:
- wide spread of wind and solar to pick up different weather systems.
- offshore wind to use different day / night cycle wind environments.
- gas backup (used 5% of the time, but intensely when needed)
There will be other options and techs, but they seem to be the big ones.
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There are heaps of alternative natural storage battery ideas. I read one article about using kinetic energy storage using weights in old mines. They said weād have enough storage to supply the world with this method alone. It will be interesting to see if any of dozens of similar ideas come to fruition though. The hydro storage seems the most practical in the short term, and about the only one that has actually been implemented in reality so far. Itās probably the lowest cost to set up initially, as much of the needed infrastructure is already in place.
This is where our local governments need to get standards right. I know weāre running trials on 3 selected EVs and certain hardware currently locally. But we really need standards in place that all local EV manufacturers can adhere to, so that they can all communicate back and forth with our solar inverters and the grid to work seamlessly together. Some European countries seem a decade ahead of us in this area, which is frustrating. Currently home solar is causing more problems than itās solving for our local grid, when it could actually be helping. Our local governments seem pretty inept in these areas to date.
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I wonder if community batteries, scattered amongst rooftop solar streets, would mitigate the downsides of rooftop solar.
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Thatās one option, but it would likely come at a cost to each of us, whereas if our inverters and our own home battery storage can be implemented into the grid, then we can potentially offset more of our individual costs, making the purchase of batteries an investment rather than a loss or break even prospect, as it is now.
I spoke with another Dad at my sonās school who has a battery on his home solar, and is connected to a local community shared power setup. He hasnāt paid anything for electricity since heās set it up years ago. The tiny rebate for feeding power into the grid on most plans nowadays makes batteries, in particular, uneconomical to buy for most people.
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Our world leading rooftop solar rollout was heavily supported by government subsidies and low interest loan programs. The next logical step is to apply the same incentives to batteries.
My big concern is that the systems being installed arenāt future proof to include a later battery, so we are going to end up with a massive amount of replaced equipment or households that are discouraged from upgrading to a battery.
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Agreed. Hence the reason we need good standards rolled out by regulators.
On the plus side, people are finding that battery life for EVs and by extension for Lithium based solar batteries seems to be a lot longer than originally expected. Albeit at lower capacity.
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PFIT ends this November 
I shouldnāt complain though seeing as Iāve made money since Iāve installed it plus fully covering my electricity costs.
Itās funny because the salesman said I would only save 50 dollars out of the 150 dollar bill I was paying back then, I donāt know how he could have got it so wrong. Arenāt they supposed to err on the side of optimism and not conservatism???
Unfortunately itās an old system and I can only replace like for like and doesnāt meet current regulations, cost a lot to install a new system using the existing set up - cheaper to get rid of it and start over. I would love to install a battery but I assume it my current solar system would have to be brought up to required current standard that isnāt worth the investment. Again probably cheaper to start over.
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It has been suggested that, perhaps one way of aming up solar generation, whilst minimising the need to bulldoze threatened species habitate etc, both for solar farm sites and transmission lines etc is to get serious about roof top solar, both on private homes and commercial premises. Australians have embraced solar, the economics are there already, so alittle additional financial nudge to really produce surplus power could be a very cost effective way forward.
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