Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientists boosts clean power hopes

First-ever net energy gain from fusion raises hopes for zero-carbon alternative.

See full article...

 

[Statistical]

That was essentially my reading (although the article is a little sketchy). A breakthrough for laser ignition but still ~30yrs behind tokamaks.
(JET had more out than in, sustained for a few seconds, in the early 90s - of course it took a lot more energy to get it fired up!)

JET never achieved ignition. JET also never achieved breakeven (Q of 0.67).
NIF achieved ignition in 2021 but with a Q of 0.7 so ignition without breakeven.
It has now achieved ignition and greater than breakeven (Q of 1.2) in the same experiment.

Ignition is defined as self sustained fusion not just fusion. ITER is planned to have ignition and a Q > 1. Now are we years from commercially viable? No. They may never be commercially viable and even if they are this event alone doesn't really change the timeline materially. However prior to this humans had never achieved ignition or breakeven fusion. All expectations were that wouldn't happen until 2025 or later when ITER went online.

 

[Chuckstar]

We do have one proof of concept for fusion come to think of it. Solar (and a little less directly, wind) already harvest the product of an utterly massive self sustaining fusion reaction. It's just that way more of it's energy is lost due to the tiny defect of most of the sun's light missing the earth. Then again maybe that's also for the best... A sun-laser aiming all of the sun's energy output at earth might overload the grid.

Freeman Dyson suggested a solution for that issue.

 

[HoosierEngineer]

I would be interested in knowing how you can form a plasma into a pellet. Is this something that only exists for a short time after hitting the cryogenic hydrogen (isotope?) pellet with the lasers, forming the plasma?

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Freeman Dyson suggested a solution for that issue.

Yep, though the "Dyson Sphere" can't work either, because it'll essentially be a free-floating unstable arrangement thanks to gravity hitting every part equally and thus nullifying it. A "Dysan Swarm" could work, but accidents could cause a rather horrific solar system sized version of Kessler syndrome.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

That's nice, but by this late date there is no plausible path for fusion energy to stop, or even slow, the ongoing global warming catastrophe. To do that we would have to replace all the world's fossil fuel uses with every non-fossil energy source now in hand: wind, Solar, and nuclear fission, along with the transmission, storage, and artificial fuels technologies needed to make full use of them.

And that's STILL only resolving the energy creation side of things. It doesn't even start to address manufacturing related carbon emissions.

 

[Asvarduil]

That isn't even close to true though. If everyone was spending trillions of dollars on fusion and nobody building/researching PV panels you might have a valid point. Except the opposite is true. Nearly nothing (relatively speaking on global economy scales) is spent on fusion power. This facility only got greenlighted for the value in modeling nuclear weapons. If that didn't exist exactly $0 would have been spent.

The PV power market is $180B annually expected to grow to $290B by the end of the decade. Fusion research is a rounding error on that.

https://www.globenewswire.com/en/ne...-18-Billion-Globally-by-2028-at-6-9-CAGR.html
So we are doing both and the vast majority of the money is going towards the more immediate practical power source.

Building on this, just because a particular technology gets one article written about it, doesn't mean that that's the new direction that everything everywhere must now go in.

This achievement in fusion doesn't preclude solar adoption in any way. In fact, for meeting energy production needs and combating climate change, both are necessary.

 

[cerberusTI]

Do you have a cite for that because I can't find any articles or cites to support that claim. There were papers published in 2022 confirming the 2021 ignition.

They achieved ignition in 2021 however 1) the energy output was only 70% of the energy input and 2) despite trying to replicate it for a year they couldn't. So to replicate ignition again and not produce the same 70% output but a claimed 120% is a pretty big and unexpected deal.




The sequence of events was
August 2021 - achieve first ignition with 70% yield (1.4 MJ on 1.92 MJ shot)
Rest of 2021 and through Nov 2022 - multiple attempts to replicate but zero successful ignitions.
Dec 2022 - achieve second successful ignition but with 70% yield but a 120% yield (2.5 MJ on 2.1 MJ shot).

Maybe that sequence of events was perfectly predictable to you but it was surprising to me, surprising to plenty of people around the world and given the damage to the facility I am going to presume surprisingly to the people doing it.

This is possibly the least surprising facility to pull this off, however it is important to realize how far from commercial viability it is.

They will very likely be subject to alignment errors with large consequence, so the expectation is a large variance in output. They are unlikely to be able to repeat this at will, although if they continue to run the facility it will surely happen again.

The measure is break even against the laser energy entering the hohlraum if it is like the last reported shot, which is a small portion of the entire laser energy, and that laser is not very efficient to begin with. If we are talking about wall power vs fusion energy, they need at least four orders of magnitude difference or so to even think about breaking even in terms of producing electricity via this method, not 120%.

Other devices may not be able to do quite what they did, but it does not mean they are further from commercial applications. This one is pretty far away given available laser efficiency, which is not necessarily an easier challenge.

 

[Statistical]

I would be interested in knowing how you can form a plasma into a pellet. Is this something that only exists for a short time after hitting the cryogenic hydrogen (isotope?) pellet with the lasers, forming the plasma?

The pellet is the fusion fuel. The fuel inside the capsule briefly turns into a plasma when the lasers cause the fuel to undergo fusion. So it isn't forming plasma into a pellet it is forming a pellet into plasma. Yes the capsule very quickly vaporizes when that happens.

 

[jeblis]

I remember when the NIF was controversial because people thought it was just for weapons research. Glad they built it anyway.

Unfortunately fusion research is always going to be closely related to weapons research.

 

[Veritas super omens]

Freeman Dyson suggested a solution for that issue.

A cow, wasn't it?

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Building on this, just because a particular technology gets one article written about it, doesn't mean that that's the new direction that everything everywhere must now go in.

This achievement in fusion doesn't preclude solar adoption in any way. In fact, for meeting energy production needs and combating climate change, both are necessary.

It's that classic bait & switch, as though everyone thinks only a single person is in charge of it and that one person can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Not only CAN we go with multiple sources of energy, it's preferable that we do! Every region is going to have different resources and needs and different solutions will apply to them. Wind makes a LOT of sense in my state for example, because it's such a major resource here we wrote a frickin' musical number about it. It's literally the first line. Solar makes more sense in regions with next to no clouds. Hydro makes sense in place we've already set up massive dams. Fission makes sense in tectonically stable landlocked areas, so long as we can guarantee competent people running those facilities that aren't driven at any point by power grabs or greed.

Coal, gas, and oil don't make sense anywhere any more, considering that the danger it poses is global, not regional. What China puts in their air affects us. What we put in the air affects South Africa.

 

[Chuckstar]

JET never achieved ignition. JET also never achieved breakeven (Q of 0.68).
NIF achieved ignition in 2021 but with a Q of 0.7.
It has now acheieve ignition and greater than breakeven (Q of 1.2) in the same experiment.

Ignition is defined as self sustained fusion not just fusion. ITER is planned to have ignition and a Q > 1.

Perhaps just as important as hitting Q>1, is that ITER is designed to allow for developing/testing some of the other technologies a fusion reactor would need: the lithium blanket for breeding tritium, design of the extra shielding needed where plasma will hit the chamber wall, etc. I don’t know if things like purifying and re-injecting tritium will be part of ITER, or if those design will waits for DEMO. Even beyond the takomok itself (or whatever reaction chamber design), fusion reactors are not going to be at all simple devices, and we’ve been waiting for a reaction system to be shown to work before designing much of that ancillary tech (rightly, of course, since spending that money before having a fusion system to use it with would be wasting time-value-of-money)

 

[Dark Jaguar]

A cow, wasn't it?

Spherical of course, with a sun in it's belly. That is, in fact, a greatly simplified but accurate description of a cow's energy source. Cows are solar powered. This is why biologists hate physicists.

 

[Snazster]

We used to pay for phone service with a connection fee and then by the minute for anything but local calls. Calling home to my family once every two weeks for just a few minutes (when I was stationed in Korea) would run fifty bucks when that was serious money. My daughter took a job in Korea and would routinely make a video call to me (back in the US) as she was walking to work. She was only paying for her connection fee, so long as she did no exceed her enormous data cap.

I look forward to the day when non-commercial (home use) electrical service will have a connection fee, but no charge for usage quantities (so long as it stays under an enormous cap). If we are alive then, the younger folks will no doubt consider it ridiculous and horrifying that we ever did.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

We used to pay for phone service with a connection fee and then by the minute for anything but local calls. Calling home to my family once every two weeks for just a few minutes (when I was stationed in Korea) would run fifty bucks when that was serious money. My daughter took a job in Korea and would routinely make a video call to me (back in the US) as she was walking to work. She was only paying for her connection fee, so long as she did no exceed her enormous data cap.

I look forward to the day when commercial electrical service will have a connection fee, but no charge for usage quantities (so long as it stays under an enormous cap). If we are alive then, the younger folks will no doubt consider it ridiculous and horrifying that we ever did.

That's adorable. To think the cost of phone and electric service is tied to what it costs to produce, I mean, but the recent price hikes of oil, for example, have NO tangible connection to the price of a barrel any more. It's whatever they feel like they can get away with at this point. The only way to reach that future you envision is going to be some serious regulation of the market.

 

[Chuckstar]

We used to pay for phone service with a connection fee and then by the minute for anything but local calls. Calling home to my family once every two weeks for just a few minutes (when I was stationed in Korea) would run fifty bucks when that was serious money. My daughter took a job in Korea and would routinely make a video call to me (back in the US) as she was walking to work. She was only paying for her connection fee, so long as she did no exceed her enormous data cap.

I look forward to the day when commercial electrical service will have a connection fee, but no charge for usage quantities (so long as it stays under an enormous cap). If we are alive then, the younger folks will no doubt consider it ridiculous and horrifying that we ever did.

They originally promised us electricity that’s “too cheap to meter” when first having the idea of fission-powered electricity generation. Don’t hold your breath.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

They originally promised us electricity that’s “too cheap to meter” when first having the idea of fission-powered electricity generation. Don’t hold your breath.

They'd charge for your breath too if they could figure out a way to patent it.

 

[Statistical]

We used to pay for phone service with a connection fee and then by the minute for anything but local calls. Calling home to my family once every two weeks for just a few minutes (when I was stationed in Korea) would run fifty bucks when that was serious money. My daughter took a job in Korea and would routinely make a video call to me (back in the US) as she was walking to work. She was only paying for her connection fee, so long as she did no exceed her enormous data cap.

I look forward to the day when commercial electrical service will have a connection fee, but no charge for usage quantities (so long as it stays under an enormous cap). If we are alive then, the younger folks will no doubt consider it ridiculous and horrifying that we ever did.

That is very unlikely to happen baring science fiction changes in material science.

Even if a fusion plant had free fuel it still has a construction cost and very likely you would need to borrow the funds so an amortized finance cost. It still has non-fuel operating costs, required repairs, maintenance, and downtime. The grid itself has a non-zero cost to maintain even if the power generation was free or nearly free. Power generation has no Moore's Law equivalent.

A PV panel is about as zero maintenance as you can get and the per unit cost of its lifetime output is very much not too cheap to meter.

 

[Fancy Internet Person]

They'd charge for your breath too if they could figure out a way to patent it.

This is the business plan for space colonization.

 

[Asvarduil]

They'd charge for your breath too if they could figure out a way to patent it.

I remember this one commercial with a character who was clearly an asshole saying something like, "If the boogeyman was hiding under your bed, I'd charge him rent."

Just because one can charge for something doesn't mean it's a good idea, even if it's something you can practically do.

 

[Chuckstar]

I remember when the NIF was controversial because people thought it was just for weapons research. Glad they built it anyway.

Unfortunately fusion research is always going to be closely related to weapons research.

Unfortunately, it’s questionable whether this result really tells us anything new. We first confirmed you can brute-force tritium and deuterium into fusing back in 1952. This is decidedly a brute-force method, just with small enough amounts of D and T to do in a lab. Time will tell if it ends up providing any useful information for fusion technology more broadly.

 

[SimonW]

Ahh, yes, a "cup of hydrogen".
I always save my hydrogen cups for when we have guests.

 

[Fatesrider]

I allways have the movies Chain Reaction (Reeves) and The Saint (Kilmer) in my head when hear these stories. I wonder in real life if they solve this, what actually happens - I suspect an even wilder ride . . .

Neither is possible with fusion.

The reaction would simply shut down, since it takes energy going in to make it continue. Earthly fusion is not self-sustaining without an external source of energy to get it started, and all it takes is cutting the power to the lasers, or cutting off the flow of the fuel, to stop it. It might be a touch warm until it cools off, but there's no possible risk of explosion nor of radiation or a Fukushima-style meltdown.

There is the potential to melt the containment chamber, but that would only cause the system to go offline, and the plasma would disperse without fuel to continue to feed it, or energy to keep it going.

I am a bit confused by this, though:

The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 percent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analyzed.

0.4 megajoules (400,000 joules) of net output is about 0.4 megawatts (as long as my math of 1000 j = 0.001 MW is correct) which isn't much excess. Then again, this is just an experiment/proof of concept thing, so yeah, I wouldn't expect it to be powering cities right off the bat.

One of the things that I've had some thoughts about in the past with respect to fusion is that it would possibly take far more power to keep it going than the excess it can produce to be used. This result seems to bear out that thought, producing about 20% more power than it takes to keep it running (if they had kept it running from the power it produced in the first place, which it doesn't sound like they did).

At least that's how I read it. If that 2.5 megajoules was above what it took to fire it up, then that's pretty substantial (but that's not how it seems to be written).

So anyone have any idea how much more excess can they expect to get as they refine the process? Or is it already expected that efficiency will be relatively low, and will need to scale the size/power upward to get commercially viable power from it?

I don't expect to see a Mr. Fusion anytime in the future, but fusion plants would be supremely cool if we got them for commercial power within my lifetime. This is obviously incremental progress in a longer process, but it's a milestone for fusion, proving it CAN be done - at least at this scale and with the methods used. Hopefully they can improve on the efficiency as they continue their efforts.

 

[randomname19937]

I guarantee you that the upfront costs for a fusion plant will be larger than for a coal plant.

It's likely (but there are edge cases, like power plants in cities, where the land for the fuel depot could make a whole lot of difference) but they should be much cheaper than fission power plants (which are still being built!) for multiple reasons:

• passive safety - no failure mode in which the reaction spins out of control (the difficulty to maintain fusion conditions is what keeps fusion from being used)
• the fuel is cheap, unregulated and safe to transport and store (deuterium + lithium; tritium is produced on-site and never present in large quantities)
• little radioactivity - tritium and the activated interior parts of the reaction vessel
• potential to operate at higher temperatures, increasing efficiency (and reducing cooling requirements)

 

[cerberusTI]

Perhaps just as important as hitting Q>1, is that ITER is designed to allow for developing/testing some of the other technologies a fusion reactor would need: the lithium blanket for breeding tritium, design of the extra shielding needed where plasma will hit the chamber wall, etc. I don’t know if things like purifying and re-injecting tritium will be part of ITER, or if those design will waits for DEMO. Even beyond the takomok itself (or whatever reaction chamber design), fusion reactors are not going to be at all simple devices, and we’ve been waiting for a reaction system to be shown to work before designing much of that ancillary tech (rightly, of course, since spending that money before having a fusion system to use it with would be wasting time-value-of-money)

Even more important is that ITER is using a different definition for Q than NIF is.

ITER is using the more classic definition and counting their entire energy input against produced fusion energy. NIF is only counting the energy of their laser, which is less than one percent efficient.

Unless this is using a different definition than they have been, it is a physics breakthrough, but nothing like ITER in terms of potential for a power plant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor#Scientific_breakeven_at_NIF

 

[same.dan]

Wow . . . "the wind has stopped blowing".

We'll, it did. Also in neughbouring France. And they put back online coal plants that have been closed for years now.
Renewables without storage are dead in the water, the reality is biting hard right now.

 

[Statistical]

Neither is possible with fusion.

The reaction would simply shut down, since it takes energy going in to make it continue. Earthly fusion is not self-sustaining without an external source of energy to get it started, and all it takes is cutting the power to the lasers, or cutting off the flow of the fuel, to stop it. It might be a touch warm until it cools off, but there's no possible risk of explosion nor of radiation or a Fukushima-style meltdown.

There is the potential to melt the containment chamber, but that would only cause the system to go offline, and the plasma would disperse without fuel to continue to feed it, or energy to keep it going.

I am a bit confused by this, though:


0.4 megajoules (400,000 joules) of net output is about 0.4 megawatts (as long as my math of 1000 j = 0.001 MW is correct) which isn't much excess. Then again, this is just an experiment/proof of concept thing, so yeah, I wouldn't expect it to be powering cities right off the bat.

One of the things that I've had some thoughts about in the past with respect to fusion is that it would possibly take far more power to keep it going than the excess it can produce to be used. This result seems to bear out that thought, producing about 20% more power than it takes to keep it running (if they had kept it running from the power it produced in the first place, which it doesn't sound like they did).

At least that's how I read it. If that 2.5 megajoules was above what it took to fire it up, then that's pretty substantial (but that's not how it seems to be written).

So anyone have any idea how much more excess can they expect to get as they refine the process? Or is it already expected that efficiency will be relatively low, and will need to scale the size/power upward to get commercially viable power from it?

I don't expect to see a Mr. Fusion anytime in the future, but fusion plants would be supremely cool if we got them for commercial power within my lifetime. This is obviously incremental progress in a longer process, but it's a milestone for fusion, proving it CAN be done - at least at this scale and with the methods used. Hopefully they can improve on the efficiency as they continue their efforts.

The short answer is nobody knows. This isn't a power plant. It isn't even a experimental powerplant. It isn't even an experiment on how you could make a power plant using fusion.

If commercial fusion powerplants ever exist they are unlikely to look or operating anything like this facility. Understand also you can't compare MJ to MW directly unless the output is over exactly one second. This experiment is more like TW scale power but lasting nanoseconds. The fuel capsule is hand placed in the experiment chamber. They often spend weeks or even months between shots calibrating and testing and then it initiated fusion for nanoseconds. Sometimes it fails to initiate fusion at all. Sometimes it initiates fusion but it isn't self sustaining (ignition). Until this month all attempts had never reached break even. So this is gathering data but nothing like a powerplant. They aren't even trying the non-fusion powerplant stuff. Like how would you feed new fuel in, how would you convert the thermal output into usable electricity how would you handle the neutron damage to the facility from continual operation.

So trying to draw any conclusions on how some future hypothetical commercial fusion powerplant would operate from this experiment is just a bridge too far. Any conclusions would simply be science fiction. The only good news is there is huge potential for improvement. The last ignition at this facility last year produced 1.4 MJ output and it now produced 2.5 MJ. That is almost an 80% increase in nominal output. To be anywhere close to viable though it would need to be more on the scale of 1000+ MJ output on the same 2 MJ laser input. So we are so far from commercial viability it would be like a week after the Wright brothers first flight trying to conceptualize what an international airliner would look like. Any conclusions drawn would almost certainly be wrong.

 

[Maury Markowitz]

Physicists have since the 1950s

1938.

2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 percent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers

That's the output of the laser's final optics after upconversion to UV.

Prior to upconversion, the laser itself is about 4.2 MJ.

That uses ~425 MJ of electricity.

 

[xoe]

This site has electricity generation for the UK https://gridwatch.co.uk/ and renewables are basically dead as the wind has stopped blowing and due to it being winter solar is also dead and both have been for the last 39 hours.

How much battery capacity and how big an area of land would be needed to power the UK for that length of time using the 35.5 to 38.5GW's average electricity usage?

Because currently we are just burning lots of natural gas with some coal and biomass.

This is with the UK having 25GW of installed capacity for wind power and 14GW of solar.


We need fusion to become usable a lot faster than it is going to be.

I don't understand why people are so strongly against natural gas as backup power generation to supplement intermittent power sources. They are quite good at it and are among the least harmful options that are realistic for immediate implementation.

 

[Chuckstar]

It's likely (but there are edge cases, like power plants in cities, where the land for the fuel depot could make a whole lot of difference) but they should be much cheaper than fission power plants (which are still being built!) for multiple reasons:

• passive safety - no failure mode in which the reaction spins out of control (the difficulty to maintain fusion conditions is what keeps fusion from being used)
• the fuel is cheap, unregulated and safe to transport and store (deuterium + lithium; tritium is produced on-site and never present in large quantities)
• little radioactivity - tritium and the activated interior parts of the reaction vessel
• potential to operate at higher temperatures, increasing efficiency (and reducing cooling requirements)

I wasn’t trying to prognosticate the price of fusion plants, only to point out that comparing fuel costs to maintenance costs when the upfront capital costs are likely to be so different doesn’t cut it. I will point out, though, that a fusion plant is going to be a way more complicated device than a fission plant, albeit as you point out not requiring the same levels of fail safe. I wouldn’t necessarily assume fusion ends up cheaper than fission.

 

[cbum]

Here one of the aforementioned small fusion research groups with a promising approach:
(Their website is at LPPFusion.com)

https://mailchi.mp/lppfusion/fusion...er-funding-for-lppfusion-5477797?e=c1f2b20a85 (July 2021)

From the above report:
On LPPFusion’s basic approach, using the dense plasma focus device with hydrogen boron (pB11) fuel: “Pursuit of the p11B fusion fuel cycle is highly desirable, because that cycle does not directly emit neutrons, which greatly complicate concepts based on other fusion fuel cycles..."

 

[mhalpern]

This is the business plan for space colonization.

Pretty sure for sake of simplicity, that'd just be an item under "space taxes" also to keep THAT fee hidden....

 

[d4ars]

it would be a great achievement if it was not for [1] .

TL;DR : NIF has redefined the measure of input energy to their own convenience

Quoting: LLNL has proposed another modification of Q that defines Pheat as the energy delivered by the driver to the capsule, as opposed to the energy put into the driver by an external power source. That is, they propose removing the laser's inefficiency from the consideration of gain. This definition produces much higher Q values, and changes the definition of breakeven to be Pfus / Plaser = 1 . This is because the laser is extremely inefficient; whereas

for the heaters used in magnetic systems might be on the order of 70%, lasers are on the order of 1%.

So, when comparing to other fusione method, the actual Q is not 1.2 , it is probabily 0.012 .

Consider that the ITER project is supposed to achieve Q=10 , for comparison; and it is highly debated if Q=10 can be enough for economic viability. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor#Scientific_breakeven_at_NIF
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

 

[same.dan]

A study reported here maybe a decade ago looked at the northeastern quarter of the US and came up with the cheapest way to get IIRC 99.9% uptime on just renewables as headline capacity of several times typical demand and enough storage for several days of grid operation. The biggest caveat in the model was that they didn't attempt to price the expansion in long distance transmission lines needed to move power from regions that were producing large excesses to regions with large deficits.

Regardless of how that works out, we'll have a long period between when we've got enough renewables to cover happy case and even average case needs and when we can finally scrap natural gas burners as no longer needed emergency backup systems.

Really? And what is this Magic storage you're talking about?

 

[Chuckstar]

I don't understand why people are so strongly against natural gas as backup power generation to supplement intermittent power sources. They are quite good at it and are among the least harmful options that are realistic for immediate implementation.

If one believes the goal needs to be zero fossil fuel use, then you’ve got to get to zero fossil fuel use. If one believes the goal is to massively reduce fossil fuel use, and that a few hard-to-eliminate uses can take longer to figure out, then there shouldn’t be a problem with some minority of natural gas peakers operating around the world. Personally, I tend to fall in the latter camp, but understand where the former are coming from.

 

[d4ars]

...and finding a viable source for Tritium that does not involve constructing a bunch of fission reactors to feed the fusion reactors.

no need for fission: [1] ITER will use a deuterium-tritium fuel, and while deuterium is abundant in nature, tritium is much rarer because it is a hydrogen isotope with a half-life of just 12.3 years and there is only approximately 3.5 kilograms of natural tritium on earth.[137] Owing to this limited terrestrial supply of tritium, a key component of the ITER reactor design is the breeding blanket. This component, located adjacent to the vacuum vessel, serves to produce tritium through reaction with neutrons from the plasma.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

 

[Snazster]

That is very unlikely to happen baring science fiction changes in material science.

Even if a fusion plant had free fuel it still has a construction cost and very likely you would need to borrow the funds so an amortized finance cost. It still has non-fuel operating costs, required repairs, maintenance, and downtime. The grid itself has a non-zero cost to maintain even if the power generation was free or nearly free. Power generation has no Moore's Law equivalent.

A PV panel is about as zero maintenance as you can get and the per unit cost of its lifetime output is very much not too cheap to meter.

My bad, I meant non-commercial. Cheap enough power and it won't be worth it to read meters on minor users.

 

[Fancy Internet Person]

We'll, it did. Also in neughbouring France. And they put back online coal plants that have been closed for years now.

That's a funny way to say they're refiring one coal plant that was closed in March, because Russia's war on Ukraine has reduced natural gas availability.

 

[Ozy]

I don't understand why people are so strongly against natural gas as backup power generation to supplement intermittent power sources. They are quite good at it and are among the least harmful options that are realistic for immediate implementation.

Absolutely. NG peaker plants to backup a ~90% renewable grid is much better than what we have now, and we can work on that remaining 10%.

 

[mhalpern]

We'll, it did. Also in neughbouring France. And they put back online coal plants that have been closed for years now.
Renewables without storage are dead in the water, the reality is biting hard right now.

Yes and no, storage and/or long distance transmission help, as the intermittent renewables (wind and solar) are intermittent, but its not like with sufficient build out, you wouldn't be getting power for an extended period. there's also geothermal and for edge cases, biomass, but really most storage is just needed to balance out daily generation and use. There might be cases where long term storage is needed, but no one has decarbonized their grids to the point where its an immediate concern yet.