ayshfm1 wrote:...Thirdly the only energy source that really does change the dynamics also wipes out all the renewables, where as it tends to complement fossil fuels. Anyone who thinks passenger planes will have electric engines deludes themselves.
Anyone who thinks they will have tokamaks
also deludes themselves - tokamaks are big,
heavy installations, even the smaller ones that are being worked on... Passenger planes will almost certainly be powered by chemical fuels, and the only candidates that look practical at the moment are hydrocarbons and hydrogen, with hydrogen having the practical advantage that it can be cheaply and efficiently synthesised using electricity, while hydrocarbons have the practical advantages of being easy to store and being the in-place technology.
ayshfm1 wrote:So I'll summerise.
Fossil has uses that can't IMHO be substituted
Obviously
fossil chemical fuels
can be substituted - with synthetic versions of the same fuels. For the chemical fuels in widespread use today, it's known technology, but it's unfortunately too expensive... However, technology has a habit of coming down in price as it is developed -
if the development effort is put into it. For example, the other day I saw a
story on the BBC indicating that offshore wind power had come down in price to the point that new installations no longer looked likely to require subsidies.
ayshfm1 wrote:Green as it stands today has a business case that has the potential to be blasted to bits
Just about every industry we invest in has the
potential to be blasted to bits - given a suitable definition of the word "blasted" that doesn't imply a very short timescale...
And I don't see fusion as being at all likely to blast other energy-supplying industries' business models to bits if one uses a definition that does imply a very short timescale. It's all very well talking about it supplying "abundant nearly free energy" and (from your link) "One glass of water will provide enough fusion fuel for one person's lifetime" - but the cost of that water will be a miniscule part of the cost of fusion energy for a
very long time, or quite possibly forever. The major part of it will be the costs of all the development and the capital & running costs of the plant, and they'll almost certainly be considerably higher than the costs of other forms of energy and slowly come down over time. And even when they are below the costs of alternatives, there will be a huge installed base of sunk capital costs to replace - things like the current issues of migrating houses away from using gas and other fossil fuels for their heating, cars away from using internal combustion engines, etc, would all be easy were it not for the huge installed bases of the current technologies.
I'm fairly certain it will take a few decades from the point that fusion starts to take off ( metaphorically - I'm not talking about those passenger planes here! ;
-) ) to its competitors being in bits, and the point at which it starts to take off is still an unknown number of decades away. Yes, your link talks about commercialization starting in 2025 - but that is a new company with not-yet-proven technology talking about its own future, something which is almost always done with strongly rose-tinted glasses on. And fusion has a
long history of people expecting it to become commercially viable in a lot less time than it actually turns out to need... (Which does
not show that it will continue to do so forever - but
does show that it's hard to predict when it will become commercially viable.)
ayshfm1 wrote:I have an open mind about what happens next - I try to come out OK on the swings and the roundabouts.
One scenario - the planet dies and we have bigger problems to worry about.
The other - fossil plays a far smaller part in the future and there is abundant nearly free energy
A third scenario: fossil plays a far smaller part in the future, and there is abundant cheap energy from fusion in the
distant future, leaving a gap between them when things become difficult - and that gap is filled by solar power, wind power, wave power, etc, and possibly also by energy storage/transmission technologies other than batteries and power cables.
And there are numerous variants of that third scenario, using the different technologies to complement each other in a variety of ways. Basically, just looking at the swings and the roundabouts isn't enough - one needs to look at the seesaws, the climbing frames, etc, as well...
Or dropping the analogy, I don't think that concentrating on just fossil fuels and fusion is a particularly good idea. Given the plausible timescales, green as it stands today almost certainly has a major part to play in the next few decades, and I would want my diversification to include it, even if it is eventually doomed to be eclipsed completely by fusion.
One other point to bear in mind is that when new companies do start to take off, they often get taken over by established players with deep purses - especially when their expansion becomes limited by the availability of capital and if they're competing with other companies in a similar position in the same market... The current big energy companies are likely to be looking for fusion companies to take into their empires once they see them starting to take off, just as they are looking to expand into solar and wind power today.
Gengulphus