this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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It seems like it's probably too late.
Even if we crack fusion power today, I can't see it being deployed cheaply enough and quickly enough to compete with solar/wind+batteries. By the time we could get production fusion plants up and ready to feed power into the grid, it'd be 2050 and nobody would be interested in buying electricity from it.
Fusion would provide orders of magnitude more power than solar. There's a limit on how much we can practically get from solar, fusion would allow us to exceed that.
Yeah, but there's no prizes for producing way more power than we use. We're not running out of space to put solar panels or batteries.
'Too much power' has never been an issue, and will likely not be an issue ever with solar. There are multitudes of technologies, especially in industry, that are currently impractical because they would consume too much energy.
We can already massively increase generation to meet the needs of those industries whenever we want. They're impractical due to the cost of meeting their energy requirements, not because it's impossible.