It is pretty funny that as advanced as our technology gets, we’re still basically just at the higher end of the “steam engine” phase.
I explained this to my oldest when he learned about the steam engine and how cool it was. When I told him it was the peak in power he was like “but we have nuclear and gas” and I told him that nuclear power is basically just a super charged steam engine, and nuclear rods boil water better than coal or gasoline, but it’s basically a steam engine. I went over how gasoline in cars was basically the same, but instead of steam, it used tiny explosions. We watched a few how it’s made type videos.
But I don’t WANT to boil water, I want ELECTRICITY. Like, future electricity!
Nooooo! I want different electricity. Not calculator electricity.
I want REAL electricity!
[sad Sterling Engine noises]
Just as a side note that gas power plants capture two types of energy, both the expansion of the burned gas and the heat. This is why they’re now more popular for new builds than oil.
We’re honestly almost past that at this point. Solar is devouring the world. Total global electricity production capacity is about 10 TW. China is currently producing 1 TW of panels annually. And the panels are still getting better and the prices are still dropping. We will quickly reach the point where the vast majority of global electricity production is solar, and everything else is a rounding error.
There just isn’t going to be any reason to build fusion plants. Maybe in the distant future colonies in the outer solar system and beyond will use them. But for anything inward of Mars, solar is the way to go. Solar+batteries is already, in 2026, the cheapest form of baseload power available. Material limitations are not a problem with modern battery chemistries. Daily swings in power demand will be solved by batteries. And we simply won’t have to worry about seasonal power swings. We’ll build enough solar panels to meet all our winter needs. We’ll build enough to power our cities during the coldest, cloudiest months. And then the rest of they year we’ll have super-abundant dirt cheap power.
The future is one of vast energy abundance. We’re going to find all sorts of ways to use energy that we’ve never even dreamed of before - mostly to take advantage of the abundance of dirt cheap energy we’ll have during all but the coldest months.
The days the steam engine are numbered. With the exception of remote polar outposts, everything’s going solar. It’s simply the cheapest most abundant form of energy we’ve ever discovered. Nothing can match it.
The days the steam engine are numbered.
Not really. Unless there are some breakthroughs in technology that significantly lower capex & opex for grid scale energy storage, they’ll be sticking around for a long time.
There is an asterisk on the 1TW number, and that asterisk is capacity factor. In practice it means that depending on the time of year and location, the effective output of your solar panel will be between 0-40% of label capacity .
In my country for instance, you can expect 0-2% output from a panel in the winter time, which also happens to coincide with the peak demands (heating). Luckily, our politicians had some foresight in the 70s & 80s and built lots of hydro and nuclear power, which has been the backbone of our grid ever since (despite attempts to dismantle it).
you can expect 0-2% output from a panel in the winter time
I can confirm this. My family is off-grid and there have been extended periods the last two winters when it has simply been too dark for too long to depend on the solar without installing 50x more panels.
Also, the problem with having larger battery capacity to span these periods is that if they don’t get fully recharged or cycled properly the batteries get damaged and eventually die. We learnt that the hard way.
Solar is the undisputed champion for 80-90% of the year but needs to be complemented with something else for the remainder, if you want uninterrupted on-demand electricity.
The future is one of vast energy abundance
Wow. Isn’t it amazing that the majority of human history operated under renewable energy?
I just hope the timeline you describe can outpace the timeline racing towards neo-feudalism, world war 3, global pandemics and heat waves triggering a new migration period.
Turns out there is a method of fusion power that doesn’t boil water. It generates massive electromagnetic fields that creates electricity.
direct energy conversion in a magnetic confinement setup, specifically leveraging a field-reversed configuration
Its actually more like if a steam engine and a waterwheel had a baby, a turbine
china already have a supercritical carbon dioxide system integrated into a functioning powergrid and operating commercially. The system exploits an exotic phase of co2 which expands to fill a volume like gas, but moves frictionlessly through tubes as a liquid. There are concerns about lifespan because of how caustic the system is, but apparently some new materials are being trialled which negate this.
Link with description for those who are unaware of this like me
Heat pumps are the next evolution of the “it’s just steam again isn’t it?” meme.
They trying to make them with work with either memory alloys or with magnetic materials.
Same principle have something can go hot and cold based on some external control. But they will be done on solid materials not fluids.
Harrumph
Still don’t understand how this could possibly generate energy.
the power plant is in space and beams energy to the dish.
Right, but like… whatever you’re doing in space is going to be more cost effective to do on earth. Not to mention the insane amount of energy lost to the atmosphere
Energy loss for wireless energy transmission is actually surprisingly low. Here is an example of 80% efficiency over 1 kilometer: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1123672
Energy loss for wireless energy transition is actually surprisingly low.
…
Unless you really need to optimise for land use. An arbitrarily large solar array in space could transmit to a fairly small collector in the surface.
As for losing power to atmospheric attenuation, high frequency microwaves will pass right through most everything that would scatter visible light. Clouds, dust, etc wouldn’t really impede it.
I won’t say it’s not a silly idea, because it is. It’s fun to think about though.
You could also have a constellation of satellites with area greater than the surface of the earth. It’s not that silly of an idea.
Big solar panel
musk wants datacenters in space. which makes sense, 24/7 sunlight and no transmission of power is grand; but I do wonder about the shielding and moving the data back and forth.
yeah but imagine you can put the plant and all the pollution on an asteroid or something.
It basically doesn’t work out.
Theoretically you could have 2500 square meters of solar arrays above the weather beaming the power down to a dish with only a 500 square meter footprint.
But you’d still have to deal with weather with some kind of a storage solution. And 2500 square meters of area in space seems more expensive to claim than just 500 square meters of area on land, in pretty much any scenario.
ACKSHUALLY we’re going to put special solar panels inside the reactor.
Harness the power of the sun, but indoors!
People are essentially internal combustion engines that burn food. Trying to capture that energy in ways that increases the load on us just causes us to need more calories. That’s counter productive as you could just burn said food itself to get energy, and agriculture is an energy and environmentally intensive industry to begin with.
On the other hand, clothes that would help me lose weight and charge my phone at the same time sound pretty cool. Just need to install Pokemon Go and I’ll be fit in no time.
The original idea was the machines using humans as a connected neural network. I don’t think it would change much about the plot of the movies if they’re used for energy or brain power, so it’s easy to change it for your own head canon at least 🙂
We aren’t actually talking about the matrix here
All energy sources have trade offs.
Solar panels take a lot of space and shadows ecosystems reliant on sun light. Wind turbines kill birds and are noisy. Dams remove water sources from ecosystems and communities reliant on them. Fusion/nuclear/fission pose security risks. Oil/coal power puts CO2 and pollutants into the air.
The last one has global consequences and the first 4 only have local consequences that depend on circumstances.
Edit: hey everyone, the point of this comment was not to shit on renewables or to paint them as equal to non renewables. I admit that the arguments I made are not the best. They didn’t come from thorough analysis, but it also wasn’t the point. The point is just that there is a case for fusion/fission too. One doesn’t have to exclude the other. Many renewables are time sensitive and depend on the environment. They are great and absolutely should we invest in it! I just don’t subscribe to the idea that we should shoot down fusion/fission.
Wind turbines kill birds and are noisy.
Technology Connections made a video specifically for you. https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Solar panels providing shade to grazing animals and crops is a mutual win, not the loss you make it out to be. Search for “the trampolining effect”
Thanks for sharing!
Wind turbines kill birds and are noisy.
No they are not, no they do not.
Visit a wind farm. You will find far more dead birds at the base of a glass office building. Last summer I walked through a farm of 16 wind turbines and never saw a dead bird.
Can someone explain the solar panels bit at the bottom? Is it because the creator of the meme is advocating that as a cooler method of energy, given that it doesn’t use boiling water, or is it because the fusion reactor can utilise solar panels to convert the energy to electricity?
My the actual intention of this joke, was to point out, that even if fusion will make again use of boiling water, we already have more “suffisticated” methods to generate electricity (like e.g. solar cells via the photovoltaic effect), that make not use of the great equalizer make wheel spin fast.
But based on many comments here (and yours is not one of them), this failed.
How are solar panels made? Doesn’t it involve mining? Is it renewable?
I can really recommend this video by Technology Connections which answers your questions very well. It is long but entertaining and educational. The last 30 minutes are basically a rant about politics and I love every second of it.
They are mostly glass and silica I think. The thing that generates electricity is basically a reverse LED. They are also highly recyclable, as the video linked in the other comment explains.
I watched a docu about one fusion startup in the US. They’re skipping the boiling water step and converting the energy directly to electricity.
I dont remember the mechanics of how though. But they reportedly are the closest to net positive.
Helion energy. But i don’t think their approach has been verified yet. So take it with a grain of salt.
I didn’t know someone was trying a different approach like that, their animated graphics were really cool.
Eventually someone has gotta figure this out, I just hope I’m alive to see it and the outcome of it.
Guess god wanted us to get malaria because he created mosquitos? /s
Mosquitos don’t automatically have malaria. The sun automatically has fusion.
Yes, Jimmy; you are.
