Reply To: Okay, Let's Stop The BAKE SALE mentality and get SERIOUS

[zapkitty]

Still needs serious trimming and condensing… comments, critique needed.

Worldwide conversion to electric vehicles ASAP?
[em]Not Enough Juice For The Grid And Not Enough Grid For The Juice[/em]
Change the rules: Get Fusion

A serious constraint on EV market growth is the inability of the current grid to support recharging when and where it is convenient. Current renewable energy sources can’t grow the grid fast enough for a worldwide conversion to EVs in less than decades and will still require rigid enforcement of off-peak recharging.

So a worldwide switchover to EVs without waiting for the grid and recharging habits to catch up needs cheap and sustainable power ASAP.

One answer to that is power from fusion.

How can this be possible? While conventional wisdom says that fusion is “always decades away” in fact it may be much closer, and much cheaper, than you think.

What changed? The scant funding afforded to fusion has almost all been channeled into government-sponsored “Big Fusion” projects such as ITER and NIF. These try to tackle big problems with big hardware in big installations… and they have equally big research costs to show for it. So various small companies are investigating methods of avoiding the big obstacles that the big projects wrestle with. And it so happens that each of the proposed alternative fusion methods would result in much smaller and much cheaper commercial installations much faster than their “Big Fusion” counterparts… and their research costs are much less as well.

None of these alternative efforts are “Cold Fusion”. They are aiming for the real deal and several of them would use the same fuels at the same temperatures as the ITER and NIF efforts but in smaller, more manageable configurations. Other companies are reaching even further ahead using advanced fuels for fusion at even higher temperatures in even smaller devices. And the companies expect tangible results in years at most, not decades.

So small private projects are underway researching smaller, cheaper fusion power units. These would be the units that could be easily added to a rapidly growing distributed grid to support a swift worldwide conversion to EVs. And these small companies all have one thing in common… they need you.

The research budget of a typical fusion contender is less than what a larger corporation budgets for coffee supplies, but while government investment in “Big Fusion” is anemic at best the funding for more agile fusion solutions has been nonexistent. The contenders need investment, especially investment from people who are not afraid to rock the twin boats of current government fusion research and current energy suppliers, and whose needs are for results in years, not many decades.

Are such alternative studies worth the effort?

Yes, they are. Even the most basic forms of fusion power under study should solve humanity’s power issues permanently… and safely. Each of the contenders would have its advantages and disadvantages compared to the other fusion methods but any and all of them would leave non-fusion contenders in the dust.

It is research and there can be no guarantees but diversifying investment into at least some of these companies could be worthwhile… because if even one of them succeeds then it will change the world forever.