Solar Is Already Clean, Reliable and Abundant
So do we need fusion?
Venture capitalist superstar Sam Altman has become the face of AI (artificial intelligence), although according to Elon Musk the person most responsible for the success of OpenAI is Ilya Sutskever. Nonetheless, Mr. Altman seems to have a knack for identifying, growing and publicizing technology companies that might fundamentally change our world.
So that’s why Helion stands out among the crowded field of start ups attempting to make electricity by fusing atoms. They prominently note Sam Altman among their investors. And while they haven’t generated any electricity yet, they have generated a lot of interest thanks to that association.
It turns out there is a strong connection between AI and electricity. Training the models and running the code necessary for today’s AI requires a lot of electricity. So anything we can do to produce more power at less cost will help AI really take off. Helion promises a future where AI can thrive because energy is clean, reliable and abundant, thanks to fusion.
But do we need fusion on Earth? The gigantic fusion reaction happening one astronomical unit away (our sun) is already sending clean, reliable and abundant power to us for free every day. All we need to do is collect it.
While Helion’s approach to fusion seems much more reasonable than others, primarily due to the fact that they are not planning to harness the heat from a fusion reaction to build thermal steam power plants. Instead, they believe they can use magnets to generate current from pulses of expanding plasma in their reactors. Still, that’s a lot more work than leaving a solar panel out in the sun with a couple wires attached.
The fundamental issue with fusion and other other fuel-based power technologies is the fuel. Helion claims that they’ll easily be able to make helium-3 from deuterium to produce their own fuel. That would be a neat trick, and might be worth the price of admission even if that’s all their technology can do. It would be fun to have a cheaper supply of helium-3 in the world.
But it’s hard to compete on price to generate electricity from fuel, no matter how cheap you can make that fuel, when your competition can produce electricity without any fuel at all. To scale successfully, nothing beats having a zero in front of an optional expense factor.
Still, I believe there will be a role for fusion. Not because it will be any cleaner, more reliable or more abundant than solar power, but because it is concentrated and dispatchable.
Everyone loves power sources that are concentrated, meaning they don’t take up a lot of real estate, and dispatchable, meaning they store energy until power is requested.
Solar is not concentrated — but that isn’t a deal killer. Every area we’ve paved could be solarized. And we can put floating solar panels on canals and reservoirs. As we transition away from fuel we’ll find that we can put solar in many more places than we’ve imagined. But still, it would be nicer to have a power plant that fits in your pocket.
Solar is not dispatchable — until you pair it with storage. In my view, you’d have to believe that none of the energy storage technologies currently being commercialized will pan out in order for fusion of any sort to get a toe-hold in the market for general purpose electricity. In the near future, almost everything will have a battery, and we’ll be able to recharge those batteries with solar whenever the sun shines.
The fact that fusion is concentrated and dispatchable is necessary, but not sufficient for the win. Storing solar energy in batteries (and a long list of other energy storage technologies) concentrates power into a dispatchable system. The real question is, can fusion be a better battery?
There are a few niche markets for fusion while it remains larger than AA battery size. Fusion would be great powering research stations at the poles or deep underground or underwater where not much sunlight penetrates. It might also be nice to have fusion heaters for buildings at high latitudes where the sun doesn’t shine for months. But what would really make fusion great is not making it clean, reliable, and abundant, but making it tiny, portable and safe.
Once fusion can fit in your fitbit, then it will really be something worth paying attention to.