Me, talking about fusion and clean energy revolutions

In this episode, as a guest on Canadian daily news podcast The
Big Story, I discuss a momentous fusion breakthrough, just how
close we actually are to a future of unlimited clean energy
(hint: not very), and where we should be focusing instead.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


A few weeks ago, I was a guest on the Canadian daily news podcast
The Big Story, chatting with host Jordan Heath-Rawlings about the
big fusion news from December, the public’s hunger for energy
breakthroughs, and the energy revolution that’s going on before
our very eyes while we get lost in sci-fi fantasies.


It was fun! The team was kind enough to allow me to share it as
an episode of Volts, so please enjoy, and go ahead and subscribe
to The Big Story wherever you get your podcasts.


Frequency Podcast Network


You're listening to a Frequency podcast network production in
association with City News.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


If you've listened to this show for any length of time, you will
know that we think scientific breakthroughs are cool, especially
when they show us a path to a theoretically unlimited source of
clean energy. When you look at the trouble we're in, it's easy to
understand why anyone could get caught up in that height.


Media soundbite


The power that powers the sun, an abundant source of clean energy
to help the planet kick its carbon addiction.


This is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st
century.


It's a star in a box. Putting it in a box on Earth and tapping
that energy that goes forever. It's what Iron Man has in his
chest.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


Now, here is where I get to be a buzzkill. When a scientific
breakthrough hits the mainstream media, it's important to look
immediately to the people who have covered the sector before that
breakthrough. They are the ones who can separate hype from hope.
And while, as I said, the fusion breakthrough in December was
legitimately cool, ask some of the people who have been covering
clean energy and the climate crisis and they'll tell you a story
of other technologies.


The ones that we have right now, the ones that actually are
changing the game we are currently playing and those people
wonder why can't we focus on these things right now instead of
waiting for a miracle? I'm Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is "The
Big Story". David Roberts runs a newsletter and a podcast called
Volts, which discusses clean energy and politics. You can find it
at volts.wtf. That is an interesting suffix for your website.


David Roberts


Yes. I didn't even know it existed until I was trying to register
a domain, and then I made a rather impulsive purchase.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


Well, at least it's memorable. Now, before we get into what's
going to happen in clean energy this year, which I'm really
intrigued by, can you maybe quickly take us back to December? And
I'm sure many people listening will remember a big headline and
discussion about fusion. What was that news?


David Roberts


Sure. The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory has been experimenting with fusion for years
and years now, and they just achieved a goal that they have been
pursuing for a long time, which is they got more energy out of a
fusion reaction than was put into it. And this is a big milestone
in fusion research.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


Why is that milestone, theoretically at least, so important?


David Roberts


Well, you have to untangle a few things. In the big picture, the
hope is that eventually you can master fusion to the point that
it can create clean energy because the fuels required to run
fusion are cheap and abundant, it's carbon free. Theoretically,
fusion power plants would have a very small footprint. So, from
the energy perspective it's sort of this tantalizing utopian
energy source. In the actual fusion world, the Lawrence Livermore
Lab is not even in the business of researching fusion for energy
production. They're actually more geared toward weapons research.
There are other fusion companies pursuing energy production, but
they use actually a fundamentally different technology, a
fundamentally different form of fusion which has not reached this
threshold, this breakthrough.


But there's lots of companies pursuing fusion and depending on
how seriously you take their hype, maybe they'll be producing
actual power plants that produce actual energy in a decade. Some
of them are saying earlier than that, but they're also trying to
raise money so one doesn't know how seriously to take them. But
one thing to keep in mind is the Lawrence Livermore Facility
costs about a billion dollars to create this small amount of
energy it created. And the alternative forms of fusion claim that
they will be able to create power plants for merely hundreds of
millions of dollars. So, all of this is speculative and distant,
let's say.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


Well yeah, I mean we used theoretically a lot there, there's a
lot of caveats I noticed that you kind of threw into your
description of what could happen. But nevertheless, we begin the
conversation here because I want you to tell me just a bit about
how this went over in the mainstream news cycle because as I
mentioned, this was a big deal in early December, right?


David Roberts


Well, there's a vision that has a hold of people's imagination of
abundant clean energy produced in small power plants. And if you
have sort of...


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


Like Sim City


David Roberts


Like Sim City. And if you have limitless energy with barely any
fuel and no waste, there's all sorts of things you can think of
you could do with limitless energy. You could for instance,
desalinate water at scale with something which costs a lot of
money and energy now. You could grow endless food. There's all
kinds of stuff you can do if you have surplus abundant energy
which fills people's heads with these sort of utopian futuristic
visions.


And that vision I think, ends up causing people to sort of clutch
to any announcement like this and say oh it's it's closer, it's
going to happen, you know. But like fusion, fusion research has
been sort of going through Hype cycles ever since 1950, mainly
because of this Sci-Fi vision in people's heads. But you know, it
just needs to be said over and over again. We are still very very
far from that utopian vision of energy production. And, I would
just like to remind everyone that we're in a climate crisis and
we do not have decades to wait on an abundant source of clean
energy.


So, even if the most sort of aggressive forecast, even if
everything went very well, this is going to start generating
energy well after the point that we need to have largely
decarbonized already. So, there's sort of two categories people
can think about. There's the near term decarbonization imperative
and this is not particularly relevant to that. And then there's
like the long term, post 2100 futuristic, "mankind expands to
fill the solar system", all this kind of whatever your Sci-Fi
stuff. And this is relevant to that, but we need to keep those
two separate.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


So that's why I came to you, because you've been writing about
clean energy and politics for years now, as you've said, more
than a decade, and you wrote a Twitter thread about this
discovery that kind of opened my eyes a bit. So I'm just going to
read out the first tweet to you and get you to explain your
thinking to our audience. "It drives me crazy that people are
still pining away for some magic blue light arc reactor Sci-Fi
energy source to save us when solar and wind are out there doing
it as we speak". What are you getting at?


David Roberts


Yeah, you know there's a lot here, but where I'd start is we have
wind and solar right now. We have renewable energy. And when I
say renewable energy, I mean wind and solar and all the sort of
attendant technologies that enable them making huge progress
right now. But it's difficult progress and it's a big political
fight. You're fighting at the national level, you're fighting at
the community level. There's a lot of community resistance to
renewable energy now. So it's just a struggle and a slog to
transform the energy system around renewable energy. And I think
a lot of people imagine, or maybe wish that if you had this
Sci-Fi energy that could produce all the energy you want with
hardly any input and no problems, you could in effect skip the
politics of transforming the energy system.


You could do it without politics. I think there's a real,
especially among sort of, let's say tech nerds, and I say that
with love. I love tech nerds. I think there's a real sort of anti
politics at work here. This idea that the sort of grubby work of
negotiation and compromise and half steps forward, it's all very
frustrating, it's very ambiguous. I think they just are naturally
sort of repelled by it and they sort of imagine ways around it,
imagine ways you could improve humanities a lot without politics.
And this sort of tendency comes up over and over again in a lot
of different areas. It expresses itself in a lot of different
ways.


But I think this is a classic case, this idea that fusion could,
in a sense, short circuit all these politics or skip all these
politics and just sort of transform everything without anybody
being upset, without anybody fighting about it. And that's just,
I just push back against that again and again wherever I see it.
Even if we created this magic energy source, even if fusion
somehow miraculously developed enough to not just create a
positive amount of energy, but to create a lot positive amount of
energy at a cost that's even remotely competitive, with current
energy sources. To take that and transform the world energy
system with it would still require a lot of fighting and a lot of
politics and a lot of slog.


There is no way around politics. You've got to go through it. And
that's why I think, despite the sort of spectacular success of
wind and solar in the past decade, people still sort of resist it
and want to poopoo it because it's just hard. It's just hard. And
it feels like it's going to require too much work. You have to
transform too many things. You have to transform the grid. You
have to develop all these storage technologies to complement it.
It requires a sort of wholesale rethinking of the energy grid.
And that's just going to disturb a lot of incumbents.


It's going to be a lot of change. And people just have a very,
very instinctive, brainstem level aversion to change, basically,
or to transformation. And that's what I think is expressing
itself here.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


Wind and solar have seen tremendous success over the past decade.
How has our reliance on wind and solar been growing? What does
that tremendous success look like? Like, just in general, you
know, how far have we come with these since, I don't know, 2010?


David Roberts


Sure, there's a lot of different ways to look at it. If you're
just looking at the technologies themselves, they have plunged in
cost. If you look at these graphs of the cost of wind and onshore
solar, that's just a steep downhill for decades now. And now we
are at the point that wind and solar are creating are the
cheapest forms of electricity. The electricity they generate is
the cheapest electricity in the world. And that's with or without
subsidies. I don't think this has fully sunk into people's heads
yet. It is the cheapest way to produce energy.


They're still early in their deployment and spread. So it's only
like, I think solar is like 2% of US energy. It's more elsewhere.
I think if you live in Denmark, I think they're getting close to
50 plus percent wind and solar there in that country. So they
still early in their march to take over the electricity system.
But in terms of cost, they're just dirt cheap now. So that's why,
you know people wonder, why do you want to transform the energy
system around sources that come and go with the weather, right?
The idea is they're not reliable, you can't turn them on and off
at will, they come and go with the weather.


Why would you want to use that? The reason you would want to use
that is because it's dirt cheap. So even with all the sort of
balancing technologies you need, and even with all the changes
you need in the grid to accommodate that variability, it's still
way cheaper than the alternative. So we now have, and this is
totally different than 2010 when we used to discuss
decarbonisation in 2010, as I was, it was all Sci-Fi, I mean it
was all speculative. Wind and solar were ridiculously expensive,
and the technologies that would enable the grid to accommodate
more wind and solar were nascent.


And so, the whole thing was sort of batting back and forth
speculative possibilities. But now, we have a clear trajectory
toward decarbonizing grids. We know how to do it now, and we have
the technology that is cheap enough to do it now. People say,
well, you can't get to 100% clean energy just using renewables.
And that's true. To get from say, 85, 90 percent to a 100 percent
is tricky from our current perspective. We don't know quite yet
how we're going to do that, but as I constantly tell people,
we're not even close to 85 or 90 percent yet, so we've got a lot
of runway , and we know how to get to that level.


And by the time we get to 85, 90 percent, tech development will
have been preceding a pace , and we'll probably have a much
better idea by then how to get to 100. So, there's been this
revolution in clean energy that's been happening right in front
of our eyes. And it's always strange to me that people want to
have this weird urge to resist it or to poo poo it or to find
flaws in it, you know what I mean?


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


Because it's not magic.


David Roberts


I guess that's it. And I think also it comes back to the
politics. Today's grid is built for big centralized, dispatchable
energy sources, because that's mainly what we had for most of the
history of electricity. So, the grid today is still, and not only
the grid physically is built for that, our rules and our
regulations and our laws and our practices and utility practices
and all this stuff have that hangover, are still built around
sort of hub and spoke big power plants sending power out to sort
of dumb consumers. To change that system, you have to make the
grid much more sophisticated.


You have to accommodate the fact that end users are now creating,
generating energy on their own. They can generate energy on their
own, they can store energy on their own, they can trade it with
one another without ever dealing with that central source. We
just need a much smarter grid. You need much more grid, right?
Because if you're reliant on the weather and sun. You have to
build the power plants where the sun and wind are, which are not
necessarily where people are. So, you got to build a lot more
long-distance transmission. You need a lot of transformative.


You need to transform the grid along with spreading wind and
solar. And that is hard, and it's a fight, and it's kind of a
drag. Like anything in politics, it's a slog. And I think that's
one reason people sort of resist the good news that's happening,
unfolding all around us.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


Has the politics been getting easier though? You just kind of
walked us through this massive amount of progress. I would hope
at least that as the price plummets and as it continues to be
more reliable again, I'm not expecting the magic solution, I'm
not expecting the politics to go away. But theoretically this
transition gets easier as momentum builds, right?


David Roberts


Well, in some ways yes and in some ways no. Wind and solar are on
what are called learning curves, which means every time you
double the amount deployed, costs fall by a very predictable
percentage. And that sort of ratio has held steady for decades
now. So, it's pretty reliable and predictable. Which means if we
continue doubling deployment to the point we need to completely
decarbonize grids, it's going to get super cheap. Not only cheap
like it is today, but like super dirt cheap, trivially cheap. So,
there might be magic, right? There might be some magic on the
horizon.


People have been underestimating the fall in costs of renewable
energy at every stage for decades now. If you look at the sort of
official forecasts from the International Energy Agency or the US
EIA, all these modeling bodies, they keep predicting over and
over again that the costs are going to level out, plateau, right?
They're going to stop falling, and they just don't stop falling.
They just haven't stopped falling.


Are they like the people that kept predicting there would be a
limit to what we could put on a computer chip and that laptops
would never get... Like all this stuff. This is the same science,
right?


Yes, exactly. Very confidently predicting that we couldn't do
those things, right? I mean, it was not that long ago that people
were very confidently saying a grid cannot accommodate more than
three or four or 5% variable renewables before it starts falling
apart and becoming unreliable. And we just shot right past that,
right? Every supposed limit of renewable energy that people have
been confidently pontificating about for the last two decades,
we've shot right past those. It's defied all those. So, that's
going to continue. And as it gets cheaper and cheaper, it gets
easier and easier in some ways just because people like cheap
business, people like cheap, like investors are going to go
invest in the cheap thing, whatever the sort of team sports
people have around different energy sources are irrelevant to big
money.


Big money just goes where the cheap stuff is, right? And it's
going to follow renewable energy. That's true. But on the other
hand, once we start building these out in real bulk, once we
start getting from like 5% to 50%, you're going to need a lot of
wind and solar build out and that happens on land and people live
on land. And so, these fights about building stuff, and the US
sort of famously has difficulty building big stuff these days
because we have this thicket of rules. We have this sort of
absurd degree of community. Communities are just able to stop
things in their tracks, use laws that were originally designed
for environmental protection to slow things down. It's really
getting even more into the sort of yard by yard fight of
politics.


You have to overcome community resistance to get to the really
high numbers. So in a sense, that politics is only starting. It's
only going to get harder and harder. So, how those two things
interact is anybody's guess. But I will say that the momentum of
renewable energy and its attendant sort of balancing
technologies, the storage, throw in some geothermal, whatever,
throw in some thermal storage and the technologies that make it
work have developed a momentum at this point that is effectively
unstoppable. Like we are going to transform the grid around
renewable energy on some time horizon.


It's just as always climate change looms in the background, and
we just do not have time to mess about. And this is another thing
that drives me crazy about fusion. They're like, "oh, in a couple
of decades we'll have limitless energy". I was like, we just
don't have time. We do not have time to wait a couple of decades.
In a couple of decades we're going to be living... In a couple of
decades, we're going to be suffering under climate change in a
much more visceral way than we are today. Climate change is going
to be to the point that its tipping points are going to be
looming closer and closer.


We just don't have time to waste. We have to start, we need to
decarbonize the US grid by 2030. That's the sort of target we've
laid out in Paris. And if you ask me, I mean, I'll bet any amount
of money, there is not going to be a commercially viable fusion
reactor generating electricity by 2030. I will bet anybody any
amount of money about that.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


So last question then. What is the next big breakthrough? And, I
don't necessarily mean like magic bullet like, oh, we did this
fusion reaction, but where's the next big milestone, or where's
the next big thing that you're looking for that will kind of tell
you something is shifted?


David Roberts


Well, unfortunately for those of us in media, the real
development of the energy system is almost always incremental,
right? That's how it's always been. It's probably how it's always
going to be. There are very few legitimate, sort of like, turning
points or markers that you can celebrate. So, wind and solar is
just going to continue getting cheaper and cheaper. What I think
where we need to look for exciting tech developments are in these
balancing technologies, right? If the core, if the bulk of your
energy is wind and solar, they are variable, they come and go
with the weather, so you need balancing technologies.


So, that's storage. I think there's a ton of work going on in
storage right now. I expect some big things out of the storage
community soon. And another place to look, I think, for possible
breakthrough is geothermal technology. So, right now there's such
a thing as geothermal electricity where you just sort of find
places where there's volcanic activity underground and you stick
a tube down there and get hot steam out. But, currently under
development are all sorts of ways where you can dig down and kind
of fracture the rock and in a sense create your own source of
heat down there, which you could do anywhere, right?


You can only find volcanic activity in some places, but if you
can dig deep enough you can find heat anywhere. And there's a lot
of work underway about deep geothermal. I mean, people are down
there drilling now with lasers and sound waves and there's all
sorts of crazy Sci-Fi stuff going on in geothermal right now, and
I would expect some big announcements out of that. And geothermal
is a) renewable and b) always on, right? It's not variable, it
doesn't come and go with the weather. So, it's a great complement
to renewables in a sense. It is the same complement to renewables
that is currently the role that is currently being played by
natural gas, right?


We got to get rid of the natural gas. We got to replace that with
something. And geothermal, I think, is kind of a dark horse
candidate for big breakthroughs. That will be awesome, and then I
think there will be amazing breakthroughs on the demand side.
People constantly overlook the demand side. When you think about
how to balance out renewable energy technologies, people are
always looking at different energy sources. But there are tons of
ways to be more sophisticated about when and where we consume
energy. So, we can shift demand to times when there is more
renewable energy on the grid - by storing it, by sharing it, by
moving it around.


Just think about your humble sort of home water heater, right?
You don't care when the water is heated as long as it's hot when
you need it, right? So, you can shift the time you heat the water
and the water heater to match times of abundant renewable energy.
And you can do the same with every appliance with EVs, this sort
of using electric vehicles as a kind of distributed storage
technology that helps the grid, that's just nascent right now.
That's just in its early stages. So, you're going to see a ton of
interesting developments in sort of digitized smart demand
management.


And all these things are going to be incremental. They're all
going to come together in unpredictable ways. But I would just
say, people are saying fusion is like exciting science in a way
that renewable energy isn't, and I just don't get that. Right
now, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people
out there in labs doing demonstration projects, working on
various problems around renewable energy, and it's just never
been a more interesting time to follow technology. I just have
faith that, like, there are more people than ever working on this
stuff. And the more brain power we throw at it, the faster
developments are going to be.


So, it's just going to be an absolutely fascinating decade to
live through in the energy world, fusion entirely aside. Just pay
attention to sort of like thermal storage, it's super
interesting. That's nascent. Demand management is nascent in a
sense. All storage technology is just at the start. Geothermal is
nascent. There are going to be amazing developments in all these
areas and they're going to interact in sort of ways and have
emergent effects that are unpredictable now. It's just
fascinating. If you're fascinated by science and technology
development, you don't need fusion Sci-Fi stuff. There's stuff
going on all around you right now, just like tune in.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


David, thank you so much for this. It's fascinating.


David Roberts


Thank you, Jordan.


Jordan Heath-Rawlings


David Roberts is the author and host of Volts, which you can find
at volts.wtf. That was "The Big Story". For more you can head to
thebigstorypodcast.ca. I know, I usually talk about the podcast
in this space, but since they will never ever let me do an
episode about this, I just have to say: Don't sleep on the
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