> I see you've "rebutted" the DOE price survey by pointing to a blogger as your source.

Yes, I quoted me. A professional in the PV field.

The DOE report in question is based on numbers that are approximately five years old. That's how long it takes them to put reports together. In the last five years, the price of PV has fallen seven times. When you divide by seven, you get my number.

But what's really telling is that the post in question shows you how to do this calculation yourself using up-to-date numbers. But clearly you didn't bother to use the two minutes it takes. Are you really that lazy, or just don't want to admit you might be wrong?

> You don't need any energy storage as long as your base power can supply all your needs. Period

Incorrect, trivially so. If your base load power cannot throttle, when you can't use it all you need to dump it. There are a limited number of places you can do this, and when they run out you have to shut down the plants.

Nuclear is a good example. Most reactors can throttle about 15 to 25% within a 24 hour period, and somewhat less than that on a day-to-day basis. Yet daily power use varies at least 50% practically everywhere. So if you had a 100% nuclear base load supply, you'd have to find somewhere to dump about 30% of it every day.

And that really is like dumping 30% of your money into the turbines, which is precisely why fission represents a fairly small percentage of most supplies, including here in Ontario which has one of the highest penetrations at a little over 50%. If we go any higher, we have to start dumping power. France has pushed this to 75% through a fascinating system of rotating fuelling, but even then they've had to shut down parts of the network during heat waves.

Natural gas is a wonderful dispatchable source, as is hydro and to somewhat less extent, coal. A grid consisting of as much PV, wind and hydro you can make, with NG filling the rest, appears to be the future in North America at least. Such a system is sustainable, low cost, and much lower carbon than the one we had five years ago. And it's not just "nice to have", it's the fact on the ground: coal and nuclear plants are being turned off as I write this, while NG, PV and wind compete for title of "fastest installed".

> Since peak power usage (in the US) tends to be in the afternoon, that's excellent up
> to about 10% market penetration Above that, you need energy storage

40%

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/variable-renewable-power-can-reach-40-percent-capacity-very-cheaply/

> Solar is also less effective in winter (shorter days) and in locations with significant overcast.

Luckily peak usage matches PV input very closely south of the mason-dixon. We're not so lucky up here in Canuckistan, but it still works OK when you examine the charts:

http://www.ieso.ca/imoweb/marketdata/markettoday.asp

> The true answer is, there is room for multiple approaches to technology development

Absolutely! Which is precisely why I talked about a bunker mentality. The fission industry is *rabidly* defensive against any and all alternatives. Here's some examples:

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/why-solar-is-nuclears-best-friend/

> Solar 35 cents (10AM - 4 PM only)

More like 8 to 15, depending on where you live. You can do the calculation yourself, I'd be interested to see if you come to any other sore of conclusion:

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/green-apples/

> Wind 5 cents (when wind is between 30-40 MPH)

Nope, all in.

> The bottom two are supplementary power

And as another report released this very day noted (available on Ars), you can have 40% intermittent power like PV and wind before you have to do *anything* to the grid. To be clear: no form of energy storage *whatsoever* is required until you get about 40% intermittent.

> Solar electric costs ten times as much as hydro or natural gas

It costs about 2x, max. Compared to nuclear it's already at parity:

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/green-apples/

You can do the calculation yourself.

> even coal and oil might be seen then as too expensive in regards of solar energy

They already have too much to worry about *right now* from natural gas and wind to start worrying about PV in 2020.

You know wind in the US hit just over 5 c/kWh for a while there, right? Nuclear is 6 to 8 (the plant down the road from my house is 8.5 c/kWh).

> Yeah, fusion is a pipe dream

Indeed.

> and these researchers are all losers

No, its bunker mentality. Same in the fission world, maybe worse there though.

Commissioned PV is under $1.25 a watt. If you don't understand what that means, then you should go look it up.

There is no way that any of the fusion devices anyone is working on will ever be able to match that, even if they do get it to work. And so far, they can't even do that.

> Maybe advanced computing can be used to simulate fusion reactors

They've been doing that since the 1960s. The simulations say it all worked 25 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LASNEX

I'm not convinced more simulations will help.

"Democratic representative with no seniority. Not good for fusion funding."

Soooo you're freely admitting it's nothing more than pork? Because it is, at least in the case of NIF.

So it would have had about 900 hp, required two enormous drive shafts (never good for your P/W), used fixed pitch props, was built of wood so you're compound curves suck, and this was supposed to reach 500 mph?

Total BS.

Props, pistons and shafts don't like each other, every aircraft that tried it either failed to mature or was a mediocre performer. P-39. BD-5. etc. The singular exception is the Pfiel, which took the most of war to get working.

Spitfires would have eaten this thing's breakfast.

> You don't talk about a "fleet" of reactors unless you mean a nuclear-powered Navy

Everyone calls it a fleet.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A-F/France/
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C-Cool-running-reactor-fleets-0801141.html
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A-F/China--Nuclear-Power/
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-G-N/Japan/

I like that righteous indignation you used while illustrating that you know absolutely zero about the topic you are pontificating on.

> To name a few: Ariane, Concorde, nuclear reactors and nukes

Well Concorde was pretty much entirely Bristol Aerospace, in the UK.

They designed it as the Type 223 and submitted it to the Air Ministry, who promptly (and secretly) gave the document to the French, who passed it to Sud. A few months later the Ministry arranged a meeting between Bristol and Sud, suggesting they share development costs, and the Bristol team were presented with a design that appeared all too familiar.

It was years later when they found the proof that this had occurred, but everyone kinda knew it all along.

> More promise in the near to medium term" still has us running out of fuel

Ummm, solar panels?

> Fusion is very necessary for our long term survival

No its not.

> for what little "green" power

You mean "all the power would could possibly ever want"? You are aware there's 1000W/m^2 on a sunny day, right? Here, do the math yourself:

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/revenge-of-the-electric-oil-sands/

> And if the Apollo program had been budgeted in the same way as fusion in this country

This is *not* a budget problem, don't let the people justifying their existent fool you into believing that.

Let me illustrate the actual problem with the best example I can think of. In 1972 John Nuckolls published this paper:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v239/n5368/pdf/239139a0.pdf

Unfortunately, you can't read it without paying, but here's a paper that reviews it:

http://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/10126383

On page 5 (you'll have to count, there're not labeled) you'll see the key point. Nuckolls predicted, using simulations, that break-even/ignition could be achieved with a 1 kJ driver. This prediction was made long before they had drivers of that power. When they eventually made one, Shiva, in the mid-1970s, it was clear that they were nowhere near ignition, and had to change the simulations. Now they predicted they needed 100 kJ. When they eventually made one, Nova, in the mid-1980s, it was clear that they were nowhere near ignition, and had to change the simulations. Now they predicted they needed 1 MJ. When they eventually made one, NIF, in the mid-2000s, it was clear that they were nowhere near ignition, and had to change the simulations. And now you're up to date.

This is the story of *every* fusion effort going right back to Tuck and Ware. It is, simply, a very difficult thing to understand, and even more difficult to actually *do*. You can fund this all you want, it still won't change the physics involved, and those physics are going to make any practical fusion machine fantastically complex and expensive. There is simply no way around this.

> Because its not a spelling error. 'wold' is a word.

Which demonstrates that *smaller* spelling dictionaries are normally better. Yet every word pro bragged about how many words were in it.

3. A theorem by Emmy Noether, says that continuous symmetries of the Lagrangian create conservation laws:
Time shift = Conservation of energy.
Translation = Conservation of momentum.
Rotation = Conservation of angular momentum.

I've always felt a little uncomfortable with this "direction", from the symmetry to the conservation.

We wouldn't have conservation of momentum if one side of the universe was heavier than the other. There's no "law" that says it has to be so. This is an observational fact, not an absolute truth.

So I've always felt more comfortable saying that *because* we *observe* a symmetry, we can conclude there will be a conservation law.