a) Shipping. Big container ships can't be sail-powered (the largest sailing ships ever are about 1% of the size we'd need). But existing marine nuclear power is a proliferation and/or meltdown risk. If we can make a small fusion reactor, we could make our existing global supply chains carbon-neutral.
b) Continuous industrial processes that can't survive a power glitch, much less nighttime on a windless night (no renewables). There are a lot of those.
@cstross If we can't get fusion in the near-term (and I’m willing to bet we can’t), we're going to need batteries. Lots and lots of batteries (or other energy storage mechanisms). Particularly with respect to (b).
At my current $DAY_JOB, we're all about "decarbonization of the grid”, and I've sat through a lot of interesting presentations on the topic. One thing that's been luminously clear to me is that we don't get there without really good storage, because of those windless nights.
@angusm How many breakthroughs do we need in battery technology to make this realistic at the necessary scale?
The only approach I can think of that is known to work at scale would be electrolysis producing hydrogen, Sabatier reaction to produce methane, use existing natural gas storage and feed to existing natural gas power stations.
Cost would be horrific, of course, but you'd hope to get some efficiencies of scale.
@cstross@angusm We need break through of scale. Manufacturing - from mine all the way to installed battery. Large parts of that are not done at the needed scale. Not to mention the how do you store that many batteries without a fire/explosion hazard.
c) Cold winter nights in the far north. Most folks think solar power is great—it peaks during daytime in summer, when you want air conditioning! But that's less useful if you need heat to avoid freezing on a winter night.
d) Space travel beyond roughly Jupiter orbit (not much sunlight that far out).
e) Speculatively: fusion reactors as a controlled source of neutrons for destroying existing radioactive waste stockpiles through transmutation.
@rszasz@cstross pumped hydro is not the clean power storage that folks tend to think it is, unfortunately. the local ecological impact is fairly massive.
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