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I am so curious about this fusion reactor that we have already giving us free energy!

Please elucidate!
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somebody may be slipping
still in reactive phase

Understanding the types of AI classification
  • Reactive Machines. <<———
  • Limited Memory.
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last response
 
@Mods
how did a low end AI bot get past the join phase questions?
somebody may be slipping
still in reactive phase

Understanding the types of AI classification
  • Reactive Machines. <<———
  • Limited Memory.
  • Theory of Mind.
  • Self-aware.
  • Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)
  • Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
  • Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)
last response

I think you have reality issues.

There is no fusion reactor generating power on earth, so like the rest of your post, disconnected from reality.

The only working fusion reactor in our solar system is the sun.

If you think about it, oil and natural gas are stored solar power...
 
I think you have reality issues.

There is no fusion reactor generating power on earth, so like the rest of your post, disconnected from reality.

The only working fusion reactor in our solar system is the sun.

If you think about it, oil and natural gas are stored solar power...
Bingo!
We have a winner!
 
I think you have reality issues.

There is no fusion reactor generating power on earth, so like the rest of your post, disconnected from reality.

The only working fusion reactor in our solar system is the sun.

If you think about it, oil and natural gas are stored solar power...
see messages 7492, 7493, 7501
you are such a cute wannabe roomba.
 
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your rooftop panels merely converted the solar radiation into heat, the same amount of heat that would've been produced by your roof

No.
Physics is hard eh? Solar panels work because photons excite NP gap in silicon, that energy is absorbed and transmitted as electrical energy. SOME of the light is at frequencies not captured sure, but the heating radiation is absolutely absorbed more fully than a black roof shingle.

you now spend resources to clean your panels that previously was NOT spent to clean your roof.

LOL!! Rains or snows pretty much once per week here in Ontario Canada except for a few weeks per year where we get perfect sun for 14 days straight!
 
add in the costs to run conduit to all those sites, the inverters and batteries to make the electricity usable and the maintenance to keep them intact and you'll get to my point that it will never be "free"

Point : "free" after the initial investment is paid off, "free" because there is no fuel cost, "free" because a sunk cost is paid for and included.

When the payback period to non-renewable (coal, nuclear, gas) sources is only 5 years, and the working life of panels and electronics approaches 20 years, there is 15 years of "free" energy.

Batteries are dropping in cost, the period of solar+storage becoming perhaps 10 years to payback, and then 10 years of "free" energy is a big win.

Ex : Ontario Canada : the refurbishment of the nuclear fleet and new gas plants to back that up have increased costs 50% in the past 7 years and they have a 25 year investment period, there will be a point where the electricity system here will be more expensive than me going it alone on solar+storage in the warm months, but sadly, winters are tough, so the majority have no other choice but be grid connected for 4 months of the year. Fortunately, we have an abundance of wind and hydro that can help. But due to decisions in my lifetime that will last 35 more years, the grid here will not benefit from more solar, Ontario "big nukes" and "big gas" will force lawmakers to enact some kind of change to punitively punish people putting up solar, it's inevitable when solar becomes 3x cheaper than the grid.
 
Point : "free" after the initial investment is paid off, "free" because there is no fuel cost, "free" because a sunk cost is paid for and included.

When the payback period to non-renewable (coal, nuclear, gas) sources is only 5 years, and the working life of panels and electronics approaches 20 years, there is 15 years of "free" energy.

Batteries are dropping in cost, the period of solar+storage becoming perhaps 10 years to payback, and then 10 years of "free" energy is a big win.

Ex : Ontario Canada : the refurbishment of the nuclear fleet and new gas plants to back that up have increased costs 50% in the past 7 years and they have a 25 year investment period, there will be a point where the electricity system here will be more expensive than me going it alone on solar+storage in the warm months, but sadly, winters are tough, so the majority have no other choice but be grid connected for 4 months of the year. Fortunately, we have an abundance of wind and hydro that can help. But due to decisions in my lifetime that will last 35 more years, the grid here will not benefit from more solar, Ontario "big nukes" and "big gas" will force lawmakers to enact some kind of change to punitively punish people putting up solar, it's inevitable when solar becomes 3x cheaper than the grid.

It seems we're not discussing things from the same book, so I'll use your post to make my point.

You all (+msphor and winfield100) are thinking in terms of consumer costs and not in terms of energy value in a global currency perspective.

What you paid (for the panels, wiring, inverter, etc) has to be amortized over the entire productive life of those panels (at some point, electrons WILL stop flowing, due to wiring, inverter, or panel failure). That will be the COGS of your electricity, much like how bitcoin miners have to amortize the costs of their ASICs and electricity bills over their mined coins. As a product, if you produce it for self-consumption (think victory gardens during WWII), then the production costs doesn't have to matter. But if you're producing it to trade for goods and services (role of currency), then the cost of production matters, and it determines the basic value of your "free electricity".

At $0.02/kwh, you may need 100kwh to buy a dozen eggs, assuming it took less electricity than that for the farmer to produce, package, and deliver that dozen eggs. As a currency, the nominal quantity of exchange will probably be in the mega-watt-hours. Although you're not performing any maintenance now, you're not thinking along the timeframe of decades!

Your roof-top solar and free kwh's of electricity isn't in the right scale of perspective.
 
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Yesterday's world was rooted in scarcity. We're rapidly moving towards, and in many ways are already in, a world of sustainable abundance based on renewable energy production and(ironically) energy storage.

I encountered this notion that at any point in human history, we can understand what's going on in terms of three technologies: energy, communication, and transportation. Where does the energy come from, how do we communicate, and how do we move stuff.

The 'magic' of the Internet is that the collection of technologies that makes it work has yielded "approximately zero marginal cost communication". In residential and small scale applications, this looks like a monthly subscription for communication services, with roughly zero marginal cost whether you're streaming a movie or sending grandma an email.

Communication hasn't become free, but we're also mostly beyond metering it. At least my Comcast internet is effectively unmetered - if I go over some really large amount of traffic in a month, then I get a warning and in a future month if I do it again, then I get to pay some extra (I think the 'cap' is 1TB).


Solar and other renewables (but particularly solar) have put us (I claim) at the front end of the same dynamic in energy. I believe that we're going to see "approximately zero marginal cost energy" in our lifetimes (or at least mine - I'm thinking 3 or 4 decades in my case). In practice I expect that to look like some sort of monthly subscription for access to the energy distribution system and my energy usage is otherwise unmetered.

That subscription will probably be priced based on the size of my connection to the energy system. A house with 100 amp service will pay less than a house with 200 amp service. But I do expect that the cost of energy will become so low (that up front investment plus ongoing maintenance) that we'll stop metering it. Sort of how the internet has a large and ongoing investment along with large and ongoing maintenance, and yet we can pay for it with monthly subscriptions. And arguably the providers of that communication infrastructure are more profitable with unmetered communication than they were previously when every minute of a long distance phone call was closely watched in the household budget.


Outside of EVs consuming 'free' energy I don't see line of sight to "approximately zero marginal cost transportation". At least not yet. Autonomous vehicles by themselves don't get us that far. But 'free' energy will certainly put a dent in the cost of transportation, so its still good.


What is really interesting is that oil, like sunlight, is a limitless resource.

I think it was Freakonomics that made the point that we think of commodities and resources in terms of physical existence. In fact human history is littered with evidence that the actual definition of what is a commodity or resource comes from the technology and the cost to get it. I assume that this idea is what you're referring to.

The oil industry is increasingly making it clear that however much oil there is in the ground is really kind of irrelevant - the technology to go find and get it along with the cost of doing so and the value of the oil once its been mined are really what determines how much is available. I totally agree with the premise that there is a lot more oil in the ground than are on balance sheets or that has been found.

I assume that this idea is what you're referring to. Because taken literally, oil isn't limitless. It's a really big number / value and we can make it a lot bigger with a high value/barrel of oil. But if nothing else, if every square meter under our feet was oil, then we'd hollow out the globe and run out. Unless you're also claiming that new oil is being created by those original creation processes as fast as we're consuming it.

Of course, taken to an extreme, sunlight also isn't limitless. At some point our fusion reactor in the sky will blow up and grow too cold, and that source of energy will be gone to us.


Great, now add in the costs to run conduit to all those sites, the inverters and batteries to make the electricity usable and the maintenance to keep them intact and you'll get to my point that it will never be "free". There will be a baseline cost/kwh for that electricity.

Renewable energy will never be 'free'. But I do think that free is the right mental model.

Just as communication and the internet aren't actually free - they have all the same but different costs as you've listed for energy. With the internet the marginal cost to send an email over the internet vs. not sending that email is roughly 0; the maintenance, infrastructure build and upgrade - that all costs the same whether the marginal email is sent or not.

Or whether the marginal use is a movie from Netflix.

For the internet, we're using a monthly subscription business model now, rather than metering out KB / MB / GB of data. And that monthly subscription is more than adequate to make being in the internet business game a good one.


For energy I expect a similar business model to arrive. Namely a monthly subscription. And I expect it to arrive fast as renewables press towards 100% of energy, we'll start discovering new ways to use energy and the new energy system won't replace today's energy system one for one. Instead, like the internet, when we have approximately zero marginal cost energy, then we'll find new things to do with all of that 'free' energy.
 
Point : "free" after the initial investment is paid off, "free" because there is no fuel cost, "free" because a sunk cost is paid for and included.

When the payback period to non-renewable (coal, nuclear, gas) sources is only 5 years, and the working life of panels and electronics approaches 20 years, there is 15 years of "free" energy.

Batteries are dropping in cost, the period of solar+storage becoming perhaps 10 years to payback, and then 10 years of "free" energy is a big win.

Ex : Ontario Canada : the refurbishment of the nuclear fleet and new gas plants to back that up have increased costs 50% in the past 7 years and they have a 25 year investment period, there will be a point where the electricity system here will be more expensive than me going it alone on solar+storage in the warm months, but sadly, winters are tough, so the majority have no other choice but be grid connected for 4 months of the year. Fortunately, we have an abundance of wind and hydro that can help. But due to decisions in my lifetime that will last 35 more years, the grid here will not benefit from more solar, Ontario "big nukes" and "big gas" will force lawmakers to enact some kind of change to punitively punish people putting up solar, it's inevitable when solar becomes 3x cheaper than the grid.
Agree with your macro look at Ontario’s situation, but I hope that cooler heads will prevail and we will simply import what we need from an interconnected jurisdiction.
Or we can still keep running that biofuel generator near Nipigon and live with 1.004 kg of CO2 emitted for every kWh produced (yes, you are reading that stat right).
 
I see a few supporters for the "moving to a virtually free unlimited resource" ideology, and I just wanted to point out that the cost of energy will reach an asymptotic base cost (maybe 2c/kwh?). It costs energy to produce the panels from which more electricity is generated. And although we might approach a point in time where they can be auto-manufactured with the factory and tooling costs already fully amortized ( thereby rendering the COGS of the panels to be essentially zero), there will be an environmental cost with all that solar irradiation being directly converted into electrons (~30%) and heat (remaining 70%), without contributing any biological "work" into the food chain.

At that point, where any further deployment of solar panels and wind farms will have a cost of directly impacting the foundation of the food chain, the value of energy bottoms, and "farmers" would choose to plant more corn rather than more solar panels. Energy might become super cheap, but never free. Even with panels that are already paid for and amortized, the operating costs [ of keeping the panels clean and the electrical interconnects checked and working ] makes the electricity non-zero.

Edit: I think Elon and JB posted up a slide a long time ago showing that the entire world's electricity production could be replaced by solar panels covering the land area smaller than TX, but that was for electricity at the 15c/kwh rate. As electricity gets cheaper from more renewables, consumption will rise (and carbon-negative tech will become one of the biggest consumers of that cheap electricity), to the point where significantly more land area is needed.
Very true. There's an opportunity cost to everything. If I didn't put all this time, talent, materials and energy into yet one more solar module, what else could I have put it into. I vote for more digital streaming content like Mandalorian.

The world does not need free energy. We just want energy to be so cheap that we don't go to war over it or trash the environment or allow children to starve.
 
Forgive me for the irony (in case anyone remembers John Peterson?) of using Axion Power as my source, but we'd need 115,625 sq miles of solar panels to produce 18.54 TW of solar panels:
Powering The Entire World With Solar: Surface Area and Panel Requirements - Axion Power

California has a total land mass of 163,696 sq miles.
I think one time I calculated that total area committed to parking lots in the US was enough to power the whole country with solar, or something close to that.
 
This guy is great! How have I not seen this troll before? Renewable crude....awesome!
MacroLevel.jpg


I'm willing to make my contribution.
 
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Let's just stick to the unvarnished facts. That's always a great basis for investment.

Occidental Petroleum(OXY) is one of the most leveraged and likely to fail oil & gas plays.
OXY is up ~7% today nearing $32 and a $29B market cap.
In 2018 it somehow touched $85 and pre-covid it was $42.

ExxonMobil has emerged as the more likely to fail oil major, I guess due to leverage and high costs basis.
XOM touched $62.50 today, a market cap of ~$270B.
This is right around it's pre-covid level and near it's $75-95 range of recent years.

Chevron is now magically the "smart" oil & gas play. (Is there a smart oil & gas play?)
CVX is sitting around $112 today, a touch above pre-covid.
CVX looks prepared to add even the most leveraged assets via their "good" balance sheet.

If all that is true then we buy:
OXY long puts starting now and ramping til they implode. Jan 2023 now and move out as they become available.
XOM long puts starting 4th of July and ramping til they implode. Jun 2023 and move out as they become available.
CVX long puts starting Labor Day and ramping til they implode. Sep 2023 and move out as they become available.

I'm sticking to my plan of buying 1 put contract for CVX in 4Q20 at the longest expiration and whatever strike I can get at $4.20 per share. Then this quarter I buy 2 with the same strategy, then next quarter 3. Trying to time it out within each quarter to get the best deal @ $4.20 or just wait til the last day.

Will probably do the same with OXY starting April 1 and XOM in 3Q21. Should work out fine if I can afford it for 2 years for the outset of each.

I generally jump the gun on these things, so it's likely best to bump this post in 16 months and start from then. In the mean time, I will start throwing my money in a hole.