I don’t expect a sustained Moore’s Law type improvement to efficiency here, just the possibility of a few technology jumps with modest but meaningful gains. A factor of 10 beyond CMOS would amount to an extension of a decade.
I probably have much shorter average fusion timelines than you, albeit also with high variance, and wouldn’t be hugely surprised if fusion ramped up commercial operations through the 2030s, nor would I be shocked if it didn’t. The new wave of fusion startups seem to have coherent justifications to me, as a layman.
I would be shocked if fusion provides >10% of electricity to any major economy in the 2030s, like cold-fusion-is-possible-level shocked. On the one hand, the technologies new fusion start-ups are working with are obviously much more plausible than cold fusion, on the other hand there are a LOT of likely ways for fusion to fail besides just technical problems, so my intuition tells me it’s a toss-up.
I don’t know nearly as much about solar PV so my confidence intervals there are much wider. I agree that if there was sufficient economic incentive, we could scale to incredible amounts of compute right now, crypto mining shows an empirical lower bound to that ability.
I agree with all of this. I wasn’t intending to imply fusion would lower global average prices in that timeframe. A massive supercomputer effort like I was describing could build its own plant locally if necessary.
I don’t expect a sustained Moore’s Law type improvement to efficiency here, just the possibility of a few technology jumps with modest but meaningful gains. A factor of 10 beyond CMOS would amount to an extension of a decade.
I probably have much shorter average fusion timelines than you, albeit also with high variance, and wouldn’t be hugely surprised if fusion ramped up commercial operations through the 2030s, nor would I be shocked if it didn’t. The new wave of fusion startups seem to have coherent justifications to me, as a layman.
I would be shocked if fusion provides >10% of electricity to any major economy in the 2030s, like cold-fusion-is-possible-level shocked. On the one hand, the technologies new fusion start-ups are working with are obviously much more plausible than cold fusion, on the other hand there are a LOT of likely ways for fusion to fail besides just technical problems, so my intuition tells me it’s a toss-up.
I don’t know nearly as much about solar PV so my confidence intervals there are much wider. I agree that if there was sufficient economic incentive, we could scale to incredible amounts of compute right now, crypto mining shows an empirical lower bound to that ability.
I agree with all of this. I wasn’t intending to imply fusion would lower global average prices in that timeframe. A massive supercomputer effort like I was describing could build its own plant locally if necessary.