[Commentary] Grand Opening of the Charleston Energy Park

Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay

I set this story in the capital of Charleston, in West Virginia. Now known as the state with coal miners, it's clear that they will need to change their energy production. The cost of solar is now cheaper than operating existing coal plants. Coal prices are skyrocketing while solar continues to decline about 7% each year.

Nuclear fusion is an idea that has always been a decade away. It promises huge amounts of clean. near-limitless energy if we can achieve it, and I believe we will. It's the energy of the future. However, as we are not in the future yet, it seems clear that solar plants will be adopted and become widespread across the country.

I wrote this story after reading about a start-up from Massachusetts called Commonwealth Future Systems. Their goal is to get to commercial fusion, and they aren't the only start-up collecting tons of investment. If their research proves fruitful, it'll probably not be for another fifteen years from today that we'll have operating plants.

What will the world be like by then? Solar will likely get cheaper still over that period and it may be harder to justify the costs of fusion. Even if fusion's unit price is low, it'll remain costly in order to recoup the prices and regulations may also force costs upward.

So it may be that we reach this historic milestone and nobody will care. This will really be a shame. Fusion reactors, particularly on a small-scale, can be useful for space travel in particular as sunlight dissipates the farther we go. But that'll be a story for another time...