"We are proud to have achieved this breakthrough which puts us one step closer to providing the world with a new, secure and carbon-free energy source."
Seems like every fusion energy announcement, always one step closer but never quite arrived.
This is how R&D projects work. It’s extremely difficult to estimate timelines. Someone might have said the same thing of, for instance, image recognition - we kept getting “one step closer” for years and years. You could look at Fei-Fei Li making ImageNet in 2006 and go, “she didn’t really solve anything - they keep saying we’re one step closer to image recognition but this is just some new dataset.” Of course that actually was a very significant step, it was crucial groundwork for AlexNet.
There is absolutely no way to know whether getting to 100M in a spherical tokamak is really significant. Maybe this design is a dead end that will never see actual use. Maybe you will have a tiny one in your tea kettle by 2050.
What’s clear, though is that the pace of fusion research is really much faster than it was. That should be exciting to everyone except oil barons.
Sometimes money wants to deny the future that is coming.
- ICE factories can't just be switched to be EV factories, so having an existing ICE factory is a burden not a benefit.
- They don't have capacity to build batteries
- Even if they did, they don't have the raw materials
- Even if they did, they don't have the raw materials processing capacity
- Even if they did start securing the capacity now i.e. Building Lithium mines, battery factories, EV car factories etc. By the time they come online... GM will have run out of money, because no one will be buying their cars anymore, but they'll still be paying for ICE factories/workforce/etc.
Xpeng and Neo are kind of Tesla clones, but they have home ground advantage in that they are Chinese based which is where the majority of the EV market is right now, it's also where all the battery supply is. You haven't heard of them, because they haven't entered the US market yet.
GM don’t have a strategy, it’s clear they are just hoping for a miracle. Hence: Penny stock.
The market agrees with me (look at the growth rate of EV sales globally). The stock market disagrees with me… but it’s clearly irrational… again look at the growth rate of EVs.
Which is probably true.
I've heard from friends of some of the typical shenanigans played among state actors involving oil and gas, and that would be the least underhanded thing going on.
I am saying that the timeframe between a breakthrough in fusion, and it having a measurable effect on energy usage is so large that "money" will not reflect it with immediate and large moves in the market.
‘Breakthroughs’ like fusion typically does are useless. Something viable is not.
When something viable happens, you’ll see markets move, because market pricing is based on expectations of future performance, not current performance.
My non-expert understanding is that Futures are a specific financial instrument with set expiry dates, and are about locking in prices for these commodities at a certain date. The vast majority of these would be expiring in under low digit years. I am arguing that the ramp up time for fusion to go from "feasible design" to "having a significant impact on the the amount of oil/gas consumed" is much longer than most futures expiry dates, and would therefore have little impact.
That said, I guess people can (and do) buy futures with expiry dates for more than 10 years out, presumably they just have to find a counter party. Is this a significant amount invested? Bringing me back around to my original (and honestly asked) question: How many years out do oil/gas futures project?
For me, I'd take 'viable' to mean something like a demonstration plant actually working somewhere, a team with the ability (somewhat proven) to reproduce it at scale, and after that exists the math pencils out it's profitable even on a risk adjusted basis.
At which point, it's a real thing that will happen, and prices will start to adjust based on the likely adoption curve (with various speculative values of the curve of course too).
Which yes, may or may not change future values for delivery depending on the timeline.