[normanmatrix]

I was thinking Nuclear would be the stable baseline for renewable. But this is not a sustainable option. We need to enforce hydrogen.

Do not submit to the fallacy of nuclear waste disposal. First Elon needs to fix space travel and make transport into the sun feasible. And we will have iter by then.

[nuccy]

Hydrogen is not a good (at the moment at least) source of energy or fuel for cars or industry (chemically speaking, obviously much better together with Deuterium and Tritium for fission, though we are still from such a technology). Steam reforming, which is currently the most common way of hydrogen production, uses natural gas and water and produces plenty of CO2 [1]. Nice summary as for cars fuel application here [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MzFfuNOtY

[pfdietz]

Hydrogen is an answer to the question "how do renewables serve 100% of the grid?". It enables renewables to cover that last 10% or so, and rare prolonged dark/calm periods, without excessive amounts of overcapacity or batteries.

[riquito]

Hydrogen can be a practical fuel, but you need energy to extract it, which could very well be nuclear

[phs318u]

Or solar. Or wind. Or tidal. The beauty of hydrogen is its a great way of time-shifting intermittent energy on a large scale (assuming a large enough water supply) for later use. I’m talking primarily about electricity generation as opposed to fuel for vehicles.

[pfdietz]

ITER is not a power plant, but if one could turn its gross fusion output to electrical power at 40% efficiency it would cost $100/W (vs. $10/W for fission and $1/W for solar). Not sure why you think this will be something worth waiting for.

[HideousKojima]

Why would you need to put it in the sun? That would be a huge waste of energy, just stick it in a stable graveyard orbit, or just get it fast enough to escape Earth's gravity