We've had many advances? We don't have fusion energy or anything close to it, so if we have many advances those are very, very small.
Maybe fusion won't matter anyway. If it arrives too late, power usage will have been restructured to fit the unreliability of sun/wind/minor power generation, and fusion's ability to provide steadily is something that users have learned to do without. Learned at great cost.
We have absolutely not learned how to do without, that's a waste over estimation. Many places already have problems with the variety and those are still a tiny part of overall generation.
And the advances in theory are actually incredibly important if you want to build an actual plant.
But then again, for stable power fission does basically everything fusion does for you. The difference between fission and fusion are tiny compared to chemical energy.
Intermittent, but very cheap when available, power sources ruin the market for baseload, even if they can't cover 100% of the power demand. When they ARE available, they crash the price of power. Baseload sources depend on the market being there most of the time to pay back their costs.
High capital cost systems, like what fusion reactors will be, are ruined economically if they can only charge a lot only a small fraction of the time. They will find it impossible to compete against sources with low capital cost but high operating cost (like, say, turbines operated off hydrogen produced at times of low power prices). The latter may have horrible round trip efficiency, but that won't matter.
"And the advantages in theory..."
What advantages are those? Fusion has inherent DISadvantages that are fundamental, most importantly low volumetric power density compared to fission reactors.
For baseload yes, but it increase the price for dispatch-able energy.
There batteries, nuclear, gas and so on will compete.
> High capital cost systems, like what fusion reactors will be
That is not necessary true. Look at aneutronic fusion for example.
> What advantages are those? Fusion has inherent DISadvantages that are fundamental, most importantly low volumetric power density compared to fission reactors.
I was talking about advances in the theocratic understanding of plamsa and how fusion happens.
What I wrote was that power uses may well have learned to do without by the time fusion energy becomes available. AFAICT that might happen sometime after 2050, maybe closer to 2100.
Assume that energy users do not learn to cope with just renewables. In that case CO₂ emissions go as at present, ie. the CO₂ content in the atmosphere increases by about 2.25ppm/year. In 2050 that works out to about 500ppm and in 2100 to 600ppm (these are conservativish numbers, since they assume that the 2.25ppm/year stays flat while in reality it has been increasing steadily).
ITER is not thought to lead all the way to fusion power; at least one more round of experiments is required afterwards. The Wikipedia page mentions 2035, so assuming that the next round also takes 20 years and only one more round is necessary, the first actual fusion reactors could start construction around 2055, and large amounts of fusion power could perhaps be available around 2075 or 2095, when CO₂ content is 550-600ppm. This is absurdly high, therefore the assumption is untenable.
Maybe fusion won't matter anyway. If it arrives too late, power usage will have been restructured to fit the unreliability of sun/wind/minor power generation, and fusion's ability to provide steadily is something that users have learned to do without. Learned at great cost.