Thankfully you don’t need to hang your hat on fusion. For decades people predicted fusion would bring about a new golden age of cheap abundant power.

Turns out, we actually did get that future, just turns out to be in the form of photovoltaics. Photovoltaics have already made fusion power obsolete. Today, in 2026, it’s cheaper to provide baseload power via solar power and batteries than it is to do so via a fission plant. And solar and batteries are still plummeting in price. While we don’t know what a fusion reactor will cost, it is without any doubt going to be more expensive than a fission plant. Even if we could get it to work, fusion is an obsolete power source. The investment in it is primarily an exercise for STEM folks to indulge in their childhood fusion fantasies.

When I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s, fusion seemed like this magical dream energy source of the future. If we could crack that, all our problems would be solved. I played SimCity 2000! Turns out, we didn’t need a miraculous new energy source. We just needed to put in the hard yeoman’s work of making photovoltaics affordable. Now we have, and fusion has no hope. The only advantage fusion will have is physical compactness, and that’s simply an irrelevant advantage for almost every application. Hell, even in polar regions, it will be cheaper to ship in solar power via long lines from the lower latitudes than it will be to build a fusion reactor.

Fusion is a retro-future energy source. It was the power source of the future for generations, but no longer.

But don’t lament. The dream is not dead forever. In the very very long term, fusion will have a future. When humans get around to expanding out to the Outer Solar System and beyond, fusion will be an invaluable power source. But anywhere closer to the Sun than the asteroid belt? Fusion will never be able to compete with simple solar power.

Turns out it’s cheaper to use the fusion reactor nature provides than to build our own.