Energy systems of the future, including in particular nuclear fusion
Institutskolloquium
- Date: Dec 13, 2024
- Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Prof. Dr. Thomas Hamacher
- Thomas Hamacher is Professor of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Systems at TU München and is Director at the Munich Institute of Integrated Materials, Energy and Process Engineering (https://www.epe.ed.tum.de/en/ens/homepage/).
- Location: IPP Garching
- Room: Arnulf-Schlüter Lecture Hall in Building D2 and Zoom
- Host: IPP
- Contact: karl.krieger@ipp.mpg.de
A step by step walk into the energy future: The next hundred years will see major changes in the energy system. The emergence of new technologies and the improvement of existing ones, in interaction with regulation, demand and overall political constraints, will shape the new system. For the time being, it is only possible to identify trends that could lead to change in the future, and to identify technological and other challenges for different system developments, without picking winners now. It is very likely that we will see more renewable energy systems being deployed, but advanced fossil fuel and nuclear technologies will be added depending on political and geographical conditions. The talk will present a three-step view of the future, starting with the current trends that will have the greatest impact in the new future, moving to a time when at least policy targets expect net zero emissions, and then to a very distant outlook when an even more holistic set of sustainability criteria is applied. The presentation tries to show that fusion could be a cornerstone in a future system that reduces more and more compromises on sustainability criteria.