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Comment by perfunctory | Hacker News Reader

Some time, in not so distant future, we will have abundant, almost infinite, almost free, renewable energy. We will forget what an energy bill is, because administration overhead will be higher than the price of the energy itself. It will just be an inconspicuous tiny item on the city taxes. And we won't think it's amazing. We'll take it for granted. It will become new normal. Just like now we don't remember any more what it feels like not being reachable by phone when you go out for dinner with your friends.

Mark my words.

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The fuel (or lack thereof) may be free, but in the foreseeable future generation capacity and transmission infrastructure is not. Someone has to build and maintain it according to demand. If efficiency or consumption limits are not incentivized then you risk demand exceeding capacity.

Civilization grows with available energy. People would start desalinating the oceans to green deserts, speed-boat cargo around the world, grow staple foods indoors or pull carbon out of the air if energy were truly free.

Windmills break down too, plenty of moving parts. idk what the maintenance window is for solar.

So you're officially saying that it will be too cheap to meter?

As you surely know, that's been said before, mostly about nuclear fusion and fission breeder reactors, both of which have inexhaustible resources. What's different this time? There's still absolutely massive amounts of major equipment needed in a wind/solar dominated energy system.

Often people consider 50-70 years to be a long time. I think the point is that we will get there, and it will seem like it had always been this way.

I'm more skeptical. I worry that energy demand will rise to the level of supply, more akin to road use than to phone access. As an example, you're going to have to deal with crypto miners and grow-ops.

Something to keep in mind is the growing trend of electrification in the 2020s. This will be both electric cars, and heat pumps for heating.

> “Our story for gas plants is, if you build it, they won’t run -- they won’t run at their expected capacity factors,” said Mark Dyson, who co-wrote both reports. “And that filters down to pipelines, too.”

I suspect that the demand for electricity will mean that we'll need gas plants much longer than the article believes.

This will be a good thing, because electric cars and heat pumps running off of natural gas generators is much less carbon than gasoline cars and natural gas furnaces.

Or to use an example closer to home, more akin to software bloat.

That's fantasy land. Half of the cost of your electricity bill is the cost to deliver it to your house. The grid costs as much as the electricity generation.

So even if it were free to generate electricity--solar panels and batteries were free--you would only see a 40-45% decrease in your electricity bill.

I believe this kind of technological breakthrough is the main point of Diamandis' book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. That would be a liberating event -- the key would be then getting the energy technology to societies in need - mainly a technological leap frogging, like mobile phones in developing nations did.

> https://www.diamandis.com/abundance

The book Fully Automated Luxury Communism gets into this as well.

It's not so simple, because energy consumption is restrained by its cost. There are also grids that will need expansion and maintenance, and both solar and winds need either baseline energy backing (such as nuclear or gas) and/or storage.

A wind-based grid, at scale, is actually a reliable baseline. We have over a decade of solid data on it now, from Iowa and Texas. Wind is much more reliable than you think.

Just how reliable are we talking? The odds of being unable to fully service demand for even a single day should be really, really low for infrastructure like electrical or water supply.

Reliable enough to say "Wind will provide at least this much power, even on a "non-windy" day.

Also, keep in mind that wind is much, much steadier 200 feet in the air than it is on the ground, where it's subject to all sorts of disruptions and irregularities.

>Reliable enough to say "Wind will provide at least this much power, even on a "non-windy" day.

That pretty much means nothing. How close is that guaranteed minimum to the maximum deliverable or expected daily average power?

You have links to any published research? Is it published separately or as part of larger studies? I'm having trouble finding simple numbers.

Such numbers would be useful for determining a theoretical floor for gas, nuclear, etc providing baseline capacity.

https://energynews.us/2015/02/13/midwest/blowing-away-myths-...

Thank you for these future-forward words. I am definetly looking forward to this time as well.

You still have to pay money to maintain the grid.

And at that point in time, in a cloudy night, the wind will stop blowing. And the lights will go dark.

Improved stargazing and no more blackout curtains? Sign me up. :-)

Nah, GP said a cloudy night. Though I look forward to a future where solar panels produce energy from starlight.

Hahaha. Maybe by that time we will take it so for granted that time-out periods so we can see the stars better will be socialized. I still remember the blackout of 2003 rather fondly...

Probably not, though...

I live in a 3rd world country and had to go to hospital with no power and no lights. It was chaos, amputations by flashlight, doctors unable to see where to hook up IVs, etc etc. How could you honestly think that the power going off would be anything except a horrible horrible thing?

Edited to preface: my intention certainly wasn’t to dredge up any terrible memories. I’m sorry if it did so. It was more a remark on North American “go-go-go” culture that was forced to take a pause for a day or so.

In this part of the world many critical services like hospitals run on back up generators if the main grid goes down. It was part of the main grid that went down

There was surely chaos some places where traffic lights weren’t on backup power, but otherwise the worst things that would happen were maybe you have to close up the office or the worksite for the day. Transit was down but not much else could be done anyway.

It was bittersweet. I’m sure there were problems. I’m also sure that many people who’d never seen a star in their lives saw the sky unfolded like they might never again. It was a stark reminder how much we’ve drowned out with things that “matter”

That's why we have batteries and active development on ways to manufacture hydrogen without emitting carbon.

Successful renewable energy infrastructure demands that large-scale, grid-tie energy storage is also in place. This is why battery tech and renewable tech are so intertwined at this time.

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