There will always be costs for energy. Nothing lasts for ever and solar panels and batteries eventually need to be replaced.
>>people would say that at some point it’ll get so cheap that it won’t be worth running a meter to track customer usage
A similar case was made about automation. On the first half of the XX century people argued that by year 2000 we would only need to work 1 hour a day, because machines would do the rest. How that turned out? So i'm always very suspicious of arguments where the future holds some sort of cornucopia.
I do know that when energy is produced domestically, then your energy can't be held hostage by OPEC or the Russian Federation.
That is the promise of renewables: freedom from geopolitics.
He argues that we've built a giant bureaucracy, most jobs are bullshit jobs (he created that term), and most work is a scam.
We could have UBI and most people working just a few hours per week, but that much freedom is dangerous. Politicians might loose power.
More seriously, watch The Century of the Self (Adam Curtis), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04, which describes the creation and rise of marketing as a social force in the 1900s; how the consumer-based society was created.
A large driver of this was the need to "control the masses", because if they weren't controlled bad things happened. Like world wars or crystal nights.
Bullshit jobs and an all-encompassing bureaucracy, keeping people working all the time and unable to think, is our current social technique for controlling the masses.
Are you refering to something like Kristallnacht, or is it something else?
This strikes like reaching, when a simpler explanation will suffice: automation improves productivity, but the owners of capital have decided that it is better to pocket the profits than to reduce the working hours or provide UBI.
There is precedent for very expensive things becoming very cheap. Energy will always have a cost to produce, but we've seen in the case of the internet that "as long as you don't use this much, do what you like" models of pricing - it is effectively too cheap to transfer data to justify metering it.
Given how much energy I have a use for around my home, it is completely plausible that nuclear power could put me in a situation where I pay a grid connection cost, some nominal fee and then just use however much electricity I feel like to maintain a typical lifestyle. I don't think people appreciate how transformative the orders of magnitude cost improvements promised by nuclear power could be.
The people responsible for the insane over-spending on safety deserve to be publicly shamed for the damage they've done to human progress.