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Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

The way solar prices are trending, energy will also be free when it's sunny out, maybe even partially sunny.

Then the way EVs are trending, each home should have giant batteries in their garage and a good percentage will likely be incentivized to charge their EV when the sun/wind is strong and potentially release it back to the grid when its not.

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Not everyone lives in the suburbs with a two-car garage.

Indeed. Where I live most people are limited to street parking. It wasn't so bad keeping an EV charged using public chargers, but as more people are getting EVs the public chargers are becoming harder to access.

checkout ubricity, have not used them but the concept is pretty neat: use street lights for ev charging.

Or public chargers will see higher utilization and therefore be more prevalent. Supply/demand - neither is static.

And supply and demand still have to deal with physical constraints and the current layout of the grid. You can only install so many chargers in a given area before you find blocking issues.

Not everyone is necessary. You just need a critical number to balance the grid.

Cities are already energy efficient compared to the suburbs. Most cities have plenty of suburbs around them, and lots (arguably too many) large parking garages that can be used for the same purpose.

Sounds like a dystopian reality where we revert back to only really functioning when the sun is in the sky.

Luckily, between CO2 emissions and climate catastrophe, toxic energy waste of various kinds, air quality issues, and geopolitical instability largely caused by resource wars, our current reality isn't dystopian at all.

You will completely forget that you ever predicted such a thing.

After there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from, storage will be built out, and NG turbines will be used decreasingly often. Many will be converted to burn ammonia instead, which will be fixed at solar farms in the tropics and shipped wherever it is wanted.

If there is dystopia it will be via failure to build out fast enough.

Society already slows down a lot when the sun is down. Is that dystopian too?

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