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Comment by ic_fly2 | Hacker News Reader

More money made with batteries means more batteries installed. How is that a bad thing?

Profit motive commonly has obscene consequences, like destroying food instead of using it to feed the hungry.

While true that it happens in certain cases, the onus of showing that it would be the case in this specific case is still on you.

I basically just did, that's how markets of this kind work. If it is more profitable to warm the wind along a mountain side than some cold person, then that person will stay cold.

Poverty and misery in the world are mainly caused by this kind of mechanism.

If it is profitable to produce heat, it means prices are negative. If prices are negative, then that is true also for cold people.

On the other hand if prices are high, and someone has sells electricity that was bought when prices were close to zero, then the cold people will get warm for cheaper than if there wasn't a battery.

Sorry, but you really make no sense.

Manufactured scarcity and related phenomena are really, really common. You should probably look into themes like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and planned obsolescence and so on, and then explain why this specific case of coked yuppie market would be immune to them.

Again, more players in the market (both batteries and the renewables they enable) and the base fact that batteries pull prices toward the mean means that if anything, they would be exactly one of the mechanisms to avoid manufactured scarcities.

Why would this specific application of this type of market be immune to rent seekers, manufactured scarcity, wasting or withholding resources for profit, oligopolies and so on?

What makes this application of this social regime so different from e.g. food or medicine?

In many countries, energy production was (and still is) owned by the countries and power prices are regulated. In cases of total system failures (eg. look at ukraine), power usage is restricted by shutting down different parts of the country at different times, so your area has power from 4pm to 6pm, other area has it from 6pm to 8pm, etc, industry gets partially shut down, partially works at night if it's needed. Everybody gets to cook and wash in their timeslots, and the rest of the time, they're equally without power.

In case of some failure of the system you're proposing, the prices would skyrocket, the poor would not get power at all, and the rich would have power all the time but for a very high price. Economically speaking, that's great for investors in batteries and supporting systems, socially speaking, it's a horible world to live in. And the system is very unstable already, in portugal it already failed horribly not long ago.

In this case there are two things that contribute: one is cost of distribution, which means that it does in fact cost something to get the electricity to the cold person, and the second thing is the kind of structures which help insulate consumers from extreme prices: most people pay a fixed rate for electricity despite the variation in the wholesale price, which means that while they may pay some amount while the price is negative, they are also not paying a small fortune when the price goes up massively. This could probably be done better, though, and things are changing which would do make electricity free or negatively priced for some end-users when there's excess in the grid, while still insulating them from extremely high prices (they're still going to be paying something for the insurance, though).

When the grid has to much money for 10 seconds, the cost of finding an having a productive asset that is ready to accept such a short burst of energy means that paying people to throw it away can easily be cheaper, leaving you with net positive money that can be used towards keeping people warm. Real systems involve tradeoffs, and so there will always be some short enough time frame where throwing away energy is better for society and human welfare than building infrastructure to use it. Everyone already using the energy gets it for free when prices are negative.

This tends to more to do with food supply security and costs of distribution than anything else (as well as political opposition to socialising food supply).

i.e. if we want to avoid food shortages, we need to overproduce the raw goods and therefore waste some. Transporting and transforming those raw goods into food that someone can eat still costs money, it's not just so farmers can get paid. We probably should still actually make sure no-one goes hungry, but that does actually involve some cost and effort on the part of the government, and the challenge there is mainly political elements who don't like the idea of someone getting something for free.

Yep, that's why we pay farmers to keep half their fields empty, because in case we need those fields (eg. war somewhere), we still have farmers with all the machines and infrastructure needed to produce food, that can expand onto the now-empty fields.

No need of speculators. A utility purchases cheap off peak power and extremely costly peak power and pass the costs to the consumer. If the utility pays homeowner with BESS something comparable to peak power rate, they can recover their investment quickly.

Such an utility would be a speculator.

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