Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedaj0b | Hacker News Reader

the price of metal, raw metal, coming out of factories like aluminum, steel, titanium is high because the cost of energy is high.

I think it’s 30%-40% the cost of smelting it. Unless you can drop the price of energy and cheapen the raw material cost, the entire manufacturing industry will be uncompetitive.

Primary smelters currently run pretty efficiently but are bottlenecked by two main factors in the USA: raw energy prices and regulations. (there’s likely some modern process improvements they could add too but those won’t increase productively as greatly).

To reduce energy costs… you’ll need about double the current energy production we have today. That sounds like a lot but it’s very doable (the US has been neglecting itself for 50 years). It could with a little push from the Government catch up in 10-15 years, think lots of nuclear and solar.

View on HN

Bringing energy costs down. I see. While I'm not super well-versed in the US energy market, and I understand it's a bit complex, I do believe it's a mix of regulated and deregulated private monopolies under a bunch of regional ISOs, but there's an energy trading market down there somewhere setting spot prices, correct? So are you saying the US energy market should be, if not fully re-regulated, regulated harder, or perhaps abolished and everything should be brought back to being state or federally run (I'm not sure the US ever had that)?

It is not always in energy producers' interest to have really low energy prices, after all.

I believe you have it right. In theory, power generation should have been a well-regulated monopoly. Unfortunately, as soon as you add investors, aka rent seekers, the system is pushed to increase profits at the expense of the customer.

We should reset the monopoly by publishing and documenting tariffs for power and carriage. Third-party power suppliers should still have access to the power grid, with complete, transparent, and understandable costs for consumers.

There needs to be a plan for continual upgrades and maintenance, rather than starving the grid and then requiring big bursts of funding that go in part to the rent seekers.

From personal experience the closer to a regulated monopoly an industry is the worse its products are and the customer service is nonexistent.

Same with my experience, PG&E burned down my mom’s entire hometown.

I see you've dealt with Comcast and Verizon.

Snark aside, let me remind you of the term "enchitification": it came about because companies in theoretically competitive markets make good products shittier.

There are still a few regions that are fully vertically integrated and fully regulated with no market prices. However, much of the US is under a regional ISO that sets hourly day ahead prices and 5-minute nodal spot prices. Under an ISO the utility still handles distribution and often transmission, but generation decisions (like when should I turn on my plant and what should my output be) are handled by the ISOs optimization auction based off various inputs from the generator such as costs and constraints.

In theory, this ISO setup has saved untold millions of dollars (probably billions), by operating the grid regionally in a much more efficient manner than in the days of old. It is hard to tell though as you can't do a direct comparison very easily. The economists certainly like the price signals though, but there are numerous issues.

>To reduce energy costs… you’ll need about double the current energy production we have today.

I'm worried that if we were to double energy production, all of the new surplus would be soaked up by data centers.

The entire point of producing more energy is to consume it. A surplus of electricity on the grid is actually a bad thing that needs to be dealt with.

>The entire point of producing more energy is to consume it.

If the point of producing more energy is to produce more products, and instead it gets gobbled up by idiots giving us the next crappy phone app that runs in the cloud, then it's not me that's missing the point si it?

All those computers in the data center are just as much products as anything else. If you don't like the apps, by all means don't buy them.

>All those computers in the data center are just as much products as anything else.

Sure, and if they were cranked out of American factories, that'd be awesome. But since they're shipped across the Pacific on a boat, they're not really the kind of products that help.

>If you don't like the apps, by all means don't buy them.

If apps are all we get out of doubling power production, then I'll do one better and we'll just not double power production.

Of course. It's ok to double power production for things you want, but not for things other people want.

> It's ok to double power production for things you want,

For things that strengthen our country's economy, and provides a future for Americans, sure.

For some internationally-owned corporate conglomerates to churn out more brainwashing software garbage, no, I don't think me or other voters should give any support for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com