Especially in the US, and especially in homes, we tend to have dark roofs. Sunlight falls on these, heating the building up, then we burn fossil fuels to generate more energy to pump the heat outside. It’s absurd.
Fun fact: we still don't have AC in our house (it's a new-ish building, built 4 years ago) because it's decently insulated (and we live near the mountains). As in your case, our solar produces way over 100% of what we need, so I'm considering just getting AC to use the sun to cool the house if needed :)
In my old place I would often sleep in the living room sofa because of the heat.
A bit on the toasty side. That was before we had solar installed, now we might as well get AC to use the sun to our advantage. On a personal note, I like the interior a bit warmer, somewhere around 24-25 Celsius.
In a different timeline, we'd be investing in the country via zero/low-interest loans to encourage every homeowner to leverage this. It's a win for everybody.
And then there is stuff like the above indeed, uselessly wasting energy while things could be so much more efficient.
And yet, look at what is happening. Year after year the exponential growth continues without a blip! It is one of those things that looked impossible initially but obvious in retrospect.
My broader long term fear is that if we essentially get "limitless" energy, we continue to harm the ecosystem in other ways. Like giving a drug addict a limitless bank account. But we are still a long way from that point.
Vertical indoor farming is far more sustainable than outdoors farming.
It would also push electrifying other types of transportation that is harder to electrify like airplanes and ships. For example, if energy is free flights in smaller electric planes with more connections would be far cheaper than getting direct flights in jets.
Free energy also means cheaper recycling, currently aluminium scrap gets shipped around the world to places that have cheap energy (like iceland with geothermal power) for recycling. With free energy you would be able to do it locally.
It's not. "Vertical indoor farming" is heavily biomass constrained and this won't change even with infinite energy.
Have you ever paid attention to the types of crops grown in vertical farms? "Leafy greens" is a phrase that is used almost exclusively in the context of vertical farms and nowhere else. Most people talk about the specific vegetables they've had in their salad, not a broad category of vegetables that can be used for salads.
"Leafy greens" are "interesting", because they have an incredibly high water content, meaning less biomass is needed to produce the same volume of produce and they tend to have small root networks, which means that most of the biomass is edible and can be sold. They also tend to be small in the vertical direction, which allows more vertical stacking.
If we get to the point where we can reliably expect 8-12 hours of free electricity 80% of the time, then things like Direct Air Capture of carbon become viable - but that's likely 25-30 years off, so who knows what other technologies will have appeared in the meantime.