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Comment by jayfuerstenberg | Hacker News Reader

It is difficult to convince people that an abundance economy can work.

But these very people don't understand that they are currently enjoying one abundance right now: Free air.

The question is: How many things can we make as abundant as air?

OSS is there in fact. I would argue that electricity is next, then education (Khan Academy and the like), and one day fresh clean water.

We just have to keep knocking down one scarce resource at a time. The same way we don't take a single leap straight up the staircase, but instead take small steps to get to the top.

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> OSS is there in fact.

As someone who has spent many hours hacking on open source software, I'm not sure I'd call it 'abundant' in that the production of said software is very much a costly endeavor. Once it's out there, yes, it's non-rivalrous, but that's a different thing.

Well I'm certain the internet as we know it today is largely a result of Linux being free.

Imagine the costs of getting a service oriented internet company up and running in a world where the only choice is Windows and IIS.

I wonder how much longer it would take sites like Youtube to scale to their current size.

You're going to get some FreeBSD (and other *BSD) users riled up with that one (Hotmail and Yahoo, for example, are too notable services that did - in Hotmails case until well after the Microsoft acquisition - or do - in Yahoo's case - use FreeBSD extensively)

Is electricity really abundant, or about to be? I don't really see any options for plentiful energy in the future. Most people have a very negative attitude about nuclear plants, so those are a no-go. Solar/wind/hydro have relatively low output, in addition to taking a lot of land/resources and requiring very specific placement. Coal pollutes like crazy. In other countries, the electrical network already can't handle peak load, so they get occasional blackouts.

Nothing grows as fast and crazy as Photovoltaics right now. It's doubling roughly every 2 years (slightly less than 2 years). I don't know if we can scale up coal/nuclear at the same rate, but I guess that's not even possible.

So when PV prices fall to the bottom (trends indicate they will), electricity prices produced by PV will fall as well. Coal/Nuclear/etc will become unviable. What do we do then? Electricity will be basically free then.

No. What is missing is batteries. Remember, photovoltaics only work part of the day, and not every day. Same with wind.

In reality, what is happening is that because of "alternative" sources of energy, electricity is plentiful during the day, and scarce during the evening. Also, only turbines (hydro/thermo power plants) can be adjusted to keep current and voltage in the network constant, so we still need them, but because of the "green" sources, they are becoming less profitable for the operators.

TL;DR: alternative energy sources cause us to have too much electricity during the day and too little during the evening, both of which is costing us money.

At some point the turbines may have to be treated as part of the infrastructure, rather than part of the production.

If you produce energy, you get paid for it, but also pay a levy depending on how well your supply fits the demand. The levy goes to whoever fills in the gaps.

Some deregulated markets are already paying for the turbines as infrastructure.

For example, the PJM interconnection holds an annual capacity auction. This essentially pays for the capital costs of keeping gas turbines around, at idle. The cost of actually running the turbines is covered by a separate daily auction for actual electricity production.

PV is a very long way from being free right now. Even with subsidies, it's out of most people's budget to put up solar panels, and then you have to replace them every 20 years, and pay for an inverter to use the power (inverter prices and installation costs are not coming down, rather they are going the other way).

You realise there's a big difference between 'basically free' and 'actually free' right?

Yes electricity is abundant, well or easily made. There is more then enough sun, rain, wind etc. to make the price stupid cheap. But we cannot STORE enough energy currently, and that's the main problem.

Liquid metal battery seems to offer some hope in this regard.

Aren't there something like a billion very poor people in the world with no continuous access to electricity? I sincerely hope that they are going to get to take advantage of local, diverse micro-generation soon, but for now I'm going to guess that they would say that while the potential (pun intended) for electricity is abundant, electricity itself is not.

Solar is low output, but it requires very little infrastructure. What we need is to make it as cheap as possible, and then cover all roofs and windows with it. Anywhere you need electricity, lay down a sheet of solar cells with a battery, and you're there.

It won't be entirely free, but with enough effort, it might get very cheap.

Perhaps we need to be smarter about how we use it. Currently electricity is used to extend daylight hours for leisure, to do work that humans used to do, in places for transport and many other things, but we could certainly be using it more efficiently.

Of course, the abundance of air might actually be hurting us. It is so cheap that companies can abuse it freely, and it actually does wind up impacting the rest of us.

Fresh clean water is much the same way. Water is so cheap, its market price doesn't reflect its value and you get companies pretty much wasting ridiculous amounts of it, which in turn causes problems.

There are quite a few places where water won't be cheap for much longer. Underground aquifers are being depleted very fast.

This is true to an extent.

I once lived in a condo suite with free heat and hot water. My showers were longer than they would've been had I been paying for each drop.

But I still believe the merits of abundance outweigh the demerits.

Well some kinds of education will. Keep in mind that tutoring or face-to-face job training is a kind of education as well. I don't think the price of that will decrease and become as abundant as air. As high paying jobs become more difficult to get, it might get so expensive that only the wealthy can afford it.

Face-to-face tutoring might become as abundant as air when highly educated people with time on their hands and a desire to help or teach become as abundant as air.

At the moment we already have plenty of people, but most of them aren't highly educated yet, and they need to spend all their time on stupid jobs that exist mostly because people need to have jobs. So more education and basic income could go a long way towards fixing this situation.

Energy will be soon, too (within a few decades), once solar panels are wide-spread, much more efficient, and very cheap, and once we'll solve fusion.

Once we can make "replicators" like in Star Trek, food will probably become free, too, but that's probably going to take another 100 years until nanotechnology is mature and cheap enough.

Fresh clean water may only happen along sources of water, not likely to happen in the desert. But along those sources of water, it should happen pretty fast. If electricity becomes free, desalination follows basically the next day.

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