Comment by cess11
3 days ago
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.
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.
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 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).