Comment by eru
2 days ago
> Then one of you is going to try to find a way to make _more_ money with that energy and find something quickly scalable with not-too-high idle overhead costs to do with that energy besides just flowing through a resistor.
Yes, exactly.
Which reminds me of the occasional story about how one native group or another was so in tune with nature, because they used every part of the (insert important animal here).
Modern economies obviously use all parts of the animal, for exactly the reason you outline.
> Especially with solar energy, this is just going to be a thing. There's a certain balance where overprovisioning is cheaper than storage and so you just do that. Then you wait for industry (or consumers) to figure out how to take advantage of the intermittent cheap energy.
Yes, though you also need to make sure that regulations don't get in the way. Or at least not too badly.
One example I can think of is forcing utilities to charge people by net-metering, forcing the utility to implicitly pay the same price for electricity as they charge. We don't do that for eg used car salesmen.
>One example I can think of is forcing utilities to charge people by net-metering, forcing the utility to implicitly pay the same price for electricity as they charge. We don't do that for eg used car salesmen.
A large proportion of the cost of consumer electricity is distribution built in to the per kWh cost. Their buy price needs to be lower than their sell price. I think most people would be surprised by how much of the cost of their electricity is incurred between the power plant and their home.