Comment by abirch
1 day ago
Too Cheap to Meter reminds me of the promise of Nuclear Power in 1954
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter,..." Lewis Strauss
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter#Origins
Oddly enough my power bill was metered and big.
It's a deliberate reference/meme that is basically used to acknowledge the precedent of overly exuberant predictions of cost in an emerging technology but argue "however, this time it's true".
Of course, perilous territory for future irony depending on how your prediction plays out.
I remember up to around the time the PC came out, you were billed for computer time.
Later, you were billed for time connected to the "internet" (compuserve or aol or whatever)
Around when the iphone came out, software went from tens or hundreds of dollars to pennies, then free.
On the other hand legal advice has always been expensive, because a good answer is worth it.
Medical advice is worth it. Investing advice is worth it.
(That said, I wonder if with home solar and batteries if electricity will ever "generally" go down in price to normal people)
Long distance phone calls were charged per minute.
Texting was charged per character.
And if you have the capabilities to install your own solar it can pay itself back in 6 years. Not sure what that looks like with 100% battery coverage.
It's really quite unfortunate that the promise was not delivered, mostly for political reasons. I hope that a new wave of reactors and the dire need for clean energy restarts the nuclear race.
The economics are not there. Solar + batteries are much cheaper per watt today and still improving. Even better, the solar can come online instantly and expand while US nuclear takes twenty years to start generating any energy.
I'm a huge solar fan, but I don't see energy transition happening as quickly as I'd hoped 10 years ago, and what seems apparent now is that it will only happen when energy storage gets 10x cheaper, which is why companies like Form Energy developing iron-air batteries might be the catalyst. You also need grid-forming inverters that balance the loads since relying on hundreds of thousands of residences for grid-tie is a real engineering challenge.
I strongly agree. We _will_ get there with solar, wind, and batteries.
> Solar + batteries are much cheaper per watt today and still improving.
Are we still going to make the same error over and over again? The day China says "stop" the price per watts will explode, just like when Russia and Iran said "stop".
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Eh, it looks like micro reactors are coming on line much faster these days.
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Meh. Cheap seasonal batteries aren't a thing yet so for much of humanity solar + batteries just can't cover the same needs as other means of generation.
One excellent nerd-sniping side-effect of those political reasons is that the good folks of Austria built an entire nuclear power station and then never put it into service [0]. Open for guided tours on Fridays [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
[1] https://windows2008.zwentendorf.com/en/location-npp/
Nuclear was never going to give us too cheap to meter regardless of politics. Uranium just isn’t that cheap. Fuel costs are lower then coal or gas, but not so low that operators would just not bother to charge for it
A MSTR only needs uranium-233, uranium-235, or plutonium to start. It then produces uranium-233 as part of its fuel cycle as thorium is input.
Given current found reserves and the current rate of use, the world has about 40 to 50 years of natural gas. Thorium used in molten salt thorium reactors would provide electricity for 60 billion years or so if we could actually extract all of it. That's 10 billion years or more if it provided all human energy consumption. Of course there's a limit to extraction, but it is over three times as common as uranium.
Also, besides thorium one can mix in partial amounts of other fuels, including uranium and plutonium. There is no runaway meltdown risk, as the fission is actively managed rather than actively suppressed. Fuel is spent more completely. The waste products are smaller, less radioactive, and have far shorter half-lives.
Then of course we're always getting slightly closer to productive fusion reactors.
These technologies along with solar PV, solar thermal, hydro, wind, geothermal, wave power, and batteries likely all have a place in the future.
There's a decent chance that at some point in the future residential customers will pay for the connection and only commercial or industrial customers will actually be metered. That's not because companies want to give up additional revenue. It's because at some point the cost of meters, tracking usage, and competitive advertising about who has the cheapest plans costs more than the power the typical customer uses above the base charge.
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Having your own solar can be "too cheap to meter", though it is definitely a feast and a famine kind of a thing.
We had batteries full and were spending electricity on all kinds of luxury things like whole-day internet and desalination for several weeks, and now that it has rained for over a week we're starting to turn non-critical systems off to keep the lights on.
On the other hand, this did work out in other areas. I pay a flat monthly rate for all-I-care-to-eat internet access, for example. My email provider has limits on storage space but I don’t get charged per email sent or received. It’s not a crazy concept on its face, nuclear power just didn’t work out as well as was hoped.
https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/
"Between digital economics and the wholesale embrace of King's Gillette's experiment in price shifting, we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly. How big a deal is that? Well, consider this analogy: In 1954, at the dawn of nuclear power, Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, promised that we were entering an age when electricity would be "too cheap to meter." Needless to say, that didn't happen, mostly because the risks of nuclear energy hugely increased its costs. But what if he'd been right? What if electricity had in fact become virtually free? The answer is that everything electricity touched—which is to say just about everything—would have been transformed. Rather than balance electricity against other energy sources, we'd use electricity for as many things as we could—we'd waste it, in fact, because it would be too cheap to worry about."
... What Mead understood is that a psychological switch should flip as things head toward zero. Even though they may never become entirely free, as the price drops there is great advantage to be had in treating them as if they were free. Not too cheap to meter, as Atomic Energy Commission chief Lewis Strauss said in a different context, but too cheap to matter. Indeed, the history of technological innovation has been marked by people spotting such price and performance trends and getting ahead of them."
My issue is that datacenter energy costs are being prioritized for commerce over residential use, so the average consumer is paying more for electricity, because a datacenter needs more electricity and they're getting tax breaks. Assuming this all improves efficiency for new products like automated robotics, there is a debatable benefit. Jevon's Paradox has no ceiling, except the environment, and people's 401ks.