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The marginal cost of energy is NOT going to zero. Have you seen today's power bills? Unless there's a way to exact energy from nothing, energy will Always requ

The marginal cost of energy is NOT going to zero. Have you seen today's power bills? Unless there's a way to exact energy from nothing, energy will Always require input to produce output. That would lead to waste as well. So it can never be zero. Solar panels, green energy ain't free, they cost minerals to create and maintain.

arcturus17 4y ago
Maybe with fusion, but that's a long ways off. The article talks about a much shorter term, and explicitly mentions current-gen energy tech. As I said in the sibling comment the bills of GPU-based compute do not suggest to me they are trending towards zero, either.
- rapsey 4y ago
  Yup neither of these predictions make sense. No historic parallel and no curent or near future market reality supports it. Even if someone figures out net positive fusion. You still have to build these facilities and they sure as hell are not going to be cheap. Fusion even if possible is highly questionable to ever be cost effective.
Gigachad 4y ago
Even if we massively lowered the cost and made it almost free, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference because we would all just increase usage until energy became the limiting factor again
Grimburger 4y ago
The wholesale power price in my country is consistently negative during the day time. I think we have maybe 60% coal/gas power overall.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Hmm, this actually leads me to wonder would there be future in scalable loads? Or technologies supporting these? Basically developing software and hardware that can scale up and down based on power costs even real time. So if you can wait on your computation you could save money by suspending it periodically.
- langsoul-com 4y ago
  That's pretty interesting. Australia only has current (high) electricity prices because the government keeps adding legislation to prevent too high increases. Aka, it's artificially lower than what energy companies would price. Well, given they got a monopoly, that's good.
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    At least on the higher latitude parts of the east coast it seems inevitable that feed-in tariffs will go to zero over time, even during some of the wettest/cloudiest years we've had there's so much excess supply. Could do an interconnect to WA, we've talked about it for a long time, would extend out the solar over-generation period by 3-4 hours on each side of the country, but it's pricey, especially compared to local storage and power storage costs in general going down so it may be a white elephant before we even get it built. https://opennem.org.au/ https://opennem.org.au/

arcturus17 4y ago

Maybe with fusion, but that's a long ways off. The article talks about a much shorter term, and explicitly mentions current-gen energy tech. As I said in the sibling comment the bills of GPU-based compute do not suggest to me they are trending towards zero, either.

rapsey 4y ago
Yup neither of these predictions make sense. No historic parallel and no curent or near future market reality supports it. Even if someone figures out net positive fusion. You still have to build these facilities and they sure as hell are not going to be cheap. Fusion even if possible is highly questionable to ever be cost effective.

Gigachad 4y ago

Even if we massively lowered the cost and made it almost free, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference because we would all just increase usage until energy became the limiting factor again

Grimburger 4y ago

The wholesale power price in my country is consistently negative during the day time. I think we have maybe 60% coal/gas power overall.

Ekaros 4y ago
Hmm, this actually leads me to wonder would there be future in scalable loads? Or technologies supporting these? Basically developing software and hardware that can scale up and down based on power costs even real time. So if you can wait on your computation you could save money by suspending it periodically.
langsoul-com 4y ago
That's pretty interesting. Australia only has current (high) electricity prices because the government keeps adding legislation to prevent too high increases. Aka, it's artificially lower than what energy companies would price. Well, given they got a monopoly, that's good.
- Grimburger 4y ago
  At least on the higher latitude parts of the east coast it seems inevitable that feed-in tariffs will go to zero over time, even during some of the wettest/cloudiest years we've had there's so much excess supply. Could do an interconnect to WA, we've talked about it for a long time, would extend out the solar over-generation period by 3-4 hours on each side of the country, but it's pricey, especially compared to local storage and power storage costs in general going down so it may be a white elephant before we even get it built. https://opennem.org.au/ https://opennem.org.au/