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And that's $1000 per year at today's energy prices, which surely will go up over time.
by jacquesm 10mo ago
And that's $1000 per year at today's energy prices, which surely will go up over time.
- testing22321 10mo agoThey’re already locked in approved to go up at least 6% a year here. It just went up 16% this year for people out of town.
- njarboe 10mo agoOne could hope with improving tech and decreasing regulations we could have decreasing (nominal) energy prices in the future. That would be progress.
- jacquesm 10mo agoDemand is rising very fast compared to supply, I don't think that will happen. Energy is like RAM or clockspeed: you can't have enough of it.
- blitzar 10mo ago> decreasing (nominal) energy prices in the future Hasn't happened ever before, not sure why this time it would be different.
- njarboe 10mo agoHappened constantly till around 1970. One horse power used to take a horse. Now a very small electric motor for cents per day.
- zozbot234 10mo agoWe'll most likely see off-peak or dispatchable-demand energy prices become effectively negligible due to cheap intermittent sources, but the price for reliable 24/7 supply will if anything trend higher. Storage is not enough to bridge the gap in all cases, so you need either very expensive peaker plants or less expensive nuclear to provide a reliable baseload supply for those critical uses.
- pranavj 10mo agoThe baseload framing is increasingly outdated. What grids need isn't constant supply - it's flexible supply that matches variable demand. Solar + batteries handle daytime and evening peaks well. Wind fills different gaps. The remaining "firmness" problem (extended low-wind, low-sun periods) is real but smaller than baseload thinking suggests. Most studies show you can get to 80-90% renewables before you hit hard storage limits. The last 10-20% is the expensive part, but that's a different problem than needing baseload for everything.
- jacquesm 10mo agoAnd HVDC long haul offsets a lot of those problems as well and is more effective than storage.
- njarboe 10mo agoYes if we could only build them. I recently learned there was one built from the Columbia river hydro projects to southern California in the early 1970's Has one been built since?