14 ms·

Actually, I think a related but better question is, what would technology look like without the assumption of a stable base-load of electricity on the grid? Wha

by bane 12y ago

Actually, I think a related but better question is, what would technology look like without the assumption of a stable base-load of electricity on the grid? What if your power availability simply went up and down depending on the wind, or cloud cover, or the tides. There's a kind of poetry I think, a kind of awareness, that your devices may spin up and down with the seasons instead of marching incessantly and unstoppably onward.

mrfusion 12y ago
I like your idea. I've actually thought it wouldn't be that bad for people to not use electricity hungry appliances at night? Fans to bring in cool air from outside, really no need to cook or wash clothes at night. Just a small battery for TV's and a few lights? (Heating in the winter might be tougher of course. But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning, so might be tolerable?) Or Find ways to store the heat during day and slowly release it at night. Tanks of water in the attic?)
- mod 12y ago
  > But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning In my experience, a house heated to 80F can be 30F within a matter of a couple of hours, depending on the number of windows, temperature outside, and insulation levels. I certainly don't think that's a solution to winter problems in cold-weather climates. As for storing the heat, I'm not really sure what you mean. Surely it would be inefficient to generate extra heat during the day and store it, as opposed to just creating some in the evening?
  - Retric 12y ago
    It's cheap to add a fairly large heat sink in the middle of your house during construction. Brick or stone walls vs plaster or just a large tank of water. Add in some passive solar and you can keep a house in the continual US warm without active heat sources fairly easily. The major issue is it stops looking like a traditional house and costs more up front, but it’s not a major issue. PS: ~6 hours * 1kw/m^2. Take a 30' x 30' roof and that's ~600 kwh per day or an average of 24kw of heating. Though you do need to keep the now off the roof in the winter, but a steep enough rough does that fairly easily.
    - balabaster 12y ago
      You've got a fairly large heat sink right under every house. The trick is to "wire" into it during the build. Stick a geothermal heat transfer unit and run water pipes under the ground where the earth maintains a constant year round temperature. Use this to control the climate along with decent insulation and you'll dramatically reduce your climate control costs. Ideally, if you can build your entire house below the frost line, you're laughing - but this isn't always feasible.
      - Retric 12y ago
        That can be a good option when you need both winter heating and summer cooling, but ground source heating tends to be surprisingly expensive. Not to mention many houses sit on bed rock. My understanding is if you live near a stream or pond it's a great way to make heat pumps far more efficient, but otherwise just having a large rock slab in the middle of your house combined with solar heating is far cheaper for heating, but not that useful for cooling if your area does not cool off at night.
        balabaster 12y ago
        If you live near a river/stream, depending on the depth, flow and head (gradient drop) you can also use that for power generation. If it's not that deep, it'll only be useful for this in months where it's not frozen solid, but if it's deeper, then you'll still have flow under the ice to drive your turbine. In the winter however, wind tends to be more prevalent, so you can use a wind turbine to generate more power. Of course, all this is reliant on knowledge of the local geography and climate before you purchase and get set up. If you're limited to where you are right now, you're kind of stuck with what you can put on your property right now. Which could be as limited as running on-grid but growing your own food.
  - dalke 12y ago
    If a house drops from 80F to 30F within a couple of hours then it is poorly insulated, and likely has a lot of air exchange. http://www.winnipeg.ca/epp/pdfs/CoolingRatesOfHouses.pdf http://www.winnipeg.ca/epp/pdfs/CoolingRatesOfHouses.pdf looked at how houses cooled during a power outage in Quebec in January. "The mean outside temperature during this period was between -7 and -8°C, with daytime highs of up to 3°C. ... The temperature was as low as -23°C during that period." 12-17 days after the power failed, the contractor measured temperatures in houses that had had neither power nor occupants during that time. "None of the air or surface temperatures in the 31 houses inspected had fallen below 0°C." There is a proviso: "In very cold temperatures (for example, -30°C), high winds or houses without basements, the rate of cooling will be much faster than observed in the southern Quebec houses of this study." Now, I lived for a year in a house which was poorly insulated, and where you could feel the draft through the window frame. When it was -15F outside 2L pop bottles would freeze on the floor of the pantry even when the heat was on, and when the furnace went out during Thanksgiving weekend the inside temperature quickly dropped. Even then, it didn't match the freezing outside temperature over a couple of hours. I can well believe that your experience is true, but it is atypical. On the other side of things, Passivhaus designs (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house ) give an example of what can be done with good design, for houses designed for freezing weather. They need only 10W/m² of heat, which can often be met by normal activity (people, computers, screens, coffee makers, etc.) It's possible to have south facing windows in Germany which let in more solar energy in winter than is released by heat loss.
- balabaster 12y ago
  If you maintain the climate in your house with geothermal energy or using different building techniques such as earth berm which maintain the internal climate of your property naturally, you just need to supplement via some other means rather than drive all the heating and cooling via high energy devices. The earth maintains a fairly constant temperature below approx. 4-6 feet and so as long as your home is insulated well, you would not find it fluctuating so wildly as you suggest. Cooking by fire takes a bit of practice, but even that is easy with some practice. Admittedly, this in many cases isn't considered renewable, but you can remove a cord of wood (approx. 85 cu. ft.) per acre per year without ever depleting your supply. People in Northern climes claim they require 5-6 cords to get through their winters, but with a well insulated and geothermally "heated" house, you could reduce this fairly effectively. A wood gasifier can be used to drive gas burning engines - I'm not sure I'd recommend it for cooking due to potential CO output - you certainly wouldn't want to use it for cooking inside the house. We have an abundance of energy all around us and while the technologies that harness this energy aren't perhaps as efficient as we'd like yet, they're efficient enough that harnessing a bunch and wiring them together with a battery bank, charge controller and power inverter is enough that you can power your home sustainably with a much reduced need for fossil fuels. There's certainly enough for lights (especially if you're running all LED lights) and T.V. For the moment, portability of tools and machinery (think chain saws, sawmills etc.), the need for gasoline still isn't removed completely - you could go back to a felling axe and use your own energy, but trust me, as time gets on, you'll realize you spend an awful lot of time rushing to beat winter and wasting time doing things that are done far quicker with power tools. We're now at a point where you can comfortably live off-grid and (mostly) power your home with sustainable energy without giving up too many off the creature comforts you've come to take for granted. With some efforts to reduce your reliance on modern appliances - such as dishwashers, dryers, hairdryers, electric stoves etc. a modest battery bank would be enough to have enough electricity on demand to keep you running relatively normally. I think there's a difference in living sustainably and using fossil fuels. It's possible to live much more sustainably and still utilize fossil fuels at a consciously reduced rate.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    There was an article here on HN a while back about "Amish hackers", and one of the things I ended up learning from that was the Amish reliance on air compressors; compressed air was regarded as "Amish electricity" and would often be creatively applied to various (usually agricultural) machinery. Perhaps something similar could be applied here? An air compressor powered by some renewable fuel (like wood gas) could pump air into portable canisters for use in power tools (or just be hooked directly into the tools themselves, much like in modern automotive repair shops) would solve this at the expense of some portability.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Look up Riena LLP who build net zero structures in Fairbanks, AK. Key to the design, an embedded 5,000 gallon vertical stratification thermal storage tank. That and several feet of insulation and a deep foundation. http://www.reina-llc.com/ http://www.reina-llc.com/
Retric 12y ago
Hydro power averages ~90W per person in the US ~225W peak @ ~40% capacity factor. In many ways that's not a lot of power, but it's plenty to kick start other renewable sources in the apocalypse scenario or average out power from renewables. As to renewables the simple solutions is to over provision and add spare transit capacity. You move electricity 1,000 KM with minimal losses at fairly low cost so with reasonable transit you get to average over a vary large area.
- jn1234 12y ago
  Over building renewables and transport capacity would probably be worse than the status quo in terms of cost and carbon generation. Peak power, which is dictated by people's general schedule, dictates both the generation and capacity requirements. It doesn't make any sense to over build renewables when everyone is using power after the sun went down or when you can't control when the wind blows. In ERCOT, (Texas) the price of electricity overnight (when the wind is blowing) often goes negative meaning that the power producer pays you to use electricity. This is why the next generation of battery technology is going to be so groundbreaking. It will allow batteries to become more economical feasible both on a small and large scale. It simply cause renewables to become more societally efficient.
  - SeoxyS 12y ago
    Dams are one of the best kind of battery there is. They store gargantuan amounts of energy with very little complexity. Basically: pump water up into the dam to "charge," and let water flow and run the turbines to "release" energy. That's why hydro power is absolutely critical to a renewable grid. It's the only scalable way to normalize supply and demand.
    - jn1234 12y ago
      Despite, the inefficiencies (losing 20-30%) there are large environmental impacts associated with turning a large amount of land into a lake. Additionally, when a drought occurs almost all the storage capacity is lost. We are at the stage with battery technologies, where it would make absolutely to build hydro storage, even given the current trend of removing dams.
badloginagain 12y ago
That thought-experiment precludes nuclear fission, which provides energy at a consistent rate at orders of magnitude greater than fossil fuels and renewable energy sources.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  In the context of this article's thought experiment, fission's probably out of the question. However, for other scenarios, it is indeed a viable option, considering that it's statistically the safest (last I checked), very clean, and packs a high energy density. The problem, though, is that fissile material is subject to a lot of the same availability problems as fossil fuels (if not worse), plus quite a few safety concerns (particularly when it comes to radiation, though coal mining poses this sort of risk, too). The energy density is much better, so we could probably get by for a very long time (especially with things like breeder reactors, increased use of thorium instead of or alongside uranium or plutonium, etc.), but ultimately, we'll need to transition to something like fusion power at the very least.
  - eru 12y ago
    Fissile material is easily available. Current prices just make exploiting most reserves uneconomical. I am not sure what time spans you speak about. Thousands of years is possible on fission with current technology and at current levels of demand.
    - alphydan 12y ago
      The link is somewhat old, but this should help you learn more http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379 (and understand that "thousands of years on fission with current technology" is pretty far from the truth)
    - yellowapple 12y ago
      Easily available in what context, though? To us in the modern day, yeah, it's probably pretty trivial to mine such nuclear fuels, but the article discusses a lack of that technology.
subdane 12y ago
Some island countries experience daily outages of power, actually. It winds up being pretty easy to work around when you've planned to expect it (this includes things like backup power sources and so forth).
- bane 12y ago
  Right, that's my thinking...it's probably not a huge deal for most applications. Even better, if the available power is low, just run things slower. Does web browsing really need all .8KW my desktop can drain out of the wall?
  - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
    I'd be very surprised if your desktop draws .8 kW when you're browsing the web. Your discrete GPU should be drawing around 10 W at idle, and you're averaging < 30% of your CPU's < 150 W TDP. That's at most 60W, so with a HDD and some fans and 20% loss in the PSU you're maybe touching 100 W.
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      Composited desktops, heavy scrolling? Doesn't that kick up the GPU significantly?
  - funkyy 12y ago
    This sounds like maximum it can use, but still sounds really high.
    - bane 12y ago
      Yeah of course, I'm exaggerating for effect. Still, I have two monitors that eat up about 25-30W each, and I also have a desktop with an Power Supply rated at 800W. I have no idea what the entire setup uses when I'm web surfing, but the spare bedroom I'm in gets noticeably warmer. Would it kill me for the system to just spin down a little and make me wait and extra 2 or 3 seconds for a page to load?
kijin 12y ago
As another commenter pointed out, hydroelectricity can compensate for fluctuations in other types of renewable energy. Pumped storage power plants (a form of hydro where you use gravity as a gigantic battery) can also help smooth out any remaining fluctuation. This could, however, change the balance of power between different regions of the world. Fossil fuels favor coastal flatlands where it's easy to transport bulk materials. A civilization that depends on hydroelectricity, on the other hand, might favor a more mountainous terrain. The capitol in the postapocalyptic world of The Hunger Games is located somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, powered by hydro. Our usual concept of business hours might also have to disappear, if we're going to rely on hydro to smooth out fluctuations in other energy sources. We may no longer be able to afford peak usage at certain times of day, and therefore spread out power-consuming activites across all hours of the day and night. This helps eliminate the rush hour, which is itself a terrible waste of energy. If push comes to shove and we need to ration power, I suppose this will put more pressure on battery technology. People will have to store up on power at certain times of the day, and use it until the next charge-up time. It will be a bit like fetching water from the well every morning. But even under such circumstances, some people are clever enough to put a tank on the roof and install pipes/faucets to simulate a constant water supply. Batteries are to an intermittent power supply what a tank is to an intermittent water supply. We as a species can't tolerate inconvenience. We'll find a way to make life as convenient as possible, no matter what the circumstances. Intermittent meat supply? Brb, gonna store up on ham and bacon during the hunting season.

by bane 12y ago

mrfusion 12y ago

I like your idea. I've actually thought it wouldn't be that bad for people to not use electricity hungry appliances at night? Fans to bring in cool air from outside, really no need to cook or wash clothes at night. Just a small battery for TV's and a few lights? (Heating in the winter might be tougher of course. But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning, so might be tolerable?) Or Find ways to store the heat during day and slowly release it at night. Tanks of water in the attic?)

mod 12y ago
> But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning In my experience, a house heated to 80F can be 30F within a matter of a couple of hours, depending on the number of windows, temperature outside, and insulation levels. I certainly don't think that's a solution to winter problems in cold-weather climates. As for storing the heat, I'm not really sure what you mean. Surely it would be inefficient to generate extra heat during the day and store it, as opposed to just creating some in the evening?
- Retric 12y ago
  It's cheap to add a fairly large heat sink in the middle of your house during construction. Brick or stone walls vs plaster or just a large tank of water. Add in some passive solar and you can keep a house in the continual US warm without active heat sources fairly easily. The major issue is it stops looking like a traditional house and costs more up front, but it’s not a major issue. PS: ~6 hours * 1kw/m^2. Take a 30' x 30' roof and that's ~600 kwh per day or an average of 24kw of heating. Though you do need to keep the now off the roof in the winter, but a steep enough rough does that fairly easily.
  - balabaster 12y ago
    You've got a fairly large heat sink right under every house. The trick is to "wire" into it during the build. Stick a geothermal heat transfer unit and run water pipes under the ground where the earth maintains a constant year round temperature. Use this to control the climate along with decent insulation and you'll dramatically reduce your climate control costs. Ideally, if you can build your entire house below the frost line, you're laughing - but this isn't always feasible.
    - Retric 12y ago
      That can be a good option when you need both winter heating and summer cooling, but ground source heating tends to be surprisingly expensive. Not to mention many houses sit on bed rock. My understanding is if you live near a stream or pond it's a great way to make heat pumps far more efficient, but otherwise just having a large rock slab in the middle of your house combined with solar heating is far cheaper for heating, but not that useful for cooling if your area does not cool off at night.
      - balabaster 12y ago
        If you live near a river/stream, depending on the depth, flow and head (gradient drop) you can also use that for power generation. If it's not that deep, it'll only be useful for this in months where it's not frozen solid, but if it's deeper, then you'll still have flow under the ice to drive your turbine. In the winter however, wind tends to be more prevalent, so you can use a wind turbine to generate more power. Of course, all this is reliant on knowledge of the local geography and climate before you purchase and get set up. If you're limited to where you are right now, you're kind of stuck with what you can put on your property right now. Which could be as limited as running on-grid but growing your own food.
- dalke 12y ago
  If a house drops from 80F to 30F within a couple of hours then it is poorly insulated, and likely has a lot of air exchange. http://www.winnipeg.ca/epp/pdfs/CoolingRatesOfHouses.pdf http://www.winnipeg.ca/epp/pdfs/CoolingRatesOfHouses.pdf looked at how houses cooled during a power outage in Quebec in January. "The mean outside temperature during this period was between -7 and -8°C, with daytime highs of up to 3°C. ... The temperature was as low as -23°C during that period." 12-17 days after the power failed, the contractor measured temperatures in houses that had had neither power nor occupants during that time. "None of the air or surface temperatures in the 31 houses inspected had fallen below 0°C." There is a proviso: "In very cold temperatures (for example, -30°C), high winds or houses without basements, the rate of cooling will be much faster than observed in the southern Quebec houses of this study." Now, I lived for a year in a house which was poorly insulated, and where you could feel the draft through the window frame. When it was -15F outside 2L pop bottles would freeze on the floor of the pantry even when the heat was on, and when the furnace went out during Thanksgiving weekend the inside temperature quickly dropped. Even then, it didn't match the freezing outside temperature over a couple of hours. I can well believe that your experience is true, but it is atypical. On the other side of things, Passivhaus designs (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house ) give an example of what can be done with good design, for houses designed for freezing weather. They need only 10W/m² of heat, which can often be met by normal activity (people, computers, screens, coffee makers, etc.) It's possible to have south facing windows in Germany which let in more solar energy in winter than is released by heat loss.
balabaster 12y ago
If you maintain the climate in your house with geothermal energy or using different building techniques such as earth berm which maintain the internal climate of your property naturally, you just need to supplement via some other means rather than drive all the heating and cooling via high energy devices. The earth maintains a fairly constant temperature below approx. 4-6 feet and so as long as your home is insulated well, you would not find it fluctuating so wildly as you suggest. Cooking by fire takes a bit of practice, but even that is easy with some practice. Admittedly, this in many cases isn't considered renewable, but you can remove a cord of wood (approx. 85 cu. ft.) per acre per year without ever depleting your supply. People in Northern climes claim they require 5-6 cords to get through their winters, but with a well insulated and geothermally "heated" house, you could reduce this fairly effectively. A wood gasifier can be used to drive gas burning engines - I'm not sure I'd recommend it for cooking due to potential CO output - you certainly wouldn't want to use it for cooking inside the house. We have an abundance of energy all around us and while the technologies that harness this energy aren't perhaps as efficient as we'd like yet, they're efficient enough that harnessing a bunch and wiring them together with a battery bank, charge controller and power inverter is enough that you can power your home sustainably with a much reduced need for fossil fuels. There's certainly enough for lights (especially if you're running all LED lights) and T.V. For the moment, portability of tools and machinery (think chain saws, sawmills etc.), the need for gasoline still isn't removed completely - you could go back to a felling axe and use your own energy, but trust me, as time gets on, you'll realize you spend an awful lot of time rushing to beat winter and wasting time doing things that are done far quicker with power tools. We're now at a point where you can comfortably live off-grid and (mostly) power your home with sustainable energy without giving up too many off the creature comforts you've come to take for granted. With some efforts to reduce your reliance on modern appliances - such as dishwashers, dryers, hairdryers, electric stoves etc. a modest battery bank would be enough to have enough electricity on demand to keep you running relatively normally. I think there's a difference in living sustainably and using fossil fuels. It's possible to live much more sustainably and still utilize fossil fuels at a consciously reduced rate.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  There was an article here on HN a while back about "Amish hackers", and one of the things I ended up learning from that was the Amish reliance on air compressors; compressed air was regarded as "Amish electricity" and would often be creatively applied to various (usually agricultural) machinery. Perhaps something similar could be applied here? An air compressor powered by some renewable fuel (like wood gas) could pump air into portable canisters for use in power tools (or just be hooked directly into the tools themselves, much like in modern automotive repair shops) would solve this at the expense of some portability.
dredmorbius 12y ago
Look up Riena LLP who build net zero structures in Fairbanks, AK. Key to the design, an embedded 5,000 gallon vertical stratification thermal storage tank. That and several feet of insulation and a deep foundation. http://www.reina-llc.com/ http://www.reina-llc.com/

Retric 12y ago

Hydro power averages ~90W per person in the US ~225W peak @ ~40% capacity factor. In many ways that's not a lot of power, but it's plenty to kick start other renewable sources in the apocalypse scenario or average out power from renewables. As to renewables the simple solutions is to over provision and add spare transit capacity. You move electricity 1,000 KM with minimal losses at fairly low cost so with reasonable transit you get to average over a vary large area.

jn1234 12y ago
Over building renewables and transport capacity would probably be worse than the status quo in terms of cost and carbon generation. Peak power, which is dictated by people's general schedule, dictates both the generation and capacity requirements. It doesn't make any sense to over build renewables when everyone is using power after the sun went down or when you can't control when the wind blows. In ERCOT, (Texas) the price of electricity overnight (when the wind is blowing) often goes negative meaning that the power producer pays you to use electricity. This is why the next generation of battery technology is going to be so groundbreaking. It will allow batteries to become more economical feasible both on a small and large scale. It simply cause renewables to become more societally efficient.
- SeoxyS 12y ago
  Dams are one of the best kind of battery there is. They store gargantuan amounts of energy with very little complexity. Basically: pump water up into the dam to "charge," and let water flow and run the turbines to "release" energy. That's why hydro power is absolutely critical to a renewable grid. It's the only scalable way to normalize supply and demand.
  - jn1234 12y ago
    Despite, the inefficiencies (losing 20-30%) there are large environmental impacts associated with turning a large amount of land into a lake. Additionally, when a drought occurs almost all the storage capacity is lost. We are at the stage with battery technologies, where it would make absolutely to build hydro storage, even given the current trend of removing dams.

badloginagain 12y ago

That thought-experiment precludes nuclear fission, which provides energy at a consistent rate at orders of magnitude greater than fossil fuels and renewable energy sources.

yellowapple 12y ago
In the context of this article's thought experiment, fission's probably out of the question. However, for other scenarios, it is indeed a viable option, considering that it's statistically the safest (last I checked), very clean, and packs a high energy density. The problem, though, is that fissile material is subject to a lot of the same availability problems as fossil fuels (if not worse), plus quite a few safety concerns (particularly when it comes to radiation, though coal mining poses this sort of risk, too). The energy density is much better, so we could probably get by for a very long time (especially with things like breeder reactors, increased use of thorium instead of or alongside uranium or plutonium, etc.), but ultimately, we'll need to transition to something like fusion power at the very least.
- eru 12y ago
  Fissile material is easily available. Current prices just make exploiting most reserves uneconomical. I am not sure what time spans you speak about. Thousands of years is possible on fission with current technology and at current levels of demand.
  - alphydan 12y ago
    The link is somewhat old, but this should help you learn more http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379 (and understand that "thousands of years on fission with current technology" is pretty far from the truth)
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    Easily available in what context, though? To us in the modern day, yeah, it's probably pretty trivial to mine such nuclear fuels, but the article discusses a lack of that technology.

subdane 12y ago

Some island countries experience daily outages of power, actually. It winds up being pretty easy to work around when you've planned to expect it (this includes things like backup power sources and so forth).

bane 12y ago
Right, that's my thinking...it's probably not a huge deal for most applications. Even better, if the available power is low, just run things slower. Does web browsing really need all .8KW my desktop can drain out of the wall?
- semi-extrinsic 12y ago
  I'd be very surprised if your desktop draws .8 kW when you're browsing the web. Your discrete GPU should be drawing around 10 W at idle, and you're averaging < 30% of your CPU's < 150 W TDP. That's at most 60W, so with a HDD and some fans and 20% loss in the PSU you're maybe touching 100 W.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Composited desktops, heavy scrolling? Doesn't that kick up the GPU significantly?
- funkyy 12y ago
  This sounds like maximum it can use, but still sounds really high.
  - bane 12y ago
    Yeah of course, I'm exaggerating for effect. Still, I have two monitors that eat up about 25-30W each, and I also have a desktop with an Power Supply rated at 800W. I have no idea what the entire setup uses when I'm web surfing, but the spare bedroom I'm in gets noticeably warmer. Would it kill me for the system to just spin down a little and make me wait and extra 2 or 3 seconds for a page to load?

kijin 12y ago

As another commenter pointed out, hydroelectricity can compensate for fluctuations in other types of renewable energy. Pumped storage power plants (a form of hydro where you use gravity as a gigantic battery) can also help smooth out any remaining fluctuation. This could, however, change the balance of power between different regions of the world. Fossil fuels favor coastal flatlands where it's easy to transport bulk materials. A civilization that depends on hydroelectricity, on the other hand, might favor a more mountainous terrain. The capitol in the postapocalyptic world of The Hunger Games is located somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, powered by hydro. Our usual concept of business hours might also have to disappear, if we're going to rely on hydro to smooth out fluctuations in other energy sources. We may no longer be able to afford peak usage at certain times of day, and therefore spread out power-consuming activites across all hours of the day and night. This helps eliminate the rush hour, which is itself a terrible waste of energy. If push comes to shove and we need to ration power, I suppose this will put more pressure on battery technology. People will have to store up on power at certain times of the day, and use it until the next charge-up time. It will be a bit like fetching water from the well every morning. But even under such circumstances, some people are clever enough to put a tank on the roof and install pipes/faucets to simulate a constant water supply. Batteries are to an intermittent power supply what a tank is to an intermittent water supply. We as a species can't tolerate inconvenience. We'll find a way to make life as convenient as possible, no matter what the circumstances. Intermittent meat supply? Brb, gonna store up on ham and bacon during the hunting season.