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I recall someone, maybe @kr, posting about this a while ago.
It seems plausible to me that electricity could become more of a subscription service if the marginal unit cost becomes trivial. You'd still pay a fee to cover maintenance and whatever else, similar to how cell plans changed to deemphasize minutes or streaming services moved away from pay per view.
Yes, in such a situation the "last mile" becomes the only real cost. You still need someone to come out and fix a line when trees fall into powerlines, transformers blow, etc.
In theory small, hermetically sealed mini-nuclear reactors could also become a thing so instead of a mega GW nuclear reactor serving an entire city, imagine 50 mini reactors spread around serving a couple thousands homes each....
There are lots of neat power generation technologies on the horizon.
Yep. I always think about the Internal Combustion engine as a concept.....
Imagine if there was no such thing and I proposed that "we can build transportation vehicles that harness explosions of a very flammable liquid". The idea seems pretty absurd, yet we have managed to make it so relatively safe that no one ever really thinks about it.
I think with enough engineering effort (driven by the right economic conditions), nuclear could become something like that.
Its a pity the climate activist created a 50 year war against nuclear that has undoubtedly set us back many decades in advances....
climate activists
Important to recognize that it's not just hipster stupidity... but industrial psyops that manufacture, organize, and weaponize that stupidity
Any disruptive technology faces the full might of the old guard industrial complex, just as we see with Banks re: Bitcoin and in deflationary medicines.
One of the most amusing anecdotes I've seen first hand is big energy funding massive opposition to a transmission line from a huge dam on an adjacent grid... all that renewable hydro energy was all of a sudden bad because some trees would need trimmed to widen the transmission corridor for the lines. Psyop'd the population into a referendum against it multiple times over several iterations... same population pissed about having the highest electricity prices in the country
Can't make this shit up.
Baptists and Bootleggers
Yea I could foresee paying a flat rate to the utility just for them to maintain the hookup, and perhaps that comes with a whole home battery that the utility uses to buffer peak load. That would change the incentives and cost structures quite a bit, and I think for the better.
What I take away from the concept even more though is the equity component, ties in with what we discussed recently #1404823
The stock accounts for newborns, sovereign wealth fund / the government stake in Intel, SBR, tariff dividends, and so on... all sniff of equitizing citizenship.
If we frame states as corporations in an globally anarchic system, then citizens are shareholders, and "UBI" becomes a shareholder dividend. Not sure how to label such a system, Populism with American Characteristics?
Heard something the other day that sounds a little UBI'ish at a glance, but I need to ponder the meaning a little more.
Having to do with the scale of systems and integrated cost structures, like AI and datacenters effect on the grid, that at a certain point it doesn't even make sense to bill households for electricity up to a certain point because household use becomes a rounding error. Espescially when you consider other programs that already help people keep the heat on and the tax credits that go into datacenter construction. Household energy might just be part of the equity locales have in assets in their backyard, it kills two birds by solving the NIMBY problem... don't want a micronuke or datacenter in your town? what if you get free electricity? Changes the balance of everything.