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Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

Energy will probably never be "essentially free" even if solar photovoltaics end up being very cheap and require zero maintenance because it still requires land which is scarce. Also, as energy gets cheaper, each person will consume more of it and we'll create products that consume more of it. So $0.0001 per kWh might sound "essentially free" to us, but it will not be in the high-energy-usage consumption of the future.

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"American households use less electricity than they did five years ago."

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2017/05/08/evidence-of-a-decline-i...

Will there be a rebound effect? It is too soon to tell, but it is not a given that household consumption always increases.

Do you have any ideas about how American consumers could end up using significantly more(~100x) energy than they do now?

I'm guessing people 100 years ago didn't suspect that we would use as much as we do now, because they probably didn't see either the mere possibility, or widespread adoption of whole house climate control, electric water heaters, induction ovens, electric dryers, electric cars, so it isn't very surprising to me that nothing is immediately popping into my head, but I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts on this matter.

I don't really know. Star Trek-style replicators? Commercial spaceflight?

Some idle speculation: * Self driving cars kill walking and urban development, make things even more suburban by removing one of the major current downsides of car travel * Further migration out of colder northern climates to increasingly hot southern areas leads to more and more air conditioning usage * Instead of batched shopping trips once a week, or even postal-service-level delivery aggregation, everything is delivered on-demand at a one-off energy expense * Similarly, maybe some sort of robotic daily clothes and dishes cleaning instead of only doing it when there's a full load? * Active temperature-regulating clothing? Now I feel like I'm reaching more and more :)

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