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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

Not misguided. Because here in the real world, both now and for the foreseeable future, especially the near future in which we have to urgently deal with climate change impacts, energy production does indeed have those side effects.

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Solar is getting cheaper by the day, batteries are getting cheaper and more efficient by the day, and there's a ton of money pouring into research. Maybe I'm crazy, but I can see a future, maybe a few decades from now, when power is "too cheap to meter" because of renewables.

Electricity use is only one part of energy consumption. Transportation costs, production costs, and even food generation are all included in the umbrella. Also, "costs" aren't just referring to dollars spent, but also environmental impact. Having cheap electricity is only a small part of the equation, and barely a relevant one at that.

Energy is roughly transferable - if you have cheap electricity you can use it to produce cheap process heat, synthetic fuels, food, environmental cleanup, etc. You get enough solar panels for a low enough price and all the other problems become trivial.

Electricity is already priced negatively in some markets at some times of the day because of the mismatch between demand and supply from intermittent wind and solar generation. The trick here is how to design an energy storage solution that can exploit that mismatch. It’s the ultimate buy-low sell-high opportunity.

The trick is to design energy-intensive industries so that they can use DC power for a few hours each day and to site them at the PV/wind farms.

This is already happening with desalination and hydrogen production via electrolysis, and hydrocarbon production (for carbon-neutral transport fuel) is being piloted too. Future likely applications include electrolytic refining of iron ore to the metal. Cheap electricity is going to enable new industries we haven't thought of yet.

"P2X" is the abbreviation to look out for.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-X

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