Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

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This is both hard to explain to people and hard to get them onboard even once it's been explained and understood.

I think more people should think about things this way: I'm building a house now, so am I betting that in 30 years the price of gas will decrease or increase? Will electricity decrease or increase in price?

Anyone who has seen a graph of solar, battery, wind, and other renewable power grid solution costs should probably be betting that gas will increase in price over time and that electricity should decrease in cost over time, at the very least relative to one another.

I also think that more homeowners and especially builders need to stop choosing the cheapest installation options every single time as a default. I know that building a home is expensive and housing is already at a very high cost, but the US housing market is positively riddled with short term thinking when it comes to homebuilding.

At some point the comfort and safety benefits of a heat pump should be worth it. For example, a fully electrified home essentially eliminates carbon monoxide risk. You also lose the need to pay for two transmission fees (the part of your bill that involves the base service cost and not the metered usage).

> that electricity should decrease in cost over time

On the back of decades of experience - year in, year out the only constant is that utility bills go up. This time it might be different, but I doubt it.

Inflation is a given, but one can increase faster than the other. Electricity can be generated in many different ways, so has flexibility, while natural gas must be piped in.

The flip side of that is that the natural gas infrastructure is pretty well established and isn't likely to increase in cost drastically unless the supply starts running out. If anything we should start using natural gas instead of coal for power plants and raise the residential cost of it while lowering the cost of electricity, but I'm sure there are a bunch of incentives against doing that.

You could say the same thing about electricity infrastructure, pretty well established and unlikely to increase in cost drastically.

Except with electricity, the likelihood of supply running out is a lot lower because it has a diverse set of generation options, which includes natural gas.

On top of that, you can generate your own electricity at home and store it in batteries (obviously, only if you have a roof you own), and the cost of doing that has only been decreasing.

Depends on time and place. I know there's spot price contracts you can get that will -at times of day and year- go negative. That is to say, they'll pay you to use electricity (or alternately, they'll actually charge you if you feed in solar power). At other times of day the price is positive again.

It takes a bit of savvy -and panels, and batteries- to actually make optimal use of this, I figure. That said, prices sometimes going negative, however the circumstances, is definitely a bit of a change.

While the price of energy production is likely to continue to fall, I fear that this will be completely overshadowed by the necessary investment in the grid. Both energy storage and the need to adapt the grid to the more decentralised nature of renewables could lead to a plateau in end user prices.

> I think more people should think about things this way:

Seeing the monstrosities people build I think we have a long way to go

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