Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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> Do people overwhelmingly need or want more electricity and can't afford it?

Well, yes? That seems somewhat uncontroversial? There are a lot of people out there who need more electricity and can't afford it. Electricity is one of the most fungible forms of energy, with infinite electricity we could all live like kings. It'd be very comfortable. The limit on use is the supply-demand balance represented by prices and if price were low enough people would up their living standards.

That is also the explanation for a lot of the issues your post goes to. If you don't need to use the electricity, someone who is struggling can use it instead. And the way the math shakes out is it'd normally be economically optimum to increase their access to a good standard of living by giving them more energy than you gave up. These effects are over the entire economy.

And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd. If I were relying on HN comment threads I'd believe households in the UK were composed of nothing but light-bulbs and consumed nothing but the same given how much of a focus they are of the energy policy.

Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand. You just focused on arguing weaker interpretation of what I said, discussing infinities, and obsessing about why people bring up lights.

> And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd

I think you want to distract from not making your point. But easy, light used to consume a lot. By some statistics [0] just a few decades ago it was ~10TWh, close to 15% of household consumption, which in turn was higher than industrial consumption (1.1:1). So lights consumed ~8% of UK electricity. Is 15% in a household or 8% for the country so insignificant that mentioning it is ridiculous?

Personal anecdata, I can use more energy but I realistically (not in "infinite energy" world) want and need exactly as much as I use.

[0] https://www.academia.edu/81562463/Energy_consumption_in_UK_h...

> Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand.

Supply/demand and prices are rationing. Prices represent the limit on how much of a resource someone can use before there is reason to believe they should stop. It's happens to be best form of rationing we have, the other methods tend to lead to disincentives to improve the situation (consider, for example, how the market rations out limited supplies of RAM right now - prices go up and people who pay get the RAM and all the money going to RAM producers gives them resources and incentive to build new capacity to produce more RAM). There isn't a limit on demand for electricity other than the price, it does literally everything. At the extreme case, if it were somehow cheap enough, we'd be able to use it to fabricate new matter. But every step of the way there are population-level opportunities to use more energy to get more comfortable if there is enough of it.

You've been using the term "rationing" in a negative way, though. That implies more than the mere existence of supply and demand.

I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree; I don't see what is negative about the use of the word rationing. There are finite resources, some people won't have as much as they could use. There needs to be some system to work out who gets what; it isn't easy to get away from that. I recommend prices, but other methods have been tried. The alternatives tend to work badly and are not recommended.

But when prices go up 100-200%, that suggests the market is rationing pretty hard.

I personally use as much electricity as I want without care for price. It going cheaper wont make me spend more.

Yeah, if electricity dropped in price by 50% I don't think my usage would change in any significant way. There's no way in hell I'd use over twice as much and trigger Jevon's paradox.

Thinking about what happens when prices approach zero makes it hard to make realistic predictions. Yeah infinite power would change everything, but for realistic price shifts there are very different price elasticities for different use cases.

And one person changing their power use doesn't do much to the price, and a large group gradually changing their power use doesn't do much to the price either. So the idea of "If you don't need to use the electricity, someone who is struggling can use it instead." is misguided. The person who's struggling is going to see basically the same price either way. If we want to help them, conserving power won't do the trick outside of specific supply emergencies, we need other measures.

Also roenxi I mentioned things other than lights, but lights happen to be a super clear example of Jevon's paradox not happening over a very significant amount of power usage so of course they'll get brought up.

Cheap electricity would change your usage in indirect way:

Cost of electricity is a significant part in aluminum production. Cheap electricity, cheap aluminum, more cars made from aluminum instead of currently cheap steel.

Cheap reliable electricity would enable cheap hydrogen production, which could replace many uses of fossil fuels. Cheap hydrogen, cheap ammonia production, cheaper nitrogen fertilizers.

> It going cheaper wont make me spend more.

Speak for yourself. The price of electricity immediately & directly effects the setup/operation of small business. I know home businesses (juicing plants) that became non-viable on the basis of electricity alone.

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