I honestly think this is one area which should be nationalised rather than left to the private sector. Yes, the investment will be massive, on the trillions scale. But:
a) Once it's done, you're pretty much self sufficient energy wise. Sure, you may need the raw materials from other countries to make panels, turbines and batteries. But once you've achieved a 100% renewable clean energy grid, you're getting a fairly decent lifespan out of everything so you're not going to be as subjected to the whims of the market like most of Europe is experiencing with gas. The market should generally be more stable.
b) Once your citizens have free energy, they have a massive chunk of disposable cash they were once spending energy. They will spend that or invest it: and both general spending and investing are taxed at higher rates than fuel spending (5% VAT on fuel spending in UK compared to 20% general VAT rate). Yes that is a massive loan for the government to put on the books, but they will probably get it back much quicker than expected.
If you give people a limited amount of free power that's equivalent to giving them some free money. Which is fine and dandy but it's rather unrelated to how the grid works.
If you give people an unlimited amount of free power they're going to use it to mine cryptocurrency in a massively wasteful and expensive way.
I didn’t mean unlimited free power. I’d basically propose that the government would pay for as many solar panels as you can fit on your roof plus a battery in the garage or in a utility room. For apartments, the government would pay for some solar panels installed on a solar farm and you’d get a certain amount of energy for free covering the typical energy use of the size of your apartment. So we’re mainly just covering normal domestic usage. Of course if you’ve got anything spare you’re free to use that mining crypto but I don’t think that’s what the majority of households are really going to be doing.
The surest way to make someone not value something is to give it to them for free. Giving away energy is a good way to make sure that we use as much energy as we produce, and then some. The key, I think, is to make energy usage painful, but make that pain proportional to your resources. A big power bill to a billionare and a big power bill to a single mom on food stamps should result in the same level of emotional distress to both - hopefully very little.
Normally I would agree with you but not on this. There is a giant nuclear reactor in the sky giving out as much energy as we could ever possibly want. Literally all energy on this planet came from it: sunlight feeds the plants which are turned to oil or feed the animals which feed us.
Once we have built the machinery to harness that energy, it does become pretty much free and we can use as much or as little of it as we like. The cost of maintaining the machinery will become ever cheaper due to the amount of power we can get for little to no effort. It becomes self sustaining.
There are literally ongoing efforts right now to replicate Asimov’s vision which was to create space based solar farms and transmitting the energy back down in radio waves to specific points. We could literally harness our entire planets energy use from just a few of these in strategic locations if it was done right:
Yes, there is a great deal of energy at the core of the milky way galaxy as well. Unfortunately my ability to use it to make toast in the morning is quite limited.
It turns out your ability to harness energy is kind of important. We're nowhere near that level of energy capture. We can't even handle transmitting solar from one corner of one smallish continent to the other, we're nowhere near the level of technology and infrastructure development you're talking about.
> Once it's done, you're pretty much self sufficient energy wise.
What arm of the USA government do you trust most to get this job done efficiently and fairly? What do you think will happen when you use "more than your share" of electricity for a month or two and your (undoubtedly centrally controlled) account is deemed unacceptable? Or is it your thought that providing electricity free will reduce consumption?
I’m in the UK so I don’t know which branch of the US government I’d trust to get it done. What I do know, is that you guys have done some incredible things, look at your railways, roads, cities, subways, internet, space program. You have done massive scale programs in the past and I have no doubt that you could do it again in the future if the political will was there.
As for the second part, privately owned houses would get as much energy as the solar panels and battery on their property can provide. Additional power would come from the grid and would have to be paid for as normal. For people in apartments, presumably you have records of normal energy usage for every house and apartment, you could use those to work out the amount of solar panels needed to add to a solar farm or the equivalent for wind. The government pays for the installation of that and the citizen gets the energy generated for free. Additional energy they use is then paid for out of their own pocket.
a) Once it's done, you're pretty much self sufficient energy wise. Sure, you may need the raw materials from other countries to make panels, turbines and batteries. But once you've achieved a 100% renewable clean energy grid, you're getting a fairly decent lifespan out of everything so you're not going to be as subjected to the whims of the market like most of Europe is experiencing with gas. The market should generally be more stable.
b) Once your citizens have free energy, they have a massive chunk of disposable cash they were once spending energy. They will spend that or invest it: and both general spending and investing are taxed at higher rates than fuel spending (5% VAT on fuel spending in UK compared to 20% general VAT rate). Yes that is a massive loan for the government to put on the books, but they will probably get it back much quicker than expected.