My parents live in a part of India where summer temperatures routinely hit 45C (113F). Because electricity is expensive and my parents' house is quite large, they couldn't afford to run air-conditioning for more than 8-10 hours a day - usually at night.
Whenever I would go home, the heat would completely wreck my productivity. I would have to sequester myself in the coolest room in the house, then judiciously use the air conditioning to maintain some semblance of sanity.
Then my dad got fed up and took advantage of a government subsidy to buy solar panels.
It was expensive initially, but now we essentially have free power. We'll break even in terms of costs within 4 years.
We now run air conditioning when we want, wherever we want.
The increase in productivity is massive. I no longer have to deal with heat when I go home.
Now imagine this happening for billions of people living in tropical climates.
> We'll break even in terms of costs within 4 years.
That means a loan of up to 25% interest could have financed the solar panels. Are interest rates higher than that for your parents?
> The increase in productivity is massive. I no longer have to deal with heat when I go home.
> Now imagine this happening for billions of people living in tropical climates
For what it's worth, the GDP per capita of Singapore used to track the introduction of air conditioning. Not sure what's cause and what's effect, or coincidence.
We've heard that before, as far back as 1954: "too cheap to meter". The problem is, even if the incremental generation of electricity is practically free, there are still large costs in building the windmills and solar panels. And there are large distribution costs as well.
In addition, the more cheap energy there is, the more inefficiently people will use it. Why bother with things like Energy Star and LEED? Just build inefficient power supplies and poorly insulated buildings. After all, it is "practically free" to heat them and cool them.
Post scarcity energy is a non-starter. Consumption will always increase as necessary. Here's an even more crazy example: just how much bitcoin (or similar) mining would there be if energy were cheap? It's already a disgusting misuse of resources, it would be a lot worse!
> Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 5 minutes to power the world for a year.
At current levels, and that's the point of the parent comment.
> That's effectively limitless.
It's 0.0000095 or so. Impressive but not limitless. An earth in which all the infalling sunlight was used for power would be a dark place, which would be bad for people and for agriculture. And oxygen production. So actually lot less than that.
Close. We're very close. Renewables and electric transportation gets us very far. Automated farming and 3D printing or automated assembly of housing will be the last step.
"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson
Whenever I would go home, the heat would completely wreck my productivity. I would have to sequester myself in the coolest room in the house, then judiciously use the air conditioning to maintain some semblance of sanity.
Then my dad got fed up and took advantage of a government subsidy to buy solar panels.
It was expensive initially, but now we essentially have free power. We'll break even in terms of costs within 4 years.
We now run air conditioning when we want, wherever we want.
The increase in productivity is massive. I no longer have to deal with heat when I go home.
Now imagine this happening for billions of people living in tropical climates.
It's going to change the contour of the world