| Sounds totally reasonable to me. I don’t understand the theory of trying to strangle household energy usage. Increasing household energy use is not the problem, it’s actually the solution to a huge productivity and standard of living increase for your population. Energy is the lifeblood of the entire economy. Limiting energy use disproportionately hurts the poorest of the population and drives up the poverty rate. That 18.85kWh of energy at utility scale is roughly $0.25 USD in energy cost. You figure you got a quarter’s worth of value from everything that energy accomplished for you that day? Probably more like 100x that value. What’s the opportunity cost of trying to halve your energy bill and save about a dime a day? The solution is cheap, abundant, clean energy. The featured article shows that’s actually where most of our new production is coming from already. Although in truth that’s more indicative of how overly constrained our energy production growth is, but things are rapidly moving in the right direction due to technology maturation and a supportive tax structure. Funny that’s all it takes to align incentives and let human ingenuity and the manufacturing learning curve run its course. The problem is the doomsdayers who can only extrapolate linear outcomes from past performance and entirely discount the obvious technological paradigm shifts which are occurring. |