[kragen]

for some economic activities, energy is not a limiting input; you are implicitly referring to economic production enabled by electric lighting, such as office work, and indeed energy has not been a limiting input for that for at least a century. reducing the cost of energy will not result in more gdp in those sectors

for other economic activities, such as solar panel production, aluminum production, and neural network training, energy is a limiting input. reducing the cost of energy will result in more gdp in those sectors

[Retric]

Dropping energy costs lowers costs in every sector but rarely by that much.

> aluminum production

Dropping energy costs an by 75% only drops smelting prices by about 30% and finished goods by even less.

[kragen]

there's usually a long lag between a drop in the price of an input and the eventual impact on the price of the outputs, because part of the effect is mediated by the adoption of innovations that use more of the newly-cheaper inputs and less of the still-expensive inputs

to take one example, the last time we got access to a major new source of energy was something like watt's steam-engine in 01776. one of the effects of this was the widespread replacement of steel cans (which hadn't been invented in 01776) and glass bottles with aluminum cans in the 01970s, 200 years later. another was the replacement of travel by ship with travel by air, also about 200 years later. the delay is because many intermediating innovations were required, for example, in the aluminum-can case:

- the discovery of electrolysis;

- the discovery of aluminum;

- the discovery of canning;

- the hall–héroult process;

- improved aluminum alloys that permitted the use of 100μm-thick cans;

- the invention of deep drawing;

- epoxy liners that made aluminum cans chemically stable to acidic contents such as coca-cola;

- long-distance trucking which increased the cost imposed by heavier glass bottles.

[njarboe]

We started to access nuclear power as a new source, but then stopped for quite a while. It looks like things are starting up again. We'll see.

[kragen]

the issue with nuclear power is that the humans don't yet have the technology to exploit it economically; at their current primitive level it's uncompetitive with other sources of energy. like printing 1000 years ago or heron's aeolipile

[chickenbig]

> humans don't yet have the technology to exploit it economically

$2,500/kW of capacity isn't too expensive, given the alternatives.

https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/catalyst-the-cost-of-nucl...

The recent batch of 11 reactors authorised by China are perhaps 2.8B USD each for 1.1GW plant (plus a high temperature gas reactor).

[kragen]

but 1.1 gigawatts of mainstream solar panels is 0.14 billion usd. $130 per kilowatt of capacity. even at the dismal 10% solar capacity factor achieved in very northerly countries like germany, the reactor is twice the price per average watt, and it needs to be installed far from the point of use—you can't buy a 440-watt nuclear reactor, so you need transmission, distribution, and transformers, all of which incur energy losses, capital investment, and safety hazards you can avoid with photovoltaic

that large grid also needs regulation, billing, and political stability. (a reactor is an appealing target for both russian glide bombs and enron-style scams.) and the reactor is not dispatchable over timescales of less than a day, while you can short out a solar panel in microseconds

fundamentally the reactor can't compete economically because it's shackled to a pricey steam engine. the reactor itself is a triviality, just a pile of fuel larger than the critical mass. some of them formed naturally at oklo billions of years ago. what's hard is integrating that energy release mechanism into a machine, and that's because the humans are still terrible at making machines