[fennecfoxen]

> If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here.

You still need to get better return on capital before wind and solar are competitive on cost alone. Wind turbines don't last forever (and are hard to recycle well, since they need to be made of tough materials, which leads to some interesting but probably scalability-limited schemes to reuse old blades for things like bus shelters and playground equipment -- look up Wikado Playground in Copenhagen, for instance) and neither do solar panels.

Maybe that's also something they'll fix "in the long run" but it's really not a fundamentally different class of future-problem than improved storage.