The mere existence of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies means that it is impossible to ever have electricity that is "too cheap to meter". Any time electricity prices would fall below the price of mining, that creates a market opportunity that will be filled by more mining. Wasted electricity is the product.
replyI'm shocked there isn't more government regulation about this. You can't ban Bitcoin, but if you make it a massive pain to invest in it and make it difficult to convert between physical currency that would drive down a lot of demand.
replyI think that's only because electricity is the bottleneck, though. If it was no longer the bottleneck, crypto miners would expand rapidly with more hardware, mining difficulty would increase, and eventually the bottleneck is storage space for all your GPUs, if not the GPUs themselves.
replyWith the trend of orbital launches becoming cheaper, it might be that mining helium off-Tera will be our long term supply. Especially if the alternative is adjusting the amount of protons in an atom.
replyThere are several challenges, not least of which is storage. We have considerable leakage in most of our current helium storage solutions on earth because it’s so light. Our national reserves are literally in underground caverns because it’s better than anything we can build. Space just means any containment system will need to work in a wider range of pressure/temperatures.
There is to my knowledge no reason to assume that complicated physics experiments that heat water to run a steam engine will be much cheaper than fission power plants, unfortunately.
replyI can't say I agree with the conclusion, but I commend you for the concise and poetic description of what most power plants fundamentally are.
replyFusion power that uses steam turbines to convert heat into electricity will be more expensive than solar/wind
replyOnly if we first colonize the Solar System, so land becomes too cheap to meter too.
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