• D61 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    11 days ago

    Suddenly:

    1. All the poor people with electric bills wind up with a few hundred more dollars a month in their budgets. How long will this last before capital jacks up the prices of other regularly consumed goods.

    2. Assuming point (1) isn’t too severe, a whole lot less people get hurt, go to the hospital and/or die in the summer from heat related injuries.

    2a) A whole lot less people get hurt, go to the hospital and/or die in the winter from hypothermia.

    1. Somebody tries to find a way to “monetize” the extra watt hours of electricity that the vast majority of the Earth’s population has left over at the end of the night.

    2. AI and cryptocurrency datacenters increase in size and qantity due to this “extra” energy creating a pool of probably billions of watt hours of unused electricty that they can gorbble up.

    3. Businesses cover every available surface in LED strip lights for no other reason than they can.

    4. Electric powered holiday decorations just stay up all year round now. To the point that it starts small conflicts between neighbors where they increase the size and intensity of their holiday lights displays as a way to harrass each other. The number of electrical housefires increases. Home insurance rates skyrocket.

  • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    10 days ago

    Most machines become super wasteful because energy usage is not much of a consideration. Almost immediately, energy trading companies pop up that buy people’s excess so that it all goes into the economy. They would operate kind of like check-cashing places. 24000 kWh a day at current prices in America is about $4000 in energy. The price would collapse though, and scarcity of access to physical things would be what defined the economy. These physical things would continue to be hoarded by the bourgeoisie, and the ability to use the wattage to develop all sorts of nasty repression technologies would accelerate. But then the biosphere would go to shit, because…

    The total insolation that hits the earth averages maybe 0.25 kW/m². With 8 billion people each having 1000 kW, that’s a sizable fraction, the equivalent of about an extra 1/16 of a sun shining all the time. You would get very rapid global warming from this.

  • vovchik_ilich [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    10 days ago

    If the power source and lightweight, you suddenly get jetpacks/flying vehicles and distances are shortened all over. 1MW would allow for BIG flying crafts, possibly going up to high layers of the atmosphere with a big payload and making the costs of satellites and space exploration much easier.

    Huge cargo aircraft render sea cargo obsolete, making goods reach the other side of the planet for a negligible cost in the span of 24h, same applies to train cargo since no rail infrastructure is needed for air travel, and prices of human travel around the globe drop by an order of magnitude.

    The artificial heating and illumination of vast surfaces is enabled, leading to increased exploitation of uninhabited northern territories in Canada, Russia, Greenland or Antarctica. Desalination at unprecedented scales solves droughts, allows for the greening of deserts, and immense water pumping and land expansion projects spawn in countries wanting to gain land from the sea such as Bangladesh or Netherlands. Oil countries go into irrelevance.

  • LangleyDominos [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    11 days ago

    An unofficial market for surplus watts. People with surplus, that aren’t using it, could sell it to people or organizations who need more. This is assuming it’s something like a phone card or something and not attached to an address.