Comment Re:Lower cost increases consumption (Score 1) 240
What will be the unintended consequences of using more electricity?
If electricity prices fall then consumption will go up. Today people buy energy star appliances and take other meager steps to limit electricity use as a means to control utility costs. If electricity is so cheap, then self-control will be reduced.
On Slashdot, we often note that as computing power has gone up the efficiency of code has gone down. When CPU cycles were expensive, precious, every bit of code was scoured and refined to be efficient. Now that there are frequently spare Ghz lying around unused, the need to refine code to superb efficiency is an after thought.
Electricity costs are not only the cost to generate the power.
Where I live (Ontario, Canada) the cost of electricity is driven in large part by transmission infrastructure. Governments have been failing to invest in this portion of the infrastructure for decades causing the costs to continue to increase.
Even if the cost of power decreased substantially I'd only see a modest reduction in my bill, if any at all as I expect the infrastructure costs to continue to increase.
All that to say, there is more than one component to the cost of electricity. However driving the cost of power production down via renewables in a very good thing.
