It's a sad, but true, indictment about how scaled humanity works.
It's often overlooked that large wealth gaps are incompatible with a sustainable society. High prices will save the Tuna from extinction (economists were right!), except if there's a market for $10,000/plate sushi.[0] People are motivated to live efficiently, except if we see gross unfairness in the rest of society.
"Don't use trees faster than they grow" is the obvious part of sustainability. This is less obvious but no less important.
[0] shamelessly ripped from Donella Meadows keynote talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhSpzQhvFS8
1. From "We can't do X, it'll have to be a very slow transition over decades" to "alright, this is how it's going to work"
2. From "we need to be more efficient in power use at every iteration, we constantly need to be looking to do more with less" to "build as much of this, most power hungry thing humanity has created, as possible as quickly as possible, no there was never a forest there, go go go"
Somewhere amongst this was a great opportunity for reducing consumption of electricity from dirty sources, mass-optimizing millions of thermostats, car and electric bikes/etc charging, refrigerators, computer power settings etc to reduce emissions... but now it sounds like it should be illegal.
It's pretty good! The need came from the high variability of wind power. Less dystopian than ... data centers... urgh.
It's of course optional. If you optimise well you can beat the monthly or daily tables and save quite a bit. If you don't care; you pay whatever the grid operator estimates.
I have heard of efforts to link thermostats etc. with this virtual power plant idea so that when there is an energy demand one's home appliances stop working so hard and use less energy. This of course could lead to hot/cold houses for people, so there must always be the option to manually override if the discomfort is a problem. So many of these efforts come from e.g. California... other places in the world have wider weather extremes to worry about!
Origin 5 months ago Google and Voltus sign agreement for smart energy capacity (3 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48371484
Edit: why is this comment suddenly grounds for an auto shadowban??????
Your previous comment was the one that first got auto killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50216326
I don't know why it was. Reach out to the mods (contact link at the bottom of the page), asking the question here won't get you an answer.
Basically, you get solar and battery, and google gets the excess power.
(...which is actually really good for all of us even if we're not active participants in the game, as far as I can tell.)
Mostly because it fails to keep all the dirt of industrial processes from landing in everyone's yard 8-/
In China, you know, where their tech is kicking our ass (why else do we need to keep an ever increasing amount of it out of the country completely?), there are new regulations that require data centers to reach total energy self sufficiency, based on sustainable sources:
https://enviliance.com/regions/east-asia/cn/report_10060
Here in the US, any legal entity that's not able to spend at least millions in lobbying and other bribery is not a consideration for the government...