If "our" means on the US, you may have to take a look at your electricity monopolies for it to make any difference.
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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No they wouldn't. Final consumer cost is based on what people WILL pay not what they WANT to pay. At the end of the day the overarching goal of capitalism is for 99% of the population to spend 100% of their earnings. You can't funnel all wealth to the 1% if the 99% are holding on to it.
So you’re telling me if I found a way reach all my fellow power company customers we could strike and lower our power rates?
Many states have very regulated utility prices: you may need just a half dozen buddies and get appointed to the oversight board that approves rates
This guy politics.
Yes. It's like big telecom. When people install panels at home, power companies start inventing additional fees. If communities start looking for local grids, companies start lobbying to outlaw this.
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Yes. BUT there are certain ways a government can help its citizens (and itself in most cases) by allowing them to be self sufficient that has nothing to do with electric companies or monopolies at all. The subsidies for solar panels were a great example of this. Depending on your personal needs, you could generate enough power to take yourself off the grid, and the government invested in your panels by way of those subsidies. In many cases the extra electricity from the panels that you don't use can go back into a grid to be used by someone else. Theoretically helping you and the government. There are, of course some issues with the system but speaking from experience it can absolutely work and work wonderfully.
Unfortunately Trump (of course) has killed these subsidies so that will not be a thing as of new years 2026.
Imagine the savings to society with the energy independence from green energy
- shut down most of the continent wide natural gas distribution infrastructure
- shut down most of the continent wide gasoline distribution infrastructure
- cut way back on the military when we no longer have to protect oil kingdoms
I know your intentions are good, but this reads as a rather damning list of why a bunch of people are going to fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
This argument has received responses calling me a Commie, a Tankie, and 'a would-be enslaver of humanity' from family, friends, and internet randoms alike.
For me it is that I just... sorta listened to Bill Nye in the 90s about carbon dioxide.
I am pretty sure 90% of people who get called tankies on Lemmy are not communists. Tankie-calling is by far the most obnoxious Lemmy community pastime. But I'll give them this, it's an extremely annoying word, much more annoying to be called than "fascist". We need an unjustifiably smug sounding pejorative for people who call everyone tankies, to call them in exchange so that they can see how not epic their insult is.
The key thing is that the insult needs to seem like you think it's really badass and brave of you to call them that, and it should seem like you think they're seething at you, when in reality it's a super lame insult. Like so:
"You're a tankie"
"Oh no the Tankie-twister has arrived!"
"Wtf kind of lame insult is that lol"
"Now you know how everyone else feels about being called tankies"
The reciprocal word I've typically seen is "liberal".
That's just tossing a hand grenade into any political discourse.
Would companies make it cheaper or would they keep the price and pocket the profit?
They can't, if you have a functioning market economy. There should be competition and renewables, due to their more decentralized nature even incite competition.
You seem to assume that mergers and acquisitions are not an essential part of a market economy. Left to their own devices, capitalists will always end up trying to form monopolies. You need a strong regulatory state to keep them in check. But then because they are inexorably pulled towards maximizing profitability, they will try to capture the state and deregulate. So, unless you go to a very aggressively anticapitalist set of policies a market economy will never be "functioning" for long.
Nuclear is also a good option. It has the potential to scale up to our generation needs faster than green energy, and it can still be environmentally clean when any byproduct is handled responsibly.
Do I trust my government (USA) to enforce proper procedure and handling? Not really… but I do think we’re less likely to have a nuclear accident in the present day. Modern designs have many more fail safes. And I think it’d still be much cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
I think they need to coexist, though. I think a goal in the far-future should be a decentralized grid with renewable energy sources integrated wherever they can be.
Also you can vastly reduce the amount of battery capacity needed by having pilotable sources of energy like nuclear, hydro, geothermy and such
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Thankfully that is going to happen anyway through simple economics. Fossil fuel extraction is functionally already a peak technology, out of which every bit of efficiency has been squeezed by over 100 years of frantic and lavishly funded scientific development, whereas solar, battery, and wind technologies have been absolutely plunging in $-per-Kw to deploy and have much much further to go. So governments can try to slow this down as much as they wish, but it's as much a fool's errand as trying to rescue the horse industry in about 1920.
Now as for the question of "why isn't this more efficient technology resulting in savings for, me, the consumer?" I can only encourage you to look at the entire history of extractive, investor-driven capitalism for the answer.
A reminder that https://slrpnk.net/c/memes exists. I'm crossposting this there, as it's totally on point. The stupid '!' thing wasn't working for me.
What’s the context of the painting?
Norman Rockwell. He did paintings of Americana. This one is about the civic duty to speak up or something
Reverse image search is a powerful tool
Holy shit, I always just assumed it was John Brown
It does look just like John Brown
He looks real good, for having been a’mouldering in the grave for 70 years!
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Don't even have to invest. In my area, a 100% renewable supplier was about 30% more per KWH, all of that extra overhead was paid to keep old unprofitable coal plants online. That's capitalist efficiency for you.
Maybe it would also be much cheaper if "your" houses were a bit smaller and had proper insulation...
I wish!! Unfortunately, I didn't build my house.
Have you considered inventing a time machine, going back in time, becoming a general contractor, and then building your house but smaller? Smh, people won't go the slightest bit out of their way to make things better these days.
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Not working great so far. I’m 100% for renewables and fuck fossil fuels, but despite the press about renewables finally being cheaper than fossil, it isn’t being passed to the consumer yet.
Depending on where you live this might be because of pricing regulations which require payments to be equal to the most expensive source used in a given period plus a preset margin. Some of the regulatory systems don't know how to cope with the differences in generation that come from renewables. ...not that they're great at managing the non-renewables these days either.
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