Posted By: djhenergy will be too cheap to meter

But nobody mentioned the price...!

I don't mind if the energy isn't low price in future, and I've already got a smart meter. So I can pay for it with all those bitcoins. But I do mind that energy is zero carbon. Electricity is getting to that point, by 2030 apparently*, so well before the A.C.Clarke stuff happens.

That actually reinforces Tom's point - DJH conflated 'low price' with 'low carbon'. But at the moment there is basically no price difference between units of low and high carbon electricity (if delivered at the same time) and so the market cannot allocate them effectively. Anyone can claim that their energy-intensive gizmo is 'using only surplus renewable electricity'.

If renewable energy was a premium product with a higher price, then people would be less inclined to justify high consumption by claiming they were using only renewables. And more inclined to produce more of it and find ways to export more of it and self-consume less of it, from Iceland and elsewhere*. But the higher price would discourage people from switching from high to lower carbon electricity, which is not what we want, hence the problem with the market mechanism Tom identified.

Mechanisms such as emissions trading have tried to tilt the market, possibly more so in recent months since the carbon price has shot up.

* https://twitter.com/bbcnews/status/1375217718643847168?lang=en-gb
is the kind of interpretation that I think is unhelpful