It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can sell it later.
If there's no way to monetize excess energy (because we lack storage), people won't invest into making excess energy. And since renewables produce a lot of excess energy it makes them less desirable than they should be.
Analogy to broken window fallacy is totally warranted. But please notice that what broken windows do is extend capacity of glaziers. And if windows are broken cyclically then at times when there's not much demand for window repair additional glazier capacity will be used in other ways like for building glass skyscrapers (I'm stretching analogy, I know).
Renewable energy is not a scarce resource, so it's unlike the glass from the fallacy. And work put into creating too much renewable energy is work well spent given horrible state of our power network and our over-reliance on polluting energy generation methods.
The fallacy in broken windows fallacy is that additional money earned by glazier will somehow benefit the economy, and that's not the case. What might possibly benefit the economy would be oversupply of glaziers, which could make some very beneficial enterprises economical.
It's like with education. We know education is of a huge value to society. But we don't have in the economy a good way to funnel more money into education, especially to the places where it's most needed.
If you figure out a way of pouring money into training new teachers and paying them, so you have oversupply of teachers on the surface of it you are wasting resources, but additional teacher capacity even if it's often underutilized or used to 'spin the wheels' will benefit society.
Economy is prone to getting stuck into local optima and sometimes you need countereconomical nudge to get out of it to be free to travel to better optimum. I hope crypto can be such nudge for renewable energy production by sort of filling the gap of lacking storage capacity technologies.
It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can sell it later.
This gets the cause and effect completely wrong. The only reason you can sell it later is because someone will need it later. As a society you store energy precisely because you will need it later. Whether you do this by creating a market for it or not is purely an implementation detail.
Yes. But as an energy storage company you don't care whether anyone will be needing it later. Only thing what matters is if and for how much you'll be able to sell it.
If you have no way of selling it it doesn't matter how much it is needed.
So you will set up energy storage company only if you know you'll be able to sell energy you store later at high enough price.
Form the point of view of the economy it doesn't matter what will happen to energy. And economy is not just direct effect of physical causes. It's separate system that to some degree is synced with physical world. But not all that much. Much of our wealth is locked up into capital that is being gambled to get more capital without any connection to physical world. And when those connections occasionally crop up it might even be dangerous like in the case of global food prices recently when investors figured out a new game using food prices for them to gamble. You probably think that crypto is one such dangerous connection, but I believe it might be a beneficial one.
Crypto is not an electrical battery. It's economical battery. It turns energy, potentially any amount of it, into value. Even the worthless energy, that is produced when conditions are excessively good for energy production.
The beneficial effect of crypto is that it is variable load that can turn any amount of nearly worthless localized energy into globally transferable value.
You can use the value later to purchase energy (and energy generation equipment) anywhere else.
As such it incentivises building energy sources that might generate a lot of excess energy on peak production, like windmills or solar panels, or that are too remote to transfer their excess energy to places where it could be utilized.
It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can sell it later.
If there's no way to monetize excess energy (because we lack storage), people won't invest into making excess energy. And since renewables produce a lot of excess energy it makes them less desirable than they should be.
Analogy to broken window fallacy is totally warranted. But please notice that what broken windows do is extend capacity of glaziers. And if windows are broken cyclically then at times when there's not much demand for window repair additional glazier capacity will be used in other ways like for building glass skyscrapers (I'm stretching analogy, I know).
Renewable energy is not a scarce resource, so it's unlike the glass from the fallacy. And work put into creating too much renewable energy is work well spent given horrible state of our power network and our over-reliance on polluting energy generation methods.
The fallacy in broken windows fallacy is that additional money earned by glazier will somehow benefit the economy, and that's not the case. What might possibly benefit the economy would be oversupply of glaziers, which could make some very beneficial enterprises economical.
It's like with education. We know education is of a huge value to society. But we don't have in the economy a good way to funnel more money into education, especially to the places where it's most needed.
If you figure out a way of pouring money into training new teachers and paying them, so you have oversupply of teachers on the surface of it you are wasting resources, but additional teacher capacity even if it's often underutilized or used to 'spin the wheels' will benefit society.
Economy is prone to getting stuck into local optima and sometimes you need countereconomical nudge to get out of it to be free to travel to better optimum. I hope crypto can be such nudge for renewable energy production by sort of filling the gap of lacking storage capacity technologies.