alt Hacker NewsUnfortunately human energy use appears to be proportional to the amount of energy available
Hopefully we are able to reach a point of effectively unlimited cheap energy and storage but it's that if overnight we suddenly had enough solar+batteries to power today's usage, we'd suddenly need way more as demand rises
It's based on cost, like anything else. If running everything on solar and batteries makes it cheaper then we'll use more. But the same is true regardless of the technology. What's not true regardless is whether a given amount of energy usage requires continual resource extraction just to sustain it, or whether it's only needed for new capacity.