this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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[–] tal@lemmy.today 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

As far as we know, there's no source of infinite energy.

If you mean "lots of energy", well, depends upon your perspective. By historical standards, you have incredible amounts of energy available at a very cheap price.

One article I like highlights what light has cost. A snippet:

https://bigthink.com/the-past/genius-and-blood-how-cheap-light-transformed-civilization/

We have forgotten how unrelentingly dark the pre-industrial world was. Switch on a nightstand lamp or kitchen light, and you instantly and effortlessly summon into existence more illumination than was available to entire pre-industrial households. Artificial light has historically been the expensive privilege of the wealthy and powerful, while simultaneously being laborious and dirty to produce and maintain, and extremely limited in availability and quality for nearly everyone — but most especially for the world’s poor, which until industrialization was basically everyone. 

It is difficult to fathom just how expensive light was in the pre-industrial world. In what is now the United Kingdom, the price, adjusted for inflation, per million-lumen hours of artificial light was >£40,000 (or roughly $50,000 USD) in 1302 CE. This is the cost-to-light output equivalent to running ten modern 13W LED bulbs for just 7 hours.

While a home lit exclusively with candles may well appear a mark of poverty today, in the 1300s, it was a sign of significant wealth. Good candles made of bees’ wax provided the best light for the time, but their production required expensive materials and specialist skills. A limited supply of natural bees’ wax and laborious artisan manufacturing kept good candles out of the reach of all but the wealthiest individuals. The extreme cost of artificial light was, first and foremost, a technical problem. The demand for a bright, clean-burning illuminant was considerable; however, no one had managed to develop a technology that would allow a practical way of producing it inexpensively and at scale.

The quality, brilliance, and cost of artificial light had remained fundamentally unchanged for thousands of years. Prior to industrialization, artificial light was not only dim, dirty, and dangerous but also a cripplingly expensive time-cost in human labor. Matt Ridley summarized the problem most persuasively in his book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves:

Ask how much artificial light you can earn with an hour of work at the average wage. The amount has increased from 24 lumen-hours in 1750 BC (sesame oil lamp) to 186 in 1800 (tallow candle) to 4,400 in 1880 (kerosene lamp) to 531,000 in 1950 (incandescent light bulb) to 8.4 million lumen-hours today (compact fluorescent bulb). Put it another way, an hour of work today earns you 300 days’ worth of reading light; an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light.

We've very quickly become accustomed to our fabulous wealth compared to that of our ancestors, though, and now think of this as nothing.

[–] ElBarto@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Shit, I wonder if something similar will happen with AI.

"Remember the time when running AI required at the very least a very powerful computer running one or more GPUs at 100% capacity? Or entire datacenters costing millions of dollars per month? Crazy, right? Today you just tap your watch with a local AGI, using a couple of CR-2032 batteries that last 6 months, and you can ask it to create a multi-week vacation plan around the Caribbean in mere seconds."

[–] yesman@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The only thing holding back a renewable revolution is politics.

Solar cells are cheap, and once installed, harvest free energy for decades with little maintenance. Battery technology is ready for solar on the grid too. Batteries based on sodium are available now. But even the lithium batteries are fantastic. Sure, batteries mean resource extraction and everything that comes with that, but what we extract is being made into durable goods that can be used over and over for decades, then recycled. Fossil fuels are perpetual resource extraction because the product is burned and destroyed.

One day, the number one source of lithium batteries will be old lithium batteries. This is already true with lead-acid car batteries.

Technology Connections Youtube channel just released a video that is the source for my comments. Bonus, the heat-pump guy get's 'mad as hell' toward the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

[–] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Battery technology is ready for solar on the grid too.

The science is absolutely there, but manufacturing definitely isn't. Making PV panels is so cheap and solar power is so popular, we've had 581 hours of negative electricity costs in the Netherlands in 2025. That's basically 6 hours a day through the whole summer. Ironically, solar panels becomming cheap and plentiful is making it unprofitable to create place more solar panels because their most productive time is actually costing money. We're actually getting close to the point where connecting a solar panel will cost you money if you supply directly to the market (which most consumers don't, but that just means someone else pays for the losses).

It's honestly absurd, since placing another solar panel WILL help reduce demand on non-renewable sources off-peak as well, but how the market works is actively working against burning less fossil fuels. And of course, battery parks need some serious infrastructure, which you also can't exactly just plop down.

Installing batteries is the perfect solution for that, but it's very slow going. And even batteries won't fix the summer/winter power production problem.

[–] stressballs@lemmy.zip 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

If they invented a powersource capable of generating enough energy for all human needs... I have a feeling it would be used to power datacenters instead.

[–] Inucune@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

No matter the format, any system that would provide energy for nothing makes a very powerful weapon system simply because it ignores thermodynamics.

[–] SpacePanda@mander.xyz 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Or we wouldnt hear about it

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We would hear about it. The oil industry was the biggest powerhouse for much of the last century, but it isn't anymore.

Tech is orders of magnitude bigger than oil, so if it feeds data centers it will be used no matter what big oil wants.

[–] SpacePanda@mander.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

This is true, whatever makes money, this is why BP and shell have invested in solar.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

Infinitely far.

First, actual infinite power is impossible. It violates a bunch of the laws of nature. Not going to happen ever, at all.

Second, practically infinite power (meaning more power than we could ever use) is also out of reach. Solar/wind is super cheap, but you still need to build and maintain the PV/generators and that will always have a cost. Also, there's infinitely much we could do with energy, so if energy gets cheaper we will just use more of it.

If energy was close to free, we'd just replace cargo ships with railguns or something crazy wasteful like that. We'd invest crazy amounts of energy in making things a little bit more comfortable.

Just look at the current AI craze, or the crypto craze. None of that is actually doing something really necessary, but it makes numbers go up on some billionaire's charts and thus we waste ungodly amounts of energy into it.

If it wasn't that way, and instead we'd keep our lifestyle and just use cleaner energy production to not destroy the planet, we wouldn't have global warming at all right now. With the lifestyle of the 50s and the efficient tech from today, global warming wouldn't exist.

But we like numbers going up and thus we burn more and more energy and having more energy available just means we burn more of it.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

10-20 years same as 10-20 years ago

[–] Zanshi@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

This reminds of the T1 diabetes cure. We've been 10 years away for as long as I remember. I've been a T1 diabetic for 30 almost years now

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I don't think we'll ever have infinite power. But we have nuclear fission technology right now. And they're slowly getting towards useful fusion. The problem is making it cost-effective and safe.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 days ago

We just need to build some solar panels and batteries. Buuuuuuut, that would lower the share prices of the oil companies, so we can’t do that.

[–] SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

In the United States, that's a hundred years away. Coal and oil are king. Dear Leader has spoken.

[–] blarghly@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

We are not anywhere close to having infinite power, and no one is working on this problem, since it would violate several laws of physics.

If you are wondering how close we are to having cheap power - we already have it. Electricity today is incredibly cheap.

Beyond this, you're going to need some more precise metrics - how cheap do you want power to be, exactly?

[–] troed@fedia.io 2 points 3 days ago

Solar production during sunny days is regularly above grid consumption making the price of that energy "free". Of course, unless you're the one with that solar production then you still need to pay someone to get that energy to you.

depends on what ya mean, but im going with 'never'...

i bet some huge % of the global economy is strictly energy generation and dissemination.

even if it became 100% free to generate, the powers that be will make us pay for the last mile...whatever its form. that service chain will never relinquish their profits, and you should be ready to just pay what youre payin (or more) til death.

[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 0 points 3 days ago

We’d have a lot more power available cheaply to consumers if all the Ai data centres were destroyed.

An absolutely disgusting waste of resources spent on making Ai girlfriends that can’t say no for socially inept neanderthals.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world -1 points 3 days ago

Trying to put an infinite amount of energy into a finite amount of space is how you get a black hole.