this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Getting off coal would be the thing. I don’t know if they would have been able to advance batteries quickly enough regardless of investment, but getting off coal was quite doable. Nuclear fission was still in ascendancy and could have continued ever upward. Wind power was quite practical, even if not at the scale and cost of today. Solar water heating, weatherproofing, and passive solar design could have brought energy needs way down. In that era we had just gone through a radical downsizing of cars from an energy crisis, and we could have required that continue. We had made progress on many pollutants and started recycling: its not difficult to imagine carbon being recognized as a pollutant and efforts started to control it.
Just one thing, wind without batteries or some kind of balancing can actually be quite bad because you have to quickly turn on and off other power sources, which means they're inefficient. My dad says (way back then) they actually found wind increased carbon production because they had to quickly turn on inefficient generators when the wind died down.
Maybe. My parents at that time were on time of use metering, but it was fixed time. For example the water heater was on a timer to turn on at 11pm when electric rates went down.
Put those two together and you could have dynamic demand response even without grid scale batteries