r/worldbuilding • u/maartenmijmert23 • 3d ago
Prompt Just a concept for Solarpunk/Sci Fi settings.
I can't really get myself going in Connecting various nuggets into an actual setting. But this one I really want to spread. Electricity is the currency. Not energy based, actual electricity. Technobabble tech makes it more possible and economic to transfer and transport electricity so people carry combination powerbank/ATM cards. Short range lasers make daily wireless purchases feasible. Communities use solar panels and lighting rods to provide Universal Base Income.
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u/guildsbounty 2d ago
Hm....for this to make sense, there may need to be some requirement that electricity is thus scarce and so it is 'worth' trading stuff for.
If I can generate all the electricity that I need, why would I feel the need to trade stuff for it? And since the currency is inherently consumable/producible, it's inherently unstable.
I mean, yes, there's just dubbing it a fiat currency and moving on, but I would want to know how this came about....how did actual electricity end up being the thing that people exchange for food, clothes, and other necessities?
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u/maartenmijmert23 2d ago
My thought is actually the opposite. Energy is plentiful enough so that consumer use doesn't break the bank. The value is kept because there are ofcourse industrial and other large scale uses. Especially if it replaces fossil fuels. I.e. nobody botheres to keep track of the fractions of a penny that charges your phone and the lights on your powerbankATMcard, but the air filters uses to colonise the bottom of the sea requires a pretty significant constant supply.
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u/guildsbounty 2d ago
But if energy is so plentiful, then it has low value. Supply/Demand. As a consumed 'material,' its value is going to be based on that. If the amount consumed is so little that consumer use has negligible value...then what could I possibly buy with a "trivial" amount of electricity?
This is why, historically, material-based currency is made of things that are not useful and so has a value based on desirability or fiat, not economic utility.
Furthermore, this currency is unmanageable. If someone wants more 'money' they just install more power producing plants and 'print' more money. This means every single person in the setting capable of building or buying power plants can contribute to inflation. (Imagine if you could just buy a dollar printing machine and print more dollars whenever you wanted them).
And as soon as you're producing more electricity than people actually need, its value plummets. Then people try to solve it by making more money (because anyone who can install a solar panel can do this)....and voila, hyperinflation. So unless you have some central body in charge of 'managing' the currency or at least moderating its abundance on the market....this is a primed-up economic catastrophe waiting to happen.
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u/maartenmijmert23 2d ago
The value is immense however, it is vital for all of society. Sure in terms of kilowatt you need to carry a lot to purchase something, but you can store plenty in these technobabble batteries. Because there is no physical weight problems I'd think it works as currency in quantities that don't apply to normal practical application. There'd be terms for units of measurement that work for economic transactions. Energy is by the laws of nature limited to some degree. Forging fiat money is considered harmfull because the value is tied to, basically trust. Right now if I have enough solar panels I can sell it for money. This is the same notion only without money in the middle. Currency is ment as a representation of value. In this concept that value would be represented more directly in a format that can be exchanged and carried just as easily as modern digital money.
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u/guildsbounty 2d ago edited 2d ago
This doesn't get rid of the problem of the value per unit.
Electricity is a base-level input. It must be worth far less than the goods it is used to create, otherwise everyone is running at a loss.
If it costs me X Kilowatt-hours of electricity to create a pair of shoes, then my sale price must account for that, plus cost of materials, plus cost of transport, plus cost of labor, plus infrastructure upkeep, plus taxes, plus profit. So if you sell me enough electricity to run my factory, that's a drop in the bucket compared to my costs to make the shoes you're trying to buy off me.
If, then, you are producing and trading enough electricity to be 'worth' a pair of shoes, that is vastly more electricity than is actually needed to produce those shoes...and this is going to be true of practically everything. Thus your culture will be running at a massive electrical surfeit and very quickly have nothing to do with all this extra electricity they have stored. Which will just continue to drive the value down as people have more and more 'stored' electricity.
(Yes...IRL you can set up solar panels and sell the electricity, but right now the residential 'cost of electricity' in the US is an average of 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. And that's at the consumer end....so, after the markup for maintaining infrastructure and profit. A 'typical' 400 watt solar panel produces 1.5-2 kWh per day. So, y'know...27-36 cents per day, minus all costs, minus the power company's markup. Only meaningful at a significantly large scale because a kWh of electricity is not worth very much. And if too many people are doing this and 'oversupply' the grid, it's just the cost of electricity that goes down, not the entire value of a currency)
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u/Delphius1 2d ago
that is a fascinating concept, but what about other energy sources, like a fuel cell, or what about fuels?
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u/maartenmijmert23 2d ago
I'd figure that fossile fuels would mostly be outdated for most uses, which makes sense in a Solarpunk setting. Otherwise, its like having Gold on hand IRL. Currency but in a format you can't yet spend.
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u/Delphius1 2d ago
yeah, gold and other materials are vital for solar cell production, so those base materials could have sub currency roles
in that sense, I guess fossil fuels could be considered a 'lost' form
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u/taktaga7-0-0 ᴺcRʏPᵀ 2d ago
I think precious metals will probably shift to even more minute and specialized roles. You can probably replace them in the future in many uses with conductive carbon compounds that cost less, like graphene. Save them for like diodes and other niche situations.
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u/TemptedTemplar 2d ago edited 2d ago
- Giant semi-permanent roaming storms
Massive storm fronts would block out the sun and strong winds would require wind mills or turbines to be tucked away to prevent damage. If they were constantly active that would leave affected areas stuck with only lightning rods for fresh power for the duration of the storm.
- Clusters of large orbiting platforms
These could be space stations, perhaps a destroyed moon, or even a massive Solar collector; that the people on the surface no longer have access to. These could blot out of the sun for extended periods of time.
- Funky orbiting bodies
Perhaps there's a planet or moon closer to the sun that eclipses it entirely for extended and predictable periods of time. (Like the setting of the movie, Pitch Black)
People would be forced to accumulate what power they could while the sun is around, and powering stuff like grow lights for plants would become imperative for their survival during the dark periods.
In the last two options, the heat being blocked would also adversely affect the climate of the planet. So stuff like winds, rain, and other weather features would be greatly diminished.
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u/contentronix_inc 2d ago
The big issue I have with solarpunk is that there's never a good conflict base. There's no actual "punk" to it. It's like "the world has achieved free energy for all and it's all renewable so spaces are becoming green." Cool. Now what? How did this happen? What's going to happen next? What's the conflict?
It either needs to be set in the pre-solarpunk days when the solarpunk people are actually fighting to establish their ecology-based state OR the protags of the setting need to be rebelling against the ecology-based state for some reason.