The next step for people like you and things like nations: what do we do with this extra electricity we have laying around so often?
What people figure out to do with actually free energy will be exciting. There are a lot of extremely "inefficient" things that might suddenly become commonplace.
Proto-replicator technology where you dump your garbage into a barrel and it gets decomposed and recomposed into something similar to crude oil, blocks of metal, pure gasses, etc? Hydrocarbon fuel from air? Flying cars? You name it.
Generating hydrocarbons at home from their air with excess electricity is like the ultimate endgame in my opinion. It’d be so sick and enable a million new possibilities, essentially getting us into a net-zero emissions state without needing to use batteries for everything.
I doubt that it ends up being actually better due to efficiency losses but it’d be really cool!!
I often daydream about electrolysing water to generate oxygen and hydrogen and store them to use for heating and like welding torches and stuff.
To make electric energy I would have to make a small steam plant to run a turbine.
>To make electric energy I would have to make a small steam plant to run a turbine.
Or a hydrogen fuel cell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
The round-trip efficiency is of course abysmal compared to batteries, but if the input energy is "free", the increased density could pay off.