Too cheap to bill: storage and electricity

This post is neat on various levels. Read the whole thing to see what he says about the cost of storage:

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Storage: too cheap to meter?: "I saw Chris Anderson make a presentation in which he quoted the famous 1954 prediction by Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, that 'our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.' Having paid my own electric bill last night, I think I can say with confidence that Strauss was slightly off in his forecast."

Storage costs have fallen much faster than the costs of bandwidth or processing power. On the other hand, electricity costs may start rising exponentially over the next few years. Rising electricity costs and the limits of CPU design may mean that in the near future processing costs will rise, but electricity rise may have less impact on storage.

Storage costs look to keep dropping for many years to come. Sooner or later, and maybe sooner, storage may be bundled as a freebie with services such as bandwidth.

Its interesting to think about what relative costs of computing, including heat dissipation, will do to the design of our end-to-end computing environment over the next few years. Getting that right is worth so much money I'm sure a lot of people have thought it out in depth -- but not published all the results.