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[Azkanan]

My two cents; supply and demand.

If these things are suddenly in high demand, this is going to make a lot of plastic/metal producers rich. The supply won't keep up, pushing the prices higher.

The profit will counterbalance the demand, causing higher supply, but this is going to cause knock-on effects such as the next industrial revolution to produce the matter required - not to mention the mining effects. Plastic waste would increase, metal would be on a higher depletion rate, massive rates of industrial and logistic pollution...

[Arx]

massive rates of industrial and logistic pollution...

Why? We have a free energy device implied to not produce any pollution. The only increase would be the possible construction of additional roads or runways (since air travel would become much cheaper) and mining.

[Reelya]

My two cents; supply and demand.

If these things are suddenly in high demand, this is going to make a lot of plastic/metal producers rich. The supply won't keep up, pushing the prices higher.

The profit will counterbalance the demand, causing higher supply, but this is going to cause knock-on effects such as the next industrial revolution to produce the matter required - not to mention the mining effects. Plastic waste would increase, metal would be on a higher depletion rate, massive rates of industrial and logistic pollution...

By the same exact argument, it could be argued that making more efficient solar panels will in fact destroy the environment:

An efficient solar panel uses less resources to make the same amount of energy, thus the price of energy is lower, thus people will consume more than before, and thus the total amount of manufacturing of the new solar panels will exceed the old ones, and destroy the environment through mining and logistic pollution.

This "free energy box" is basically just a more efficient way to make energy for less resources, exactly analogous to creating a more efficient solar panel. But we know it is counterintuitive that increasing efficient use of resources is in fact the thing that will destroy us. And we know this because there are countries where they mandate that electrical products must meet stringent energy efficiency standards (thus they cost less power to run), and those specific countries are not seeing runaway consumption of the type you describe.

The flaw is to think that these things are going to sell like hotcakes just because they make cheap energy. "Cheap energy" means "less resources needed", which means the same companies will be losing out on mining the stuff needed for all rival energy types. It's like saying we're going to run out of aluminium for cans because a rival cola took over the market.

[scrdest]

That's magic. Literally free energy - i.e. does not run on something that depletes and has a 100%+ energy efficiency - makes the energy post-scarce. And energy is pretty much anything, and everything, eventually, is energy. If you have infinite energy, you just need to be clever how to put it into a process, then you can arbitrarily run physical (and by extension, chemical) processes backwards.

[wierd]

Agreed. Something of that quality (literally something from nothingness, which as far as we can tell is not possible, and thankfully so!) means that you can fabricate ANYTHING that you want, from nothing, as long as you are willing to deal with the waste heat.

If that technology grew faster than the semiconductor cooling solutions I mentioned previously (which can convert heat into more useful forms of energy at low levels, but could be scaled up to deal with large amounts of entropic waste energy with nano-fabrication) say goodbye to the solar system as humans misuse the shit out of that technology. (See current problem with fossil fuels, humans asserting that it would take X hundreds of years "at current use statistics" for the apocalypse to happen, followed by a long period of complacency, economic beholden-ness to not properly eliminating entropic waste, and BOOM--- Glowing solar system before you know it.)

In the short term, due to the immediate dangers of the devices being mishandled by ignorant lay people (feedback loop == BOOOM), expect world governments to initiate a global crackdown, impose stiff regulations against construction of the devices, and even harsher penalties for unauthorized construction. By the same token, expect world governments to give out lucrative exclusivity contracts to the established power infrastructure to create and deploy the devices, which they will do-- but they wont reduce the utility costs. Instead, they will use artificial scarcity produced via the world government's actions to prevent weaponization of the technology to maintain artificial pricing-- See the Debiers Diamonds model, and that of most other natural monopolies.

It's possible that this breakthrough would permit world governments to finally have a "tractible" solution to the looming problems with rising CO2 levels, since the abundant energy would allow catalytic removal and processing of CO2 back into elemental carbon and oxygen gas at industrial scales not previously viable, enabling "Government Jobs" (at atmospheric reprocessing centers, who get kickbacks for their major carbon credits they accumulate.) since fossil fuels will still have a major niche in automotive, since the free energy technology would be tightly controlled, and thus not allowed on roadways due to "public safety." 

[iceball3]

Agreed. Something of that quality (literally something from nothingness, which as far as we can tell is not possible, and thankfully so!) means that you can fabricate ANYTHING that you want, from nothing, as long as you are willing to deal with the waste heat.

If that technology grew faster than the semiconductor cooling solutions I mentioned previously (which can convert heat into more useful forms of energy at low levels, but could be scaled up to deal with large amounts of entropic waste energy with nano-fabrication) say goodbye to the solar system as humans misuse the shit out of that technology. (See current problem with fossil fuels, humans asserting that it would take X hundreds of years "at current use statistics" for the apocalypse to happen, followed by a long period of complacency, economic beholden-ness to not properly eliminating entropic waste, and BOOM--- Glowing solar system before you know it.)

In the short term, due to the immediate dangers of the devices being mishandled by ignorant lay people (feedback loop == BOOOM), expect world governments to initiate a global crackdown, impose stiff regulations against construction of the devices, and even harsher penalties for unauthorized construction. By the same token, expect world governments to give out lucrative exclusivity contracts to the established power infrastructure to create and deploy the devices, which they will do-- but they wont reduce the utility costs. Instead, they will use artificial scarcity produced via the world government's actions to prevent weaponization of the technology to maintain artificial pricing-- See the Debiers Diamonds model, and that of most other natural monopolies.

It's possible that this breakthrough would permit world governments to finally have a "tractible" solution to the looming problems with rising CO2 levels, since the abundant energy would allow catalytic removal and processing of CO2 back into elemental carbon and oxygen gas at industrial scales not previously viable, enabling "Government Jobs" (at atmospheric reprocessing centers, who get kickbacks for their major carbon credits they accumulate.) since fossil fuels will still have a major niche in automotive, since the free energy technology would be tightly controlled, and thus not allowed on roadways due to "public safety." 

Actually, you touched on a good deal of the points I've previously mentioned! And a lot more gracefully so at that, yeah. Though, in the case of fossil fuels, wouldn't there be a possibility that hydrogen cell and battery powered cars be more seriously taken at that point? The main concern nowadays for both is that converting energy into those forms from our power supplies (electrolysis for hydrogen, or charging it on the grid into very heavy battery cells for electric cars). But once you take out electricity as something that doesn't have so many of the hard and soft capacities as it does today and the like, it could make those vehicles pretty viable due to the in-expense of the process.
Also, the glowing solar system was an excellent point too. We'd end up running out of heat sinks in our local stellar space at some point!
Though it would be rather amusing that if you ran energy back into the device the other way, it'd be destroyed, heh.

[Putnam]

The entire planet explodes due to some nutter with money and time. If said nutter has the resources, anything could be destroyed given time. Literally anything. Maybe not everything, depending on whether "everything" is infinite in size.

Cheap, free energy is terrifying.

[Helgoland]

PTW, the LED thing seems interesting.

[mainiac]

The main concern nowadays for both is that converting energy into those forms from our power supplies (electrolysis for hydrogen, or charging it on the grid into very heavy battery cells for electric cars).

No it's not.  The main reason that internal combustion is popular is because gasoline has a specific energy of 45 MJ/kg while lithium ion is pushing for specific energy of 1 MJ/kg.  Thus designing a fuel tank is a very easy task while designing a batter is a hard one.  Hydrogen fuel cell has a higher specific energy then lithium ion but hydrogen is the least dense stuff in the universe so the challenge is inventing a new storage technology which is both cheap and effective.

In terms of making energy, remember that a giant power plant is far more efficient then your internal combustion engine and uses a far less expensive form of fuel.  A gallon of gasoline has 33.7 kWh hours of energy.  It's used at maybe 15% efficiency.  That's 5 kWh of locomotion per gallon.  With gas at about $2.50 that comes out to 2 kWh per dollar.  Electricity costs in the US are about 10 cents per kWh, or 10 kWh per dollar.  Electric motors are pretty efficient but let's be conservative and say 8 kWh of locomotion per dollar.  So it's four times as efficient.

[Cthulhu]

who are those mysterious oil barons that would prevent this thing from getting into open market yet would allow coal/gas/hydro/thermal/nuclear/solar power stations to exist?

i don't think those exist outside of conspiracy theories

They're with the dudes keeping the cure for cancer under wraps cause it'd kill their business somehow.

[mainiac]

Too bad we dont have Leslie Nielson around anymore to put a stop to that stuff.

[Grek]

Realistically, we'd have a major heat pollution problem.