The fact that Night City is solar powered is really interesting. If you play the game, the solar panels are visible from afar from many vantage points across the city. And if you visit it, it takes forever to traverse. It’s pre-sense is huge.
What’s so interesting to me is that in spite of the city’s green infrastructure, the inequities persist.
Solar panels are a dystopian nightmare, the nuclear energy sector told me so.
Nuclear energy is a dystopian nightmare, the fossil fuel industry told me so.
Nuclear power actually does kind of require centralization. You’re not going to build a backyard nuclear facility because it just doesn’t scale (also your home will be raided by the IAEA and whatever three letter agencies your local government has). Gas comes out of wells, so that’s easy to centralize. Both of these can be easily centrally controlled.
Solar panels can be controlled exactly once. As soon as they’re in the hands of the end user, they’re no longer possible to control.
But even if they were centrally controlled, they’re still easy to find attached to mass surveillance devices, from which they can be expropriated popularly.
How quickly would you be dead if you tried to steal nuclear materials?
Yeah, these are very different things with very different authority profiles.