The surest way to make someone not value something is to give it to them for free. Giving away energy is a good way to make sure that we use as much energy as we produce, and then some. The key, I think, is to make energy usage painful, but make that pain proportional to your resources. A big power bill to a billionare and a big power bill to a single mom on food stamps should result in the same level of emotional distress to both - hopefully very little.
Normally I would agree with you but not on this. There is a giant nuclear reactor in the sky giving out as much energy as we could ever possibly want. Literally all energy on this planet came from it: sunlight feeds the plants which are turned to oil or feed the animals which feed us.
Once we have built the machinery to harness that energy, it does become pretty much free and we can use as much or as little of it as we like. The cost of maintaining the machinery will become ever cheaper due to the amount of power we can get for little to no effort. It becomes self sustaining.
There are literally ongoing efforts right now to replicate Asimov’s vision which was to create space based solar farms and transmitting the energy back down in radio waves to specific points. We could literally harness our entire planets energy use from just a few of these in strategic locations if it was done right:
Yes, there is a great deal of energy at the core of the milky way galaxy as well. Unfortunately my ability to use it to make toast in the morning is quite limited.
It turns out your ability to harness energy is kind of important. We're nowhere near that level of energy capture. We can't even handle transmitting solar from one corner of one smallish continent to the other, we're nowhere near the level of technology and infrastructure development you're talking about.
