In the end, this will just mean that monthly fixed costs will rise, while transmission costs per kwh will fall. The cost of the electricity grid is actually in practice almost independent of the amount of electricity transferred overall - instead it has to be sized based on peak usage. The gist of it: A house that is connected to the grid and runs out of battery for just a day requires the same grade of connection to the grid like a house without batteries does. Therefore they should also pay the same, including administrative costs etc. Maintaining the grid in a city is actually not expensive at all. It simply makes no sense to put batteries into your own cellar instead of the utility buying batteries and using them as necessary. The only reason for this can be electricity prices that roll costs into the price per kwh which are in practice not based on overall usage. So the fix for the problem described in the study is to get rid of elements of electricity prices that distort the market. Then there won't be an incentive to go off-grid anymore.

I doubt that it will go anywhere. There are numerous big problems with the concept. Helium is scarce and costly to collect in nature - and there is not enough for a global transportation system. Airships are susceptible to storms, rains and other weather issues - much more so than ships and trucks. Hydrogen is better as a lifting gas and can easily be produced from water - but it is hugely dangerous. Having a 200m sized target filled with an explosive substance flying close to the ground is every terrorists fantasy. Stuff like this tends to happen if some people just have more money than they know what to do with ...

I think you are very right. But it may be also a lot more dangerous for them. This new pricing regime squarely places Uber as the entity that makes all pricing decisions and this pricing model really shows that drives have little to no freedom when they are working for Uber. From my perspective, under this pricing model, Uber drivers would have to be considered as employees, not independent drivers. Under this pricing model, Uber is not a fee for service platform as they could have claimed before (offering to bring passengers and drivers together and charging a fee for the service). Instead, now they are optimizing the price solely for their own benefit and contract out the work of driving to drivers. From a legal standpoint, I think this is totally different than before.

This sounds like a really dangerous strategy for me. Part of Uber's business model (that has come under legal threat in several countries already) has been to portray themselves as a service that, for a fee, brings customers and independently operating drivers together. With this new pricing however, it sounds more like they are offering the service of transportation to the customer and subcontracting it out to particular drivers. This is not semantics - i has potentially huge legal ramifications. If Uber is seen to be the party that takes the largest share of business decisions here - e.g. pricing - and the drivers really have little or no freedom to operate independently, then drivers could be considered employees and Uber a regular taxi company - with all the regulation this implies - including fixed rates and potentially also the need to purchase permits from local municipalities. The original way of merely being a platform for passengers and drivers basically precludes Uber from optimizing the pricing - as this is not their job. They could offer a platform to drivers to only suggest potential prices to charge to drivers - and then taking a fee for this suggestion service. This would allow them to still function as only an intermediary. But this does not seem to be what they are doing. I think this is a very desperate move that could result in a lot of legal problems and potentially a threat for the entire business model.