Energy Bound

Despite all the progress in all categories where technology is involved, we have not moved much on the energy production front. Surprisingly, it is still the bad old coal and oil, which we burn to propel things, make living comfortable (HVAC) and light our nights. Widespread nuclear, not to mention small scale fusion, is still the thing of a distant future.

And it will probably keep getting worse before it starts getting better. But production is not the biggest energy issue we are facing. The real issue is distribution - or - to be precise - the power transmission grid. It is already saturated today. And the reason is: electrification of everything.

Total electrification, pushed as the center of the politically correct "green" agenda means we need to triple the electricity capacity. TRIPLE.

See the recent discussion between Lex Fridman and Elon Musk:

So energy usage right now is roughly one third, very rough terms, one third electricity, one third transport, one third heating. And so in order for everything to go sustainable, to go electric, you need to triple electricity output

Clearly what would need to (at least) triple is the grid transport capacity. Power lines, transformers, poles... Well this simply is impossible. Utilities today have already shifted their focus from "kWh" to "kW" which means, we do not care how much is consumed. We care most about WHEN electricity is consumed, as it is the peak capacity, which has been killing us.

On top of that is the explosion of AI. Just to put things in perspective: the energy usage by a single refrigerator size rack of AI chips is equal to 150 Teslas (The Last Optimist podcast by Mark Mills, 2023 Nov 20, 14:30 mark). The appetite for AI is exploding. And the electricity demand together with it.

In the middle of all that comes the very promising trend of energy efficiency and energy savings. My personal favorite is energy efficiency of buildings through software: starting from lighting controls and then extending to optimizing heating and air conditioning based on building - wide low power mesh networks anchored to upgraded / retrofitted lighting systems. Like the Bluetooth Network Lighting Controls we champion at Silvair. Based on the recent US Department of Energy, still less than 2% of buildings are equipped with advanced lighting control systems. That means 98% are "barefoot". And I'm not saying that implementing controls in buildings will entirely solve the energy issue. It won't. But it will definitely be one of the mandatory actions to address the issue.