Weekend reads; Hobbling the AI Expansion

America is shooting itself in the foot

Here are some quotes from two articles, both behind a paywall (so we have to paywall it also). One from Evans-Pritchard, the chief economic commentator of the UK’s The Telegraph, a rightwing newspaper (so sort of friendly fire), the other from Thomas Friedman from the NYT. We give you a few quotes:

It is not a return to the free market. It rigs the market to defend the legacy status quo, though geothermal is spared, and so is nuclear fusion. “America’s strength has always been that it lets old industries die but now it is now blocking the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction,” said Ember’s Kingsmill Bond.

Electro-tech will win in the end because it is massively more efficient. Critics of clean energy love to hurl the laws of thermodynamics at their foes but they commit two intellectual crimes themselves: they skip over the detail that two thirds of fossil energy is in aggregate lost to the skies in heat, while roughly 90pc of electric energy is used for its final function.

The research firm Energy Innovation, whose peer-reviewed energy modeling is widely respected, projects that Trump’s effort to diminish America’s renewable energy industry will cause wholesale electric power prices to increase roughly 50 percent by 2035, and that cumulative annual consumer energy costs will increase more than $16 billion by 2030. It also projects that some 830,000 renewable energy jobs will be lost or not created by 2030.

Wind and solar added over 90pc of all new power in the US over the last two years. Further projects are the only possible way to meet rising electricity demand for data centres between now and 2030 since there is a five-year supply chain blockage for new gas turbines. Every other option takes too long.

Energy Innovation estimates that Trump’s bill will deprive America of 340 gigawatts over the next decade and push up wholesale electricity prices by 74pc. Data centres will not be built because there won’t be enough power. You could hardly find a better way to sabotage America’s AI ambitions.