The surveillance state will be a power hog
The amount of power required for the data centers that underpin the control grid and AI is overwhelming.
From a recent Wall Street Journal article:
U.S. power usage is projected to expand by 4.7% over the next five years, according to a review of federal fillings by the consulting firm Grid Strategies. That is up from a previous estimate of 2.6%.
The projections come after efficiency gains kept electricity demand roughly flat over the past 15 years, allowing the power sector to limit emissions in large part through coal-plant closures.
“We haven’t seen this in a generation,” said Arne Olson, a senior partner at consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics. “As an industry, we’ve almost forgotten how to deal with load growth of this magnitude.”
Just over 60 percent of China’s power grid is fueled by coal, according to the International Energy Agency. How else could you transform a country as big and as vast from backwater to tech leader in about 30 years?
But, while China has used every available source of energy in its arsenal, the West has been hell bent on destroying traditional energy generation for use by our remnant industrial base by focusing on wind and solar, which is nowhere near stable enough to maintain baseload for the kinds of important manufacturing activities needed in a modern economy — whether making steel, or appliances, or cars. Instead, we basically handed over our industrial and economic infrastructure to China, seduced by the lax environmental rules, cheap labor and promise of vast profits for shareholders.
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