The Real Deal #14

Welcome to The Real Deal - your twice-weekly dose of Energy/Climate updates, where you get to read about stuff we’re learning about while we learn.

So imagine some writer starts a newsletter (email blog with a simple website) and…

1. Starts writing about a subject he knows little about but is rapidly gaining an understanding of,

2. Inserts a lot of his personality into the writing, and

3. Makes occasional errors.

It turns out to be hard but fun, engaging and fulfilling, in unanticipated ways. He learns and gains a subscription base.

Then, in a group conversation at a holiday gathering, someone asks the writer if the newsletter is AI-generated.

That did happen (twice) and I have to say… well, I wasn’t exactly angry, but it did cause me to pause and reflect, right after laughing.

Let me be frank: I do use ChatGPT (it’s marvelous), but not for this.

I love to write… and while ChatGPT is a wonderful tool for super-specialized consultative writing, like legalese or technical documentation, it is not meant to be used to share human experience. Nooope.

So while I do consult with it from time to time, rest assured that this is all coming straight from yours truly.

The other side of the coin

Please allow me to reinforce something, though:

AI is coming in ways that you can see in the movies today. AI is not a fad.

Please let me briefly share an experience from my grad school days, when I made the mistake that the Internet in 2003 was where it was going to end up.

I took my required MBA business startup class at Babson College in Wellsley, MA. This was in the early 2000’s after the dot-com bubble had burst.

I was assigned to a group for a business plan project. One of the member said, “My idea is to build a website where people can post videos where others can review and comment, and maybe even invest.”

Seemed like a good idea. We created the business plan and the pitch. It was fun. We even bought the domain - flickbuzz - and we were talking about whether we had the time and resources to be able to build it.

Then after we did our presentation to the class, our teacher said, “The Internet fad is over.”

Balloon + pin = back to our jobs.

We all went our separate ways…about a year later I got my first Youtube link from someone and almost fell out of my chair.

For AI, it’s just the beginning

AI is going to do what the Internet did in the mid- to late-2000s.

I don’t know if enough people realize what’s happening here.

Human productivity is about to make the kinds of strides that will be read about for centuries.

The pre telephone era, pre electricity, pre automobile, pre airplane, pre film, pre television, pre VCR, pre digital music (CDs), pre Internet… Look at this chart from a 2016 Vox article:

Those lines all at the right, how STEEP they are, representing extremely rapid adoption - as a society we have become rapid adopters of new technology.

Now the end of the pre-AI era is past us. The acceleration of product adoption since the early 20th century is astounding.

But what is going to happen when we use more technology and AI drives it?

Okay okay enough why are we taking about AI now?

Because AI is an energy HOG.

According to this article on The Verge, a high-performing AI imager like Midjourney or Microsoft’s models can consume as much power to create one image as it takes to charge a cell phone.

And when you use one of these imagers, it often takes several tries to get the prompting right if you want it to get the image right. So if the average person is creating five images to get the one they want… that means you’re charging five cell phones.

The point of all this is that AI and EVs and more and more powerful energy-consuming technologies will continue to increase power needs as we advance further into this century.

Where does this leave us?

The ENTIRE WORLD has an energy problem surfacing.

Innovation is the only answer. With fossil fuel power still running strong in many parts of the world, whole industries are resistant to changes.

There are many startups working on various nuclear fusion solutions. This is still likely decades from viability grid-ready applications.

Some of the current pressures in the space:

• Solar and wind continue to propagate and flourish all over the world.

• Many energy experts calling for a resurgence of/return to nuclear energy.

• Grid modernization is very much on the menu. This needs to happen, not only to improve resiliency, but also to better incorporate renewable energy into the grid.

• And energy trading needs to mature to the point where timing challenges can be overcome through mass storage solutions.

• The risk of overbuilding capacity. Building energy capacity is very expensive, and companies who build don’t want to have their investments sit idly.

Everyone in the world needs energy. I am in a state of rapid learning about all of this. These are things I didn’t think to even wonder about very long ago. Now, I’m swimming in it and don’t have enough time to scream everything I’ve learned!

I’ll leave you with this to ponder:

Growth in solar and wind since 1965 - in the US we are at over 3,000 kwh per capita. While this won’t power a home for a year, it certainly is a step in the right direction.

There are companies out there building this everywhere. Lots of opportunity. Please stay with me on my journey to learn more. And tell your friends!

Thanks and see you Tuesday.