Right-wing wokeism can’t stop green tech winning the global energy war
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/31/right-wing-wokeism-green-tech-global-energy-war/
The US energy department published a “Moon shot” paper in 2010 arguing that it was theoretically possible to cut solar costs to $1 a watt, and if achieved this would amount to fossil parity without subsidy. Sceptics said it was delusional. That target has since been beaten ten times over.
The price of Chinese solar panels has dropped to nine cents a watt, which is why the ill-run electricity grid in Pakistan is now shrinking at a double-digit annual rate. Every village and every neighbourhood in Lahore or Karachi is erecting off-grid solar panels in a dash for cheap power and energy freedom, lifting solar capacity by 22 gigawatts (GW) in a single year. The government had nothing to do with it. The free market speaks Urdu.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/31/right-wing-wokeism-green-tech-global-energy-war/
The US energy department published a “Moon shot” paper in 2010 arguing that it was theoretically possible to cut solar costs to $1 a watt, and if achieved this would amount to fossil parity without subsidy. Sceptics said it was delusional. That target has since been beaten ten times over.
The price of Chinese solar panels has dropped to nine cents a watt, which is why the ill-run electricity grid in Pakistan is now shrinking at a double-digit annual rate. Every village and every neighbourhood in Lahore or Karachi is erecting off-grid solar panels in a dash for cheap power and energy freedom, lifting solar capacity by 22 gigawatts (GW) in a single year. The government had nothing to do with it. The free market speaks Urdu.
AI energy demand predictions have echoes of the great horse manure crisis
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/29/net-zero-risks-leaving-britains-ai-strategy-dead-on-arrival/
Recently announced in a blaze of publicity, Trump’s $500bn (£400bn) Stargate supercomputer complex would require 5GW. Amazon alone proposes to spend $150bn on data centres over the next 15 years.
All these plans now begin to look massively overblown. DeepSeek’s “Sputnik moment” also points to an already monumental, hype-driven misallocation of capital that threatens to drive significant losses and write-offs across the tech sector for some years to come.
Hundreds of billions of investment dollars are being sunk into AI, but so far for little or no return. For comparison, look back to the turn of the century dot-com and mobile telephone bubbles, which gave us a wonderful new technological infrastructure but also an eventual bust in which many people and organisations lost their shirts.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/29/net-zero-risks-leaving-britains-ai-strategy-dead-on-arrival/
Recently announced in a blaze of publicity, Trump’s $500bn (£400bn) Stargate supercomputer complex would require 5GW. Amazon alone proposes to spend $150bn on data centres over the next 15 years.
All these plans now begin to look massively overblown. DeepSeek’s “Sputnik moment” also points to an already monumental, hype-driven misallocation of capital that threatens to drive significant losses and write-offs across the tech sector for some years to come.
Hundreds of billions of investment dollars are being sunk into AI, but so far for little or no return. For comparison, look back to the turn of the century dot-com and mobile telephone bubbles, which gave us a wonderful new technological infrastructure but also an eventual bust in which many people and organisations lost their shirts.