Third Energy and Hegemonic Transition Will Be Based on Solar and AI

Discussion

Bruno Macaes:

"Today we are on the cusp of a third energy transition. Chinese officials have carefully studied the previous transitions and have come to believe that if the baton of global supremacy is ever handed over from Washington to Beijing, it will be in a similar way, through a change in the energy structure of our societies, rather than through a war over Taiwan or any other geography, no matter how strategic. The interesting question is this: if that energy structure was formed by a complex of coal and the steam engine in the eighteenth century, and electricity and the modern factory in the early twentieth, what is the complex associated with the third transition?

The most obvious candidate is solar and artificial intelligence. It is natural for us to think of solar energy as somehow primitive since, after all, the first hominids already knew how to use sunlight as an energy source to warm themselves. In reality, photovoltaic energy is entirely a product of the new physics introduced by Einstein and his contemporaries, where photons are understood as quanta of energy capable of colliding with electrons and where the kinetic energy of the resulting photoelectron corresponds to the difference between the energy absorbed by the electron and the work required to escape its orbit. The solar panel belongs to the age of the spaceship and the semiconductor.

There is a much more obvious affinity between the token factories of the future and solar than nuclear or natural gas. Training and inference for artificial intelligence models are voracious energy consumers. If they are to continue expanding in both quality and scale, they will need cheap and abundant sources of energy. Solar and batteries are not there yet, but then neither are the models. The point is that they both share exponential curves of growth. No other source of energy will be able to come close. Only with solar and wind, combined with new battery technology, can we imagine a world where energy and digital form one single complex, where artificial intelligence both manages our energy systems and is powered by the logic of zero marginal cost energy. The consequences for global power will be similar to those of the first and second energy transitions. And it could well happen that the ultimate winner will be as surprising as on those two occasions."

(https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/power-transitions-britain-america)