America produces more energy than any other country in the world, has more energy reserves than any other country, and pioneered clean, inexpensive, and virtually unlimited nuclear energy. So why does even the Washington Post admit that "America is running out of power?"
The answer is simple. Take a look at your smartphone. Binge-watch the new season of Bridgerton on Netflix. Ask ChatGPT to produce an outline for your marketing plan.
"For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity, falsely claiming they can be replaced by solar/wind," Alex Epstein — energy expert and author of "Fossil Future" — reported on X a few days ago. "Now the grid they've helped gut can't supply their growing AI needs."
For the last decade, tech giants such as @Apple, @Microsoft, @Meta, and @Google have, through dedicated anti-fossil-fuel propaganda and political efforts, promoted the shutdown of reliable fossil fuel power plants in favor of unreliable solar and wind. pic.twitter.com/kSp6PJupq1
— Alex Epstein (@AlexEpstein) May 23, 2024
There are few things more destructive than a major corporation with lots of money to throw around making themselves look good on trendy social concerns.
"Tech giants have propagandized against reliable fossil fuel power plants by falsely claiming to be '100% renewable' and implying everyone could do it, Epstein continued. "In fact, they have just paid utilities to credit them for others' solar and wind use and blame others for their coal and gas use."
Apple CEO Tim Cook got bragging rights. California got brownouts. Even Texas, one of the better-run states in the union, has made itself overreliant on unreliable energy sources like wind and solar.
Would it surprise you to learn that Apple's vice president in charge of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives is Lisa Jackson, who served as Barack Obama's EPA chief?
Now there is good news buried deep inside all the doom and gloom. Nobody, not even the wishful-thinking experts in Washington or America's C-suites, can keep power-hungry data centers running on windmills and unicorn farts. From Netflix to your cloud photo library to the latest AI chatbot, more and more of everything we do relies on data centers.
There's simply too much money to be made from Big Data to make them rely on unreliable power sources.
The Biden administration is making useless (but expensive) pledges to "modernize America’s electrical grid, paving the way for clean energy and fewer outages" that fail to address the issue. A better grid would be nice. A harder grid would be better. But what we really need is more cheap and reliable power — and lots more of it.
Enter, at long last, the small modular reactor (SMR). "Due to their small size and modular nature," Carbon Credits reported last week, "SMRs can be factory-assembled and transported to sites unsuitable for larger reactors, making them more affordable and quicker to construct."
Those same Big Tech firms that have been loudly trumpeting how "green" they are have been quietly "shopping for nuclear power to run new data centers." Plans are already being drawn up to build new data centers around SMRs.
The hypocrisy is stunning. But if the rest of us end up getting plentiful and reliable nuclear energy out of it, I suppose it might have been worth having to listen to Cook and Jackson's little lectures.
Maybe.
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