There’s a certain genre of political announcement that specializes in glossing over difficulties and soothing the eye, or ear, with vague promises of easy bliss to come. So when you read, for instance, this press release from the nominally conservative provincial government of Ontario, Canada saying “The government also announced it would release the province’s first-ever Integrated Energy Plan with a generational horizon out to 2050, which will ensure the entire energy sector is aligned behind the government’s pro-growth agenda to reduce costs and province-wide emissions” you actually hope they’re lying deliberately and with premeditation because the alternative is that they actually think all you need is will, or love, or them in power. But then you read a column by the New York Times’ marquee climate writer David Gelles that starts with a baffled “Cleaning up the technology industry was supposed to be easy” and you realize that the fate of humankind is, to a disquieting degree, in the hands of people who think practical difficulties are invented by the malicious to sabotage an outbreak of peace, plenty and harmony. How was cleaning up anything, let alone an industry that requires a lot of weird mineral inputs, going to be “easy”?
Ah, just wait. Heatmap tells us of former SpaceX worker Brad Hartwig who, wakened up by volunteer search-and-rescue in California wildfires:
“rallied a bunch of his former rocket engineer colleagues to repurpose technology they pioneered at SpaceX to build a biomass-fueled, carbon negative power source that’s supposedly about ten times smaller, twice as efficient, and eventually, one-third the cost of the industry standard for this type of plant.”
Uh yeah. Supposedly. And of course some of you are thinking that burning biomass is not “carbon negative” but the same old same old combustion of carbon-based compounds. But see:
“The goal of this type of tech, called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, is to combine biomass-based energy generation with carbon dioxide removal to achieve net negative emissions.”
And how’s it going? Well, badly of course:
“Sounds like a dream, but actually producing power or heat from this process has so far proven too expensive to really make sense. There are only a few so-called BECCS facilities operating in the U.S. today, and they’re all just ethanol fuel refineries with carbon capture and storage technology tacked on.”
Fear not. Our new snake oil really can cure anything including awkward laws of thermodynamics:
“the advances in 3D printing and computer modeling that allowed the SpaceX team to build an increasingly simple and cheap rocket engine have allowed Arbor to move quickly into this new market… Arbor’s method is poised to be a whole lot sleeker and cheaper than the BECCS plants of today, enabling both more carbon sequestration and actual electricity production, all by utilizing what Hartwig fondly refers to as a ‘vegetarian rocket engine.’”
Do not invest your life savings.
Meanwhile, according to Gelles, the whole high-tech thing was meant to be simple in this wise:
“Powering server racks and personal computers isn’t nearly as energy-intensive as making concrete or steel. So until recently, eliminating planet-warming emissions in the tech sector was expected to be relatively straightforward. Tech companies positioned themselves as climate leaders and boasted of their eco-friendly bona fides. But the sudden emergence of artificial intelligence is casting doubt on those assumptions.”
Oh darn. Increased computing power. Nobody saw that coming, huh?
He does note that giants from Microsoft to Google and Amazon are buying from or even helping build nuclear plants to try to get around the problem. But unfortunately things are going too well:
“At the center of the A.I. boom is Nvidia, the chip-making juggernaut that has, over the past few years, become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Nvidia’s chips are incredibly power-hungry. As the company rolls out new products, analysts have taken to measuring the amount of electricity needed to power them in terms of cities, or even countries. There are already more than 5,000 data centers in the U.S., and the industry is expected to grow nearly 10 percent annually. Goldman Sachs estimates that A.I. will drive a 160 percent increase in data center power demand by 2030.”
Brutal. Though of course the starry-eyed wokesters inside high tech see it solving all the issues. Gelles quotes “Dion Harris, Nvidia’s head of data center product marketing”, a job that sounds both ominous and incomprehensible, that:
“There is sort of a myopic view on the data center, but not really an understanding that a lot of those technologies are going to be the main way that we’re going to innovate our way to a net-zero future.”
No we’re not. Things will get more efficient, of course. But the vision of a human civilization that does not emit CO2, as we have since the invention not of fire but of the lung, is absurd. As Gelles himself notes, “So far, however, there is scant evidence that A.I. will deliver a miracle fix.”
Indeed. Remember that as cars got more efficient, we used more fuel not less because each individual car now made traveling, for work or pleasure, a better deal for the individual driver. So what to do?
Well, shrugging is one option:
“Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, recently said that the artificial intelligence boom was too powerful, and had too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.”
And here you thought everyone was as absolutist as you are on the subject. But of course a major part of the problem was the overall promise that getting to Net Zero wouldn’t just be easy, it would take less than no work because the greener we got the richer as well as cleaner we’d get. All because we trusted our future to people who had inexplicably reached adulthood without discovering the existence of practical difficulties.
For instance the politicians running Ontario. In announcing the plan to have a plan that would be the best plan since planning was invented:
“‘Ontario’s energy policy will literally determine the success of our province, today and for the next generation,’ said Stephen Lecce, Minister of Energy and Electrification. ‘Unlike previous governments that pursued siloed and short-term decision making that led to skyrocketing energy rates, our government will introduce the province’s first integrated energy plan that will avoid the consequences of bad planning and ensure we have the affordable energy we need to power new homes, attract investment and create jobs.’”
Now let’s be frank. He and his colleagues have been in power for six years now. And if there were any sign that they can walk that way, we’d have seen it by now. Instead their energy policy is a hoorah’s nest of opaque and inefficient rules and a swamp of stranded debt. Moreover, only a person utterly, eerily naively ignorant of economic history could blithely promise a plan “that will avoid the consequences of bad planning” especially when they haven’t devised it yet.
Still, all good things flow from being them not someone else like their stinking partisan opponents. And hence the press release mentions, only to brush aside, that:
“According to Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator, the province’s demand for electricity is forecast to increase by 75 per cent by 2050, the equivalent of adding four and a half cities the size of Toronto to the grid. There is also continued demand for other fuels like gasoline and natural gas, that currently play a critical role in powering our vehicles, heating our homes and attracting new jobs in manufacturing, including the automotive industry and agriculture.”
Gee. Sounds like there could be real trouble a-brewing. But no, see, because, Lecce says:
“Our competitive all-of-the-above approach will deliver more affordable power to our families – with non-emitting nuclear energy as our anchor – to keep costs and emissions down without a costly and unnecessary carbon tax.”
Non-emitting nuclear energy. Not the kind where they use cement to build the plants. And the “all-of-the-above approach” seems to be a plan to do everything, but better than anyone, except the stinking Liberal carbon tax. So emissions will fall magically. As a plan will fall magically from the sky:
“To inform the province’s first integrated energy plan, the government has launched a consultation and engagement process with the public, Indigenous communities and other groups.”
Yes folks. That’s right. He announced that the plan was brilliant before they even started talking to people about how to make it sufficiently woke that it may well not work at all.
He is, alas, probably right that “Ontario’s energy policy will literally determine the success of our province, today and for the next generation.” Certainly it’s more likely to do it literally than figuratively. But in all probability it will do so in a bad way.
Policy wonks are the single most deluded people on the planet. Of course, they announce a successful plan before the first iota of planning has occurred. Asking the indigenous peoples their opinion seems a bit useless, until Europeans showed up, they heated their lodges with wood fires that vented the resulting smoke through a hole in their roof! Perhaps they should hire psychic mediums to ask Neanderthals what they think!
This is more proof, if any is needed, to affirm that a brutally honest politician is now unelectable.
So,we're gonna have more and more data centers needing AI levels of electricity to operate.Meaning city level consumption of power at the same time for at least some of these data centers?At the same time as they want to dismantle reliable fossil fuel power plants in favor of wind and solar and some sort of biomass/carbon capture thing-a-ma-jiggie?The only thing saving the day,at least in Ontario,is our nuclear capacity.And also that the Ont. PC's as inept as they sometimes are,are still a hundred times better option than the far-left Opposition at Queen's Park.