The World Can't Make Enough Electricity to Power All Its Bright, Shiny Gadgets

The blunt truth.

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Microsoft and Constellation Energy just made a deal to restart a nuclear reactor. Until now, the U.S. had largely abandoned nuclear power over high costs and safety concerns. Around the country, the relentless demand for artificial intelligence is driving a resurgence in natural gas and even coal.

Regardless of where you stand, it makes one thing clear. Despite what you might hear, the world is getting desperate to power all its gadgets, and it shows no signs of being able to satisfy these fairytales of endless growth.

Recently, I got curious about heavy machinery.

It’s related.

I wanted to know how close we were to powering bulldozers, forklifts, excavators, and dump trucks with electricity instead of diesel. I wanted to know how much green energy goes into manufacturing.

I found the answer:

Not much.

This question matters for a few reasons. Manufacturing consumes half of the world’s energy and generates a fifth of our carbon emissions, but that’s not even the biggest issue. We’re in the mid-2020s, and we still aren’t producing the majority of our solar panels or wind turbines with renewable energy. As we hit peak oil and peak diesel in particular, that’s going to become a major problem for anyone who still thinks energy demand can continue to grow at the current rate.

Here’s how much consumption is growing:

Our World in Data

As you can see, renewables aren’t displacing fossil fuels. Consumption of natural gas, oil, and even coal is continuing to go up.

To put it bluntly:

How are we going to keep manufacturing solar panels if our heavy construction and mining equipment runs on increasingly scarce fossil fuels? There’s a fierce debate ongoing about when we’ll hit peak oil production, or whether we’ve already hit it. Either way, it’s coming and it’s going to get increasingly expensive, dangerous, and destructive to extract. So, what’s the plan?

There’s renewable diesel, made from soybean and canola oil. According to a report by the U.S. Dept of Energy, renewable diesel generates 65 percent less carbon than normal diesel, and California consumes almost all of our domestic production. In the long run, renewable diesel beats biodiesel because it’s a total replacement. According to fuel experts, renewable diesel can power any heavy machine, and it can also power cars as a “drop-in replacement for petroleum.”

Energy officials predict renewable diesel to grow 30 percent per year in the short term. Some estimates put it even higher.

The construction, mining, and manufacturing industries are also starting to move toward renewable options. That includes electric machines, something that looked almost impossible five or ten years ago.

One company, Volvo, finally released an electric excavator this year that operates on par with a diesel one.

As Nicolas Rivero at The Washington Post writes, “the biggest pieces of construction equipment can churn through 10 or more gallons of fuel per hour, emitting as much carbon and air pollution as several cars combined.” Construction equipment produces roughly 3 percent of carbon emissions, just in the U.S.

Several companies, including Caterpillar, are working on electric machines. Over the last year, electric models account for less than 1 percent of total sales. A recent report from a major research group on heavy equipment predicts that electric machinery will account for 3 percent of global sales by 2028. Right now, it’s less than 1 percent. Most of the demand comes from China and Europe. Only 6 percent of global demand for electric machinery comes from the U.S.

We’re not exactly leading the charge.

Compact EV construction equipment went to market within the last couple of years. The world buys more than 1 million heavy construction machines every year, and somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 of them are electric. Reports on the future of electric machinery say it will take up to two decades for them to become a significant portion of global sales. As for the giant machines we need to mine and transport raw materials, electric versions of those are just now leaving the development stage. Big machines in mining and construction need tons of power:

IDTechEX estimates the “arduous duty cycles” of heavy-duty machines over 20 tonnes will require more than 300 kWh of energy to deliver a full eight-hour workday. The current limitations in battery technologies mean sizable battery packs will be needed to meet this demand. Their higher cost, onboard space requirements and long charging times may hinder speedier product development in larger machine size classes…

Volvo’s electric excavator offers 264 kWh of energy, not quite enough for a full eight-hour day by these standards. It uses the equivalent battery storage of 4-5 electric SUVs, or a little more than two Cybertrucks.

Electric machinery faces more challenges.

From OEM:

Though an all-electric jobsite is becoming more plausible, the U.S. construction industry is nowhere near reaching that point just yet. There are still too many variables, and questions, that must be addressed.

You can’t just send electric excavators, loaders, and dump trucks to a job site and call it a wrap. Many mining sites and factories run wide open 24 hours a day, only going down for maintenance. You need an infrastructure to support the new equipment. You have to be able to charge them. You have to be able to replace the batteries and components. They have to be durable. You have to make it easy and fast for crews to run and service that equipment, or they won’t do it. At least in the U.S., there's not a lot of incentive or sense of urgency.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s even possible to transition the industrial sector over to sustainable forms of energy.

It would need to happen faster.

As for manufacturing, less than 1 percent of the electricity used by factories and plants in the U.S. comes from solar power. At best, we could power 40 percent of our factories with renewable energy by 2050.

Only a handful of companies have managed to build sustainable factories. There's one in Germany that can operate off-grid on sunny days. Tesla has been promising renewable plants that produce solar panels and electric vehicles for years. To put it mildly, those projects are behind schedule.

Even at its current growth rate, experts predict solar power to supply a third of total U.S. energy needs by 2030.

We hear a lot about the explosive growth of renewable energy. In reality, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that renewable energy will account for half of the world's total electricity produced by 2050. It will account for only 26 percent of our total energy consumption by then. Achieving 100 percent renewable energy would require half the world’s silver.

An innovation firm in Finland recently released a report summarizing what the world will need in terms of raw materials and mining capacity in order to achieve net zero. By their estimates, a green future would consume 90 percent of the world’s lithium supply and half of its nickel, along with a substantial chunk of copper. It would lead to a doubling of current demand for rare metals and minerals. We would need twice as much nickel and neodymium, three times as much cobalt, and 13 times as much more lithium. The world operates 25,000 mines, taking up the equivalent of South Korea in terms of physical space. Only 500 of those mines are dedicated to meeting green energy needs, meaning we need at least 200 more.

The IEA has made it clear that demand for these raw materials is already outstripping supply by widening margins, with a gap of 35 percent just for lithium. China is leading the world in renewable energy production, but they’re doing it with forced labor by Uyghurs and other minorities. A report from the U.S. Department of Labor indicates that half the world’s polysilicon comes from Xinjiang, which relies heavily on human rights violations to produce it. Although the U.S. is clearly leveraging this point in their propaganda campaign against China, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s happening. Meanwhile, the U.S. is guilty of labor exploitation as well. The point: Cheap energy often comes at an overlooked moral cost.

It was already a pipe dream.

Then AI came along.

Now companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Tesla have begun pouring money into artificial intelligence. Many of them still claim they’ll achieve net zero emissions by 2030. Meanwhile, they’re building fossil fuel plants. According to a recent piece in Bloomberg, energy utilities are reverting to coal and natural gas to satiate the sudden and relentless demand from data centers:

In the first six months of the year alone, companies have announced plans to build more new gas power capacity across the US than they did in all of 2020, data from Sierra Club show. And if the second half looks anything like the first, 2024 will mark the most new gas-power generation announced since at least 2017, when the environmental group started tracking the data.

As another piece in The Washington Post observes, “voracious electricity consumption of artificial intelligence is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use, including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants.” Just one data center can use as much electricity and water as a city, or 7 million laptops running at 8 hours a day. Meanwhile, Microsoft believes they can harness atomic fusion power by 2028. Scientists have their doubts. Other tech firms want to build nuclear reactors at their own research and data centers.

One energy expert says:

Coal plants are being reinvigorated because of the AI boom… This should be alarming to anyone who cares about the environment.

If we were serious about green energy, you’d think transforming our industry and construction equipment would come first on the list of priorities. It seems only logical that you would want the capacity to build green infrastructure that doesn’t rely on an aging, inefficient fossil fuel grid. Instead, we’re still using fossil fuels to make solar panels and wind turbines. It’s an energy-intensive process, and we’re only beginning to find ways to recycle those materials.

Meanwhile, the tech industry is diving headfirst into artificial intelligence, growing ever delusional about their ability to find miracle alternatives like fusion technology or micro-nuclear reactors. We’ve just barely started to make green energy itself a sustainable endeavor independent of fossil fuels, but now corporate hunger for robots and war is driving us backward into fossil fuels.

There’s a principle that explains all of this.

It’s called Jevons Paradox.

As scientists explain in a 2018 issue of Frontiers in Energy Research, it means that “an increase in efficiency in resource use will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decrease.”

Because our tech overlords are so confident in their ability to crack the miracle of limitless green energy, they’re growing increasingly reckless and irresponsible. They even seem to think it’s okay to fall back on coal and power now, because it’s just a temporary setback on the road to utopia.

We’ve heard it all before.

If you want an example of Jevons Paradox, just look at the Las Vegas Sphere, a giant round monstrosity maintained by 150 Nvidia graphics cards. The Sphere uses 28 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 21,000 homes. Don’t worry, 70 percent of that comes from Nvidia’s own solar utility.

They’re really proud of it.

@techalchemyNvidia announced that the Las Vegas Sphere is powered by 150 RTX A6000 GPUs, each equipped with 48 GB of video memory. All this hardware drives 1.2 million LED panels outside and the 16,000x16,000 screens inside. The total cost of the GPUs is over $1m. 🎥: @_dudeitude on TT #ai #chatgpt #aitools #openai #nvidia #machinelearning #lasvegas

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No, one giant sphere isn’t going to wreck the planet, but it’s a pretty good example of the logic at work. Renewable energy doesn’t seem to be replacing our current energy demands. It’s just whetting the appetite for more.

That’s how Jevons Paradox works.

When you zoom out a little, you start to see what’s happening. The public believes that solar and wind will magically displace fossil fuels, meaning that nobody has to give up anything or make the slightest change to their habits and routines. The transition to a renewable grid was always going to be difficult. The first place to start would’ve been making the production of solar panels and wind turbines sustainable by expediting the design and release of electric factories and machinery, or at least ramping up production of renewable diesel.

Instead…

We’re letting tech billionaires chase one red herring after another as they make endless false promises about reaching net zero. I really hate to say it, but green energy and artificial intelligence are the biggest bubbles in world history, with the future of humanity resting on their success, paid for with exploitation and a surge in mining that threatens more pollution and accelerates extinction. If we’re even serious about that terrible plan, we need the overlords to fulfill the promises they’ve already made instead of driving even deeper consumption.

It’s a little ironic that the tech elite have built an LED bubble in the middle of a city devoted entirely to gambling, in the middle of a desert, in order to celebrate their technological achievements.

It’s really the perfect symbol.

Not many of us want to live in a world without electricity, but there’s a big difference between using electricity to power hospitals and farming equipment versus using it to power a giant cartoon eye. At a time when we should be rationing energy, the prevailing sentiment is taking us backward.

That’s just me.