Arguing about renewables vs non-renewables is pointless

The tech and energy industries are increasingly merging – tech is, after all, pretty much just moving electrons and photons around in structured ways. Big tech is directly investing in energy products to feed data centers – for instance, all the development in central Washington, where data centers and energy access go hand in hand. My LinkedIn feed regularly features people arguing about renewable energy vs fossil fuels – and it always seems to be missing the forest for the trees.

TL;DR version – we need 10x+ the amount of energy we are using today; nonrenewables just can't scale; we need to ramp up renewables and nuclear madly.

I am no Vaclav Smil, but I will do a simple napkin calculation.

In 2023, the USA used 77e+3 kWh per capita or 2.7e+13 total kWh (there are slight discrepancies between these numbers and sources, but not that great) to achieve our standard of living and operate our economy. This usage has been flat or slightly decreasing over the last half-century; we have gotten more efficient in our use while still growing our economy.

The USA's standard of living and economic productivity are way ahead of much of the world. The entire world used about 1.75e+14 kWh in 2023 – about 6.5x the USA usage for a population about 23.5x greater (8.045B world, 340M USA).

With that baseline, now let's start to extrapolate. As a first approximation, the entire world aspires to a USA-level standard of living and GDP per capita. Assuming current energy efficiency, this implies that the world needs to generate 6.2e+14 kWh or about 3.5x current production (and at much lower prices).

Further, the USA's current usage levels aren't the endpoint. We need more energy for clean water, for industry and manufacturing, for tech and data centers, for residential cooling, etc. This article by Casey Handmer does a nice job of talking about the additional demands we have (and why solar is such a great opportunity). Energy drives every aspect of our economy; we need more at a lower cost. 2x more? 3x more? 5x more? Who knows, let's use 3x, because that makes the calculations easier.

Between meeting new demands and bringing the rest of the world up to the USA standard of living and productivity, we thus need globally about 10x (3.5 times 3) more energy production (at current or lower prices) and will need room for growth beyond that.

Based on this, we must get to renewables (viewed very broadly, including space-based) and nuclear as quickly as possible. There is no other source that can support the future we want, petroleum reserves don't have that much room for expansion forever. We should use the energy we have at hand to build out the sources we will need for the future. This is not a matter of which energy source is "better" or "less harmful"; it is just the size of the need.

This is exciting! As Casey articulated in the earlier article, great opportunities for economic growth and investment. And a great opportunity to transform lives through greater energy access. But we need to get cracking, for instance we are behind in batteries, in part a self-own.