alt Hacker NewsWhile the US stays oil rich, we should expect the US to be a laggard in ending use of fossil fuels. China and EU are not oil rich, they’ll make a faster transition.
Of course it’s idiotic to actively hobble clean energy. Or to put your finger on the scale for one source of energy, like the current administration does.
But it’s not crazy to argue for “energy abundance” where the market just picks the cheapest energy on the market in the US and that just gradually moves cleaner over time.
Replies
hvb2 • today at 8:37 PM
> But it’s not crazy to argue for “energy abundance” where the market just picks the cheapest energy on the market
Except that there's externalities not priced in. The consequences of those are becoming increasingly visible and very expensive to address
Well what I'm saying that is that on the Texas grid, solar and storage and wind are the cheapest energy, and being deployed in massive amounts because only on the Texas can an investor make money by providing the cheapest energy. (For most utilities, they take a fixed rate of profit and are incentivized to use the most expensive possible energy if they can get away with it.)
So Texas is not a laggard when it comes to clean energy, they are actually driving clean energy forward the most, because clean energy is the cheapest and most profitable energy. And that's despite Texas having natural gas that's insanely cheap right from Henry Hub.
What this tells me is that like most hyperscalers, Microsoft is not price sensitive on the electricity side, because energy costs are tiny compared to the massive capital costs of the GPUs. But why would they go this direction? What political influence would make Microsoft choose more expensive electricity, when in the past they've been fairly good at driving clean energy forward in their data center power choices, and they'd pay a premium on energy costs to go with clean energy?