Inconvenient Energy Realities

e21 ….   Bill Gates has said that when it comes to understanding energy realities “we need to bring math to the problem.” He’s right. Herein, then, is a summary of some of bottom-line realities from the underlying math behind “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking”

Imagining How Technology Will Disrupt Future Energy Markets

It’s common today for observers to speculate about how the energy futuremust look, rather than trying to imagine how it might look. The camp that “proposes” focuses on what governments and bureaucrats could or must force on markets. Meanwhile, imagination is in short supply among the energy punditocracy.

What if Green Energy Isn’t the Future?

WALL STREET JOURNAL ……  What’s Warren Buffett doing with a $10 billion bet on the future of oil and gas, helping old-school Occidental Petroleum buy Anadarko, a U.S. shale leader?  For pundits promoting the all-green future, this looks like betting on horse farms circa 1919.

Energy and the Information Infrastructure Part 5: Robots Eat Too: Huang’s Law & The Voracious Appetite of Artificial Intelligence

REAL CLEAR ENERGY …….. Will future bureaucrats impose CAFÉ-like fuel efficiency standards on the engines of artificial intelligence (AI)? After all, computing necessarily uses energy. And we know that AI computers under the hood of a useful robocar won’t have extension cords. If you do the math, when the all-robocar future does arrive, the energy used just…

Want an Energy Revolution?

CITY JOURNAL ……….  Throughout history, some 60 percent to 90 percent of every nation’s economy has been consumed by food and fuel costs. Hydrocarbons changed the way that humans organize their productive capacity. The coal age, followed by the oil age, and now by the ascendant age of natural gas, has (at least for developed…