“Like” a “Friend” & Burn Some Coal

EnergyFactsWeekly — The Cloud Begins With Coal Facebook’s new 300,000 square-foot data center, now operating in Forest City, North Carolina, took 16 months and 1.2 million labor-hours of construction, and …. This Facebook facility will require electricity from about one million tons of coal over the next decade

The “New Economy”: Transistors, Electrons and Coal

EnergyFactsWeekly — The Cloud Begins With Coal We know three things about transistors: They have already changed the world: Silicon technology progress is not over, and vast domains of untapped social and economic opportunity remain: Every single transistor consumes electricity. And we know two other related facts: The energy cost of computation has collapsed, but the overall amount of…

NEW, PIVOTAL TECH REVOLUTION IN THE OFFING?

San Diego Union-Tribune It’s a presidential election year. The economy is limping along. Real estate and the job market are terrible. Graduates are despondent. The big innovations that changed the world over the past several decades are behind us. Sound familiar? Welcome to America in 1980. Not a soul imagined then that technology would ignite…

The Coming Tech-led Boom

WALL STREET JOURNAL In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today. In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and…

Will Exxon Get Googled?

AMERICAN SPECTATOR The image of the oil industry is captured (admittedly, delicously) by Bruce Willis play the rough-and-ready character of an oil roughneck in the 1998 Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon – driving golf balls off an oil platform aimed at a Greenpeace ship. Dirty, tough, old-world, almost Jurassic.  Oil, in short, is seen as old tech. So yesterday.