Mark Mills on our energy future and why it isn’t “renewable”

Power Hour with Alex Epstein

On this week’s Power Hour Alex Epstein interviews Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, on the future of energy in general and “renewable energy” in particular. In the last year and a half Mark has published two fascinating and widely circulated reports: “The ‘New Energy Economy’: An Exercise in Magical Thinking” and “Mines, Minerals, and ‘Green’ Energy: A Reality Check”.
Mark brings a great perspective to energy issues because he a) has a strong physics background and b) he is deeply knowledgeable about how different industries, above all the digital technology industry, use energy.
On the show Mark and Alex discuss:
- The three ways to use unreliable “renewable” energy and why none them work well
- The massive and rapidly increasing quantities of reliable electricity used by digital technology
- Why every hour of video uses as much energy as driving 1 mile
- How AI has a limitless need for energy
- Tech companies’ contradiction of supporting unreliable energy and demanding ultra-reliable energy
- The fallacy of equating energy and electricity
- The limits of battery density
- Why engineers can’t fulfill arbitrary political wishes