quote: .@heronpower CEO Drew Baglino on the 40-year streak that kept US electricity flat while the economy grew, and why it just ended: "We benefited from energy efficiency from the '70s... until like the 2010s. You saw efficiency everywhere... And all of that energy efficiency more or less negated the growth in energy services." "The energy services were growing over time in the United States, but the net electricity delivered to accomplish those energy services stayed basically flat. And the same thing even happened in data centers." "If you look at the efficiency of compute, even with all the AI things that are going on, in terms of flops per watt, it's really gone up an immense amount from the first data centers to today." "And that has allowed more and more compute capability for the same percentage of GDP electricity production." "Now it's changing... We are seeing electricity growth higher than it's ever been before. And that's not just because the benefits of energy efficiency are tailing off, it's because we are seeing broad based demand for more electricity: compute, transportation, industrial electrification." "Electricity as a carrier is incredibly flexible... whether it's for intelligence or for heating, I see it as a great thing and wanna accelerate it." @baglino @heronpower | "Energy Capacity = Economic Capacity" Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on why America's power grid is the ceiling on growth: "We went through 10 to 15 years where essentially I was taking coal offline at the rate I was adding renewables, and essentially the nation was flatlined in terms of overall energy capacity." "So essentially our economic capacity as a nation, flat for fifteen years." "Even with that, we've gone to maybe increasing our national energy capacity 4% per year. Going from essentially zero to one." "Nuclear as base load is a fabulous thing that we want to go build more of. Unfortunately all of our renewables have deep dependencies in China." "Energy capacity somewhat dampens how euphoric we can get on AI. Why build a new data center and buy the million GPUs if I can't power them?" @PGelsinger @RaghuRaghuram @appenz