7th April 2021. Energy | Intellectuals

Changing energy production patterns; how to be a Silicon Valley intellectual

Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.

Yesterday’s post, on Concrete, and Plague stories, was not sent out in the morning because of a Substack glitch. (I re-sent it later in the day). If you missed it, you can catch up here.

#1: Reshaping the energy market

Gregor Macdonald’s energy newsletter is one of the few that I pay for, partly because his analysis involves being on top of the data. A recent free-to-air edition had some striking data points in it.

Oil production probably peaked in 2019. That doesn’t mean that we’re now going to see the oil market go into decline. It’s more likely to plateau at close to the 2019 peak for several years to come, perhaps longer.

(Source: Gregor Macdonald)

Electric vehicles are far more efficient at converting evergy that internal combustion engines. The reason is that ICE vehicles generate a lot of heat in the conversion process. This is isn’t a trivial difference: “A typical EV requires at least 60% if not 70% less energy to travel one mile. That’s how you can place 1.367 million new EV on the road, as China did last year, while triggering a fairly light call on new power—just 4.785 TWh of electricity demand.”

And it has a non-trivial consequence: we won’t need a huge investment in new power production to service the transition to EVs. In fact, the Chinese data suggest that supply from new deployment of renewables is far outstripping new demand from EVs.

The installed base of wind and solar is about to overtake nuclear, in terms of energy produced. Renewables have won this because their costs have plummeted and because they are simpler and easier to install. Macdonald believes that we should maintain our existing capacity, and this makes sense, since the installed base of nuclear is producing cleaner electricity than coal or oil can. He’s also in favour of introducing more capacity if it can be done more quickly perhaps through the much touted small modular reactors [SMRs].

I am less persuaded by this. Nuclear has lost the cost argument, hopelessly (how stupid the UK government’s 2012 Hinkley Point decision now looks, through any lens). The baseload argument in favour of nuclear power is disappearing quickly as new electric storage systems are developed. And there’s a reason why one of the classic design challenges is to design a sign or site that conveys “nuclear waste hazard” to a reader in 10,000 years time.

The other issue is that nuclear power is always connected to nuclear weapons. If we are worrying about the future quality of life of species on earth, that is far more likely to affected irreversibly by nuclear war than by the differences in climate change outcomes between building more nuclear capacity or not doing so. My reasons for believing this? That I share the view of those who think we have only avoided nuclear catastrophe so far through luck rather than judgment.

#2: How to be a Silicon Valley intellectual

The Baffler has a hilarious instructional article on how to be a credible Silicon Valley intellectual. The writer, Aaaron Timms, has clearly spent more time than is good for you studying the output of the leaders in the field, from Peter Thiel to Paul Graham to Sam Altman, and it’s fair to say that he’s got it down:

On your path to becoming an intellectual in Silicon Valley, understanding these two lessons—the Peter Principles, we’ll call them, since that adds nothing to the conversation but sounds sophisticated—will be key to your success. First, the point of your interventions in the public sphere is not to “win” any “argument,” nor to attract new adherents or convince neutrals of the righteousness of your cause. It is to avoid competition.. Second, there is no absolute moral evil that cannot be playfully reframed on irrelevant grounds as a net historical good.

Perhaps it’s not odd that just when Moore’s Law has lost its predictive power, and the price to performance ratio of semiconductors is no longer doubling every 18 months or so, the price to performance ratio of Silicon Valley intellectuals is accelerating to fill the gap:

Paul’s Law states that the population of VC intellectuals increases at a similarly exponential rate. This law takes its name, of course, from Paul Graham, the man who has done more than anyone else to make the venture capitalist not simply an investor of other people’s money but a critical thinker on politics and society. From his pithy Twitter feed to his legendary blog, the cofounder of Y Combinator has exhibited an unrivaled capacity to be consistently wrong on all the great questions of the age—or so his critics would have you believe. And this is the man’s special strength: the more the online mob criticizes him, the more right he’s convinced he is, and the stronger he grows. 

The piece is a users’ guide to becoming a fully fledged Silicon Valley intellectual. You could even think of it as a self-help guide. The good news is that you don’t have to be a successful Silicon Valley investor in your own right, and that, fortunately, there are surprisingly few topics you need to master. Timms reckons all Silicon Valley intellectuals gravitate around three subjects (since you ask: free speech, wealth taxes, and why America mustn’t be like France.) The bad news is that you almost certainly have to be male. Having figured that out:

How should you present everything? “Write like you talk,” Paul Graham once said, but he forgot to add: “And talk like an asshole.” Your sentences should be short. And simple. And broken out. Into blocks. Like this. See? Not patronizing at all.

There’s much more here and the sharp humour is sometimes laugh out loud. I enjoyed his Silicon Valley description of Samuel Beckett. But it’s also making a serious point: why is it that people who have nothing to say are taken so seriously when they say it? And, please: don’t try this at home.

(h/t John Naughton)

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