Energy and the Information Infrastructure: Part 2 – The Invisible & Voracious ‘Information Superhighway

REAL CLEAR ENERGY ……     Part 1 of this series (here) focused on the “Cloud” of datacenters—energy-gobbling warehouse-scale computers—that sit largely out of sight at the center of the Internet. In part 2 we explore the invisible “information superhighway” that connects the Cloud to everyone and, soon, everything. The ethereal magic of radio photons now…

American LNG will meet Europe’s urgent need for gas

FINANCIAL TIMES……….. That the Nord Stream 2 pipeline will increase Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas is a geographic and arithmetical fact. But buried in the heated rhetoric — now rising to US sanction threats — over how much that matters, is just how inexpensive it would be for Europe to purchase…

Energy and the Information Infrastructure Part 1: Bitcoins & Behemoth Datacenters

It has been said that data is the new oil. Both domains are critical to society, entailing massive infrastructures and globe-spanning businesses. Of course one produces energy, while the other uses it. It may seem inconceivable that a single smartphone is responsible for as much electricity demand as a refrigerator, but that’s what the physics dictates. This series explores the energy…

Silicon Valley’s Political Perils

City Journal .……….. It’s a truism that Silicon Valley leans left, but the average tech millionaire is not easy to pigeonhole ideologically. A revealing, if little-noted, 2017 study from Stanford University compared more than 600 “elite technology company leaders and founders,” ….

Solar Power Too Cheap to Meter? Another Green Dream

e21 ……..        Not satisfied with the mere claim that solar and wind are reaching parity with the costs of conventional energy technologies, green enthusiasts are upping the ante claiming that, as one UBS bank analyst recently put it, by “2030, the cost [of solar] could be so near to zero it will effectively be free.”