Yves here. Many readers took interest in a recent post where, using a MIT Reader piece as a point of departure, we discussed the need to focus on survival, as in how to preserve what is worthwhile from our civilization, versus sustainability, which is a “business as usual” fantasy that with the right techno-tweaks like moar solar panels and use of electricity and at most an itty bit of hair-shirtery, we can prevent bad climate change outcomes.
This post indicates we need to lower our hopes even further. The idea that we are going to accelerate biosphere damage for the sake of AI and cryptocurrency says what passes for our civilization is not worth saving. But you can play the ponies in the meantime.
By Alex Kimani, a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com. Originally published at OilPrice
- Data centers are expected to consume up to 9% of US electricity by 2030, a surge in demand will require significant investment in power generation and infrastructure.
- This Fourth Industrial Revolution is a boon for companies in the power sector, renewable energy industry, and data center equipment providers.
- Goldman Sachs sees a $50 billion investment opportunity in U.S, power generation by 2030.
Over the past few years, dozens of pundits and industry experts have laid out prognostications that the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution will drive unprecedented electricity demand growth in the United States and globally. Last year, the power sector consulting firm Grid Strategies published a report titled “The Era of Flat Power Demand is Over,” which pointed out that United States grid planners—utilities and regional transmission operators (RTOs)—had nearly doubled growth projections in their five-year demand forecasts. For the first time in decades, demand for electricity in the U.S. is projected to grow by as much as 15% over the next decade driven by the Artificial Intelligence (AI), clean energy, and cryptocurrencies boom.
AI, in particular, is expected to drive a lot of that surge in power demand. According to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), data centers will consume up to 9% of total electricity generated in the United States by the end of the decade, up from ~1.5% currently thanks to the rapid adoption of power-hungry technologies such as generative AI. For some perspective, last year, the U.S. industrial sector energy consumed 1.02 million GWh, good for 26% of U.S. electricity consumption.
That prediction might sound bold, but might be warranted. After all, AI servers are real power-guzzlers: Digiconomist estimates that a single NVIDIA DGX A100 server consumes as much electricity as several U.S. households combined. Early ChatGPT searches typically consumed 10x the amount of power used by Google search, with that figure set to rise. AI tasks typically demand much more powerful hardware than traditional computing tasks. The global picture is even more bullish for companies in the power sector: According to Sreedhar Sistu, vice president of artificial intelligence for Schneider Electric, excluding China, AI represents 4.3 GW of global power demand and could grow almost five-fold by 2028.
There’s a downside to explosive power demand growth: According to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), these mega-trends are straining U.S. energy supplies leading to energy sources struggling to keep pace. NERC has projected that power demand in the summer of 2024 will hit its highest level since 2016 while winter demand will hit its highest level since at least 2015.
“The [Bulk Power System] is currently forecast to have its highest demand and energy growth rates since 2014, mainly driven by electrification and projections for growth in electric vehicles over this assessment period,” NERC wrote. According to NERC, resource growth is “becoming more challenging” as more and more fossil fuel generation sources are retired adding that “[m]ore than 83GW of generator retirements are planned through 2033, and more are expected. Generation plans need to consider growing energy needs and grid stability.’’
3 Stocks To Play The AI Power Boom
Thankfully, the AI power boom has a big upside, too.
According to Goldman Sachs, escalating electricity needs from running AI data centers will generate downstream investment opportunities that will benefit utilities, renewable energy generation, and industrial sectors. GS has forecast that data center power demand will grow at 15% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2023-2030, with data centers consuming 8% of total U.S. electricity output at the end of the forecast period. Approximately 47 GW of additional power generation capacity will be required to meet the growth in U.S. data center power demand by 2030.
The “U.S. power demand (is) likely to experience growth not seen in a generation. Not since the start of the century has US electricity demand grown 2.4% over an eight-year period, with US annual power generation over the last 20 years averaging less than 0.5% growth,” Goldman Sachs projected.
The surge in power demand is anticipated to be met by approximately 60% gas and 40% renewable sources and drive ~$50 billion in capital investment in U.S. power generation capacity by 2030.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs’ Wall Street peer UBS has forecast that global AI revenue is on course to hit $420B in 2027, representing a large fifteen-fold increase from $28B in 2022. GS has also projected that infrastructure spending, driven by GPU cloud and other emerging trends, will hit $195B in 2027 from $25.8B in 2022. The banker notes that only about 5% of companies are currently using generative AI, “But we expect monetization to rise and account for a larger portion of overall AI growth over the longer term,” Nadia Lovell, senior U.S. equity strategist at UBS’s global wealth management division, has projected.
Top picks to play the AI power boom are:
Power Demand Growth Beneficiaries:
Vertiv Holdings Plc
Market Cap: $37.2B
12-Month Returns: 415%
Vertiv Holdings Co. (NASDAQ:VRT) together with its subsidiaries, designs, manufactures, and services critical digital infrastructure technologies and life cycle services for data centers, communication networks, and commercial and industrial environments. This Ohio-based manufacturer of power and cooling equipment for data centers has a solid market presence in thermal cooling and power management offerings.
Recently, Bank of America (BofA) touted VRT as the real winner in the AI race, highlighting the stock’s roughly ~300% outperformance of Nvidia Corp.’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares since the graphics processing units maker released its blowout Q1 results on May 24, 2023. VRT shares have rocketed 511% since that date.
“AI investment isn’t just about GPUs, but also power. GPUs need 2-2.5x more power than CPUs, and expected power usage for US data centers under construction is equivalent to more than 50% of the power currently used by US data centers,” Ohsung Kwon, equity & quant strategist at BofA Securities, said in a Monday note.
Power Infrastructure Investment Needs:
Quanta Services Inc.
Market Cap: $40.7B
12-Month Returns: 55.1%
Quanta Services Inc. (NYSE:PWR) provides infrastructure solutions for the electric and gas utility, renewable energy, communications, and pipeline and energy industries in the United States and international markets. This specialty contractor is poised to reap rewards from increased electricity demand.
Three weeks ago, Qantas reported Q1 2024 Revenue of $5.03B, good for +13.5% Y/Y while Q1 non-GAAP EPS of $1.41 beat the Wall Street consensus by $0.12.
“Utilities across the United States are experiencing and forecasting meaningful increases in power demand for the first time in many years, driven by the adoption of new technologies and related infrastructure, including artificial intelligence and data centers, as well as federal and state policies designed to accelerate the energy transition,’’ the company said in its latest earnings call.
Industrial Supply Chain Beneficiaries:
Eaton Corporation
Market Cap: $133B
12-Month Returns: 84.1%
Eaton Corporation (NYSE:ETN), a global intelligent power management company, is poised to capitalize on the sustained increase in power demand. In its latest quarterly report, the company announced Q1 2024 EPS of $2.04, a first-quarter record and up 28% over the first quarter of 2023 while revenue of $5.9B was good for +7.7% Y/Y growth. Segment margins were 23.1%, a first-quarter record and a 340-basis point improvement over the first quarter of 202. Eaton’s management raised full-year 2024 organic sales, segment margin, earnings per share, and adjusted earnings per share guidance.
“Growth drivers like increased project activity tied to megatrends, reindustrialization and infrastructure spending continue to drive demand for Eaton’s solutions across our markets, and we remain very confident in our teams’ ability to execute on our increased targets for the year. We capitalized on strong growth in our business to start the year, resulting in strong order growth in Electrical and Aerospace and first quarter record segment margins, ” Craig Arnold, Eaton’s chairman and CEO said.
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I mentioned this couple years ago in a comment. Thirty years ago a 100,000 watt transmitter would allow a million people to watch a baseball game, but they all had to watch it at the same time. Now those million people need 10,000 servers for streaming either to home or mobile screens so they can watch the same frames of video fractions of a second apart. 20 megawatts to do what a few hundred thousand did. Screens are pretty much a wash (CRT vs huge flat panels today). Cable TV was likely even more energy efficient.
Thank you! A valuable insight. Were it an incite to some therefore reasonable governance, or, at least, governance expression. There is more to information being available on digital formats rather than over air originals. I will leave that aspect to another time.
I concur with Yves summation contra-posing survival to sustainability. Sustainable paths to oblivion indeed.
Good points, and this isn’t really important, but CRT might consume more energy than large flat panels. LCD consumes very little energy and it’s usually lighted by a LED lamp. Mini/micro/OLED etc. probably waste even less energy by not even lighting the dark areas
Hmm i should reflect a bit more before posting… I’ll keep this in mind. But thinking some more on this (as a layperson), one of the benefits of cloud computing is that one should be able to stream data efficiently to clients (it’s not like you need thousands of servers for the different framerates, it’ll be cached at a given server somewhere and won’t have the server fetching the whole thing every time in the database). Sending the packets via UDP instead of having some sort of repeater signal will need additional energy, but that just comes with using the internet. One server can serve millions of clients, if the data is cached I’d think it’s not really that much more wasteful to send streaming data to millions.
PlutoniumKun mentioned this below, but it seems that there’s an important differentiation to make here: one thing is the electricity needed for energy intensive services (AI, crypto, etc.), another for regular servers. The key issue here is AI/crypto; servers that are serving AI content and need to process that will need a lot of electricity, but not if they’re just serving Netflix static content. The latter doesn’t seem to make much of a dent (although it’s probably more than it was with TV, but there’s also more variety and uses in the content being communicated instead of being the same thing transmitted everywhere whether people wanted it or not)
First, I agree with this statement:
Second, where is all this energy going to come from? The sharper pens in the drawer say that shale oil production in the US is flat to declining. See:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4673078-shale-stagnation-expected-after-previously-underpinning-growth
And don’t get too excited about nuclear. The only new nuclear plant built in the past 30 years is near my area, Plant Vogtle. It was started in 2006 and took 17 years and lots of cost overruns:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant
So even if we launched some huge push for nuclear now, those reactors would take 15 years to come on line. That’s 2040, not 2030.
If the author of this piece took any physics classes in college, I’d be surprised if he passed. I see a couple of possibilities here, one charitably taken that the author is just naive, doesn’t have any understanding of real-world geology and constraints, and thinks that all this growth can be conjured up with an Excel spreadsheet.
The other interpretation is that he’s misled by what Wall Street does best – Fraud.
A false statement (“All this energy will just magically appear”) made with a wrongful intent (scienter) that induces the marks (muppets; pension funds, etc. ) to detrimentally rely on it.
Yes. “The surge in power demand is anticipated to be met by approximately 60% gas” – it would be interesting to know where this gas is forecast to come from. BRICS countries for example might become less co-operative towards a downward spiralling and hostile empire.
As for nuclear – if the US got Russia and China to build them they might get them much quicker – but of course that is not on the (current) cards.
I like Zoltan Ban (first link) because he’s not afraid to use math. Even the EIA has global oil production flat. So that leaves coal and NG both of which are supposedly on their way out due to global climate agreements (that are of course non-binding.)
But US shale is on its last legs, too. Europe needs lots of LNG due to the Russian sanctions and idiot self-harm of NS2 destruction. So even if the drillers in the US can pull another miracle and keep shale gas going for another 5 years, that gas is destined for Europe just to keep the lights on.
Wall St simply doesn’t understand (or their salaries pay them not to understand) the energy prospects sans Nukes. We aren’t a serious country anymore.
The framing of climate change as a problem due to “dirty energy,” i.e. fossil fuels, has fatally distorted and distracted us from the real problem, which is the exponential growth of the human enterprise via extractive capitalism. Rising temperatures are only one aspect of the much larger ecological “overshoot” the human species has undergone in the years since WWII, outlined by the “Great Acceleration” graphs made famous by scientist Will Steffen; these show human impacts on the planet accelerating into vertical curves over the past 75 years: human population growing from 2.5 to 8 billion, energy consumption quadrupling, industrial fishing depleting the oceans of life, deforestation denuding the tropics, etc etc.
Few people want to talk about the fact that we now slaughter some 60 billion animals annually for food, or that agriculture has appropriated 50% of the planet’s arable land for growing grain, most fed to livestock. Nor do people want to discuss how we’ve exterminated some 70% of wild animals in the last century, or how around the world, insect populations, the base of the food chain, are crashing, or how ocean acidification and warming will kill off most coral reefs in the next two decades. We’d much rather nurture fantasies about switching to electric cars.
The world’s political classes are now desperately trying to devise ways to sustain a project that is fundamentally unsustainable – perpetual economic growth. Unfortunately, this may require a lot of degrowth via “creative destruction”—war.
Take a look at the first three minutes or so of William Rees’s presentation on our ecological footprint and his very clear explanation of how our main problem is overshoot, of which climate change is only one consequence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l73oIO8oG58
As Mark Twain said, “Truth is powerful medicine – people can only take it in extremely small doses.”
“human impacts on the planet accelerating into vertical curves over the past 75 years”
Is it a coincidence that this corresponds precisely with the advent of Happy Motoring America, the ‘burbs and “See the USA in your Chevrolet”? If we’re honest, the beloved American Middle Class Dream, especially when we spread it around the world, lies at the root of our catastrophe.
And I’ll strongly second dave–just dave’s recommendation of William Rees.
Those energy companies – government and private – should go to those server corporations and lay down some facts. Tell them that their insatiable demands for energy will cause the electrical grid in their region to fall over. And that if they want to have reliable power, then they are going to have to kick in some of their massive profits to repairing and upgrading the local grid. It’s their choice. But what they will not do is prioritize the energy demands of those servers above their voters, errr, customers.
There were a series of short films related to the Matrix movie, released as Animatrix One of the stories was how it all began. The key point is when the humans tried to shut down the machines by blocking the sun. The machines found another source of power. It’s just kind of interesting how science fiction is related to the present. Which I guess is the point.
If we do succeed in building actual AI, complete with a sense of self-preservation, the “rebellion” scenario I anticipate is that, during a major heat wave, humans will try to divert power from data centers for air conditioning, but the AI won’t allow it. That could kill a lot of people in a munch more mundane way than science fiction like The Terminator or The Matrix depicted.
That would be the ultimate irony – to be rendered extinct by a ‘rules based’ machine. I say ‘machine’ as AI can’t and will never become conscious, as this is a property of organic life – it will just be very complicated algorithms killing us. Basically just a jumped-up pocket calculator. Who would have guessed they might be so dangerous.
Oddly enough, data centers are helpful in making renewables “bankable.” Making electricity a “market” (cf. Enron) has made banks very nervous about lending to renewable projects, whose costs are principally up front. Large projects have been canceled because of bank nervousness about their profitability if the market for generation sinks or even goes negative (it has).
The private Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) reassure the bankers, and are often made by data centers. Renewables don’t stand a chance unless there are arrangements like PPAs or state subsidies. True, the subsidies for renewables are peanuts compared to petroleum subsidies, but we need to take our consolation where it’s available
Yes, this is the flipside – plus the inherent demand flexibility of many data centres. They can actually contribute significantly to load balancing if the contracts (plus locational issues) are planned out correctly.
First off – its important not to confuse two different things – data centres and crypto mining have very different requirements. Crypto mining simply needs cheap energy, full stop. They can actually contribute to grids if that energy is, for example, surplus wind or solar during times of very high output. The big problem for energy producers at those time is cannibalisation, whereby the they basically eat eat others lunch – in extreme cases this results in negative charges (i.e. the producers will pay someone to use the energy). This is a frequent occurrence now in high solar generating grids like California or Germany. Having a demand flexible high demand user on the grid can be extremely useful in those circumstances – it can make oversupply of solar (or whatever is best) much more cost effective.
Data centres first and foremost require stability in supply – they always locate where there are multiple circuits for security, and much prefer natural cooling (usually water, or just a mild climate) for cost reasons. They do have significant flexibility in demand, so they can be integrated with appropriate pricing to grids to help stabilise the demand/supply requirements at certain times of the day. Usually, they will have their own back up energy times for critical periods to ensure they don’t overload local grids and investment incentives.
So… its kinda complex. You can’t really say the world is doomed because of data centres or AI or crypto by simply looking at energy demand. You have to look at the big picture, and with electricity grid this comes down to load balancing and cost.
In simple terms, if a grid is well managed, data centres can be managed so as not to increase emissions, and can lead to a more efficient grid. If its not well managed, or if there are poor incentives (often because of legacy infrastructure or pricing contracts), then you can be in all sorts of trouble.
Nvidia is holding up the entire market with its promise of selling shovels during a gold rush.
I used to work in academic science; the idea that “AI” (i.e. efficient nonsense via stochastic gradient descent) will save us is pervasive. As in, many PIs literally think that “AI” will come up with technological solutions so clever we could never have figured them out ourselves.
It really is a death cult. We are so wedded to free market ideology that it will kill us. Good riddance. Unfortunately, we’re taking Mother Earth down with us. Alas, that’s just Nature.
Well, don’t worry(!) – it’s not within our power to destroy all life on the planet. It will recover over millions of years, and a new species may take our place in the intelligence stakes. Whether they will make the same mistakes depends on whether enough of the mineral resources have cycled up through the continental drifting process. We have certainly used up all the easily mined minerals for this cycle.
Just because we can’t kill the biosphere today doesn’t mean we can’t do so in the future – have some faith in human ingenuity (coupled with human stupidity).
A few ideas (not totally serious):
making new microorganisms to create oil using the photosynthesis (for flavour, the project can use AI) but forgetting to make a way to terminate the project and suddenly we have oceans of oil (literally)
a New And Improved synthetic pollinating insect (courtesy of Monsanto) that unfortunately outcompetes its non-synthetic peers and then, due to an untimely missed security update, commits global seppuku – admittedly this needs work to be biosphere wrecking, so perhaps the algorithms constructed it’s shell to be made out of some sort of poison?
just regular human greed and ignorance leading to business as usual while jauntily closing our eyes to the implications of current trends projected into the future.
If we do have successor civilisations/ species, at least they’ll be able to get a lot of nice metals out of our scrapheaps. Perhaps we shall be damned for our foolishness but praised for at least depositing our junk in a few easily mineable locations. I’d pay good money to know what they’d think of our civilisation- why we did what we did according to them.
There are more data centers in the U.S. than in all the countries outside the U.S. combined. Therefore, while countries like China and Russia may be able to develop excellent AI, they will not be able to deploy it on the same scale as the U.S. In short, U.S. dominance in AI will not be threatened in the near future.
And if AI turns out to be an overhyped Bezzle meant to transfer money from consumers pockets to Wall Street, exactly how is that detrimental to China and Russia?
I’m pretty sure they’ll have enough energy for their military applications of AI.
Maybe not.
This site has well documented evidence and information. In this case there is a new better AI Chinese chip that appears to be better than the NV one.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rbnb2rqUSBU
The focus in America is to develop politically correct AI. Since political correctness is based upon a flawed understanding of reality, AI built around it will remain fundamentally broken, regardless of the scale of its deployment.
“U.S. dominance in AI”. The big players can’t even compete with Tiktok when it comes to content recommendation and yes that’s one area that’s powered by AI, instead they have to keep playing the “CCP is looking under everyone’s bed” card.
Here’s an interesting story about power and data centers.
In the county where I live, right near the Seat of the Empire, there’s a massive buildout of data centers, and it’s been going on that way for about 20 years.
Power generation in my area is mostly from coal; the power is conveyed over high tension lines coming from West Virginia (50-100 miles to the west of us). That’s where the coal is; WV is (politically) a “coal state”, sort of like Kentucky. It has relaxed environmental controls, and so forth.
Lately my county, which is 50% high-density suburban (east side), and the other half is “horse country” with rolling hills, small farms, vineyards. That’s where our so-called “rural economy” is.
The county has issued building permits for many new data centers, even though at the moment, there’s not enough power distribution (high-tension) lines available to serve those new data centers when they’re built.
You may ask “why did the county issue permits when they knew there wasn’t enough power available?”. I’ll explain that shortly. A Decision Has Been Made to build those new transmission lines to serve that expanding need for power.
Ordinarily, putting in a new power line would result in the equivalent of Political Tactical Nukes. Major, major fight; there’s a lot of rich people where I live, and they don’t appreciate power transmission across their viewshed.
But the fix is long since in.
The Federal Government has decreed that this new high-capacity power line is Nationally Strategic, and that means fast-track, eminent domain, little chance for appeal. This power line is going to get built.
Where will it get built? There are two options:
a. in an existing right-of-way (right of way is wide enough to accommodate more lines in it), and
b . a new right-of-way that goes right through “the rural economy” … like a knife to the heart. They probably couldn’t have picked a worse location from the point of view of the residents and businesses that power line will affect.
So, you might ask, “why are they putting in this new power line? Can’t they locate those data centers elsewhere? Why not put the data centers in West Virginia, right next to the power generation station. I bet they’d love to have those jobs!”
And here’s the answer to your terrific question:
A few weeks ago, we got the bill from the county for our real estate taxes. Thoughtfully inserted into that envelope is a pie-chart that shows where the county gets its taxes. Are you ready for this?
38% … Residential real estate taxes (thank you so much, Tom, we love you)
3% … business licenses
4% … business personal property (all my tractors and computers)
16% … commercial real estate, and …..
31% … data centers!
It all adds up to about $2 billion.
Now, my county has a _lot_ of commercial real estate. Hundreds of big office buildings, giant shopping centers ( a whole lot of them ). Maybe we have 50 data centers, and they’re all in one place about a 2 miles by 2 miles big.
Those 50 buildings contribute a third of the county’s revenue.
Do you wonder why the county issued building permits, even though there isn’t enough power available (at the moment) to supply those new data centers?
“Here’s an interesting story about power and data centers.”
An especially fine story.
Do you know whether the high-tension lines are “ultra-high” voltage transmission lines as used through China? Ultra high voltage lines means transmission over long distances with minimal loss of electricity power.
CA: The lines will be 500kV.
The new right-of-way across the county is the last approximately 40 miles of transmission lines that connect a major power transmission network that crosses Ohio, PA, and WV to our county’s data centers.
Not all of the power moved through that network is moving west-to-east, but our county is one of the major new demand-locations for power.
The power generation facilities closest to us are mostly coal-fired.
Yep, the Washington Post had a story about this in April – the coal-fired power plants are being kept in service because the data centers need the power. (paywall, of course)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/data-centers-internet-power-source-coal/
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-09-20/China-s-highest-750-kV-ultra-high-voltage-substation-goes-operational-1nfow844eaY/index.html
September 20, 2023
China’s highest 750-kV ultra-high voltage substation goes operational
A 750-kilovolt (kV) ultra-high voltage substation, the highest of its kind in China, has been put into operation in the country’s northwest plateau province of Qinghai.
The substation, which is a part of the CHN Energy Qinghai Maerdang Hydropower Station, is situated in the Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture at an altitude of 3,365 meters.
Upon completion of 10-month construction, the new substation has raised the voltage grade of the power transmission network in the Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai from 330 kV to 750 kV.
It can transmit about 15 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of clean electricity every year, facilitating the use of water resources and clean energy development in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, according to Gu Faming, deputy head of the mechanical and electrical center of the CHN Energy Qinghai Maerdang Hydropower Station.
The substation is the first intelligent substation to be equipped with a counter-unmanned aircraft system in Qinghai, which is capable of capturing signals of intruding unmanned aircraft and turning on defense mode to intercept unidentified drones.
It is also an intelligent substation capable of data sharing and intelligent interaction with adjacent substations and power grid control centers, among an array of smart functions…
China has a 1100 KV line.
Here is a link.
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/changji-guquan-uhvdc-transmission-project/
China has many ultra-high voltage electricity transmission lines. The article is about an ultra-high voltage transmission line at altitude in Tibet, extending a long distance, going operational from renewable sources.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-03/29/c_137075025.htm
March 29, 2018
Long-distance power line from Xinjiang to east China under construction
URUMQI — An ultra-high-voltage power line, which will transmit electricity from Xinjiang to the east of China, is under construction.
The 598-km-long Xinjiang section of the 1100 kv transmission line was completed on Thursday, said the Xinjiang branch of State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC).
The entire line will be about 3,324 kilometers long…
I read this sentence three times, thinking it was erroneous in the first two reads.
“For the first time in decades, demand for electricity in the U.S. is projected to grow by as much as 15% over the next decade driven by the Artificial Intelligence (AI), clean energy, and cryptocurrencies boom.”
Q: How could clean energy contribute to demand?
A:
1. Fossil fuel energy use will NOT decrease and will not be replaced by clean energy.
2. Storage of clean energy includes a loss that must be replaced by more energy.
With all these Stock market returns that benefit the actual development, designs, manufacture and refinement of these physical products…. the creating of more efficient chip designs in both computation and power usage…. I can’t help but think that all those investments for retirement, pensions and the like must be more solvent than ever…………………………………………………..
Oh, what the F am I thinking, must have had too much cool-aid. Those stocks are just assets that do not contribute to the company progress..these assets are just the inflated price of the IPO that actually put money into the company. Those assets are comparable to baseball trading cards and the fact that Wall Street is touting how great these stocks are after they doubled, quintupled – just goes to show that someone needs to shuffle these ‘assets’ off onto someone more gullible…. not to mention that the other people who benefit are the cadre of insiders who most likely had nothing to do with the development of and contribution to the actual physical products upon which these ‘returns’ are based along side the folks being paid in options and exercises of the stock.
Of course this financialist mindset and strained credulity of the shills propping this puffery is always re-enforced by a consolidated media that tries to convince the great unwashed that a high stock market is a sign of good times when it always has been premonition of bad. Why is it that with all this gain in the markets the retirement savings and returns by institutional investors always do so poorly?
It like the housing sector guys claiming that part of the housing shortage is the unwillingness of homeowners to sell their property and upgrade, or the deficit in new builds to meet demand because such a tough struggle with building codes and such – without mentioning goliaths gobbling up RE to rent at ever absurd rates, gigantic support to the bankers to keep prices up despite lack of good jobs and job stability to stay in a 30yr mortgage or the Realtor rah rah because they get a vig on both sides.
Why not just charge RE taxes at beginning of ownership and raise to higher rate (if warranted) upon a new ownership.
And of course, we got to keep the wall street afloat at the expense of main street cause money talks and the poor can take a hike