AQOP in Polish, Judith Curry, Google's Zambia-size juice needs
A Short Friday Note
AQOP will be published in Polish
Judith Curry talks climate politics on the podcast
Google’s Zambia-size electricity needs
Sila Energii!
Some good news came in this week about A Question of Power. On Tuesday, my publisher, PublicAffairs, informed me that the Polish-language rights to the book were bought by Wydawnictwo Naukowe and that they will publish it in December. They have changed the title to Sila Energii, which translates as “The Power of Energy.” (The subtitle wasn’t changed.) The sale of the Polish rights means that AQOP will soon be available in four languages: English, Korean, Russian, and Polish. I like the way they re-used the original cover design, which was originally done by Pete Garceau, the graphic whiz who has designed the last four of my book covers.
New Podcast: Judith Curry of Climate Forecast Applications Network
The Power Hungry Podcast continues to be lots of fun. And it is finding an audience. It's ranked among the top 40 science podcasts in the US and the top 50 globally in that category. I’ve also been heartened by the warm reaction I have been getting from individual listeners. A few weeks ago while in Montana, a man who was attending the Montana Electric Cooperatives’ Association meeting took me aside to tell me how much he liked the podcast. That type of reaction reinforces my belief in the intimacy of the podcast format.
This week, we released an episode with Judith Curry, a climatologist, former academic, and entrepreneur who has broken with much of the political orthodoxy about climate change. Curry is the president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network. She left her job at Georgia Tech in 2017 after years of being vilified for questioning many of the claims being made by other academics about climate science. In our discussion, she explains why she believes climate science “has become a political party with totalitarian tendencies.” We also talked about the limits of models, the role of heretics in society, why renewables alone can’t meet our energy and power needs, and why nuclear energy and adaptation to a changing climate are the best paths forward.
It was a great discussion. I encourage you to give it a listen.
(Unfortunately, we don't have a transcript for this episode. For some reason, our transcription service rejected the audio file we submitted. We hope to resolve the issue soon.)
Google's Zambia-size Electricity Needs
If you've read A Question of Power, you will recall that it includes a chapter on the soaring electricity demand coming from the big technology companies, including Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
On Wednesday, I published a piece in Forbes about Google’s enormous electricity use. The news hook was the antitrust lawsuit filed on Tuesday against the tech giant by the US Justice Department and 11 states. I wrote that “Complex algorithms, software, and custom-built servers have helped make Google into one of the world’s richest and most-powerful corporations. But Google’s business is wholly dependent on something more prosaic: electricity." I continued, "Last year, Google used about 12.4 terawatt-hours of electricity, which means it uses more electric power than entire countries, including ones like Sri Lanka and Zambia." I went on:
Google has become a vertically integrated information-electric utility. It gained near-total market dominance in search and advertising by controlling nearly every aspect of its business, including the ownership of its own fleet of electricity generators...There are some parallels between Google’s position today and that of the most-famous monopoly in American history: Standard Oil. More than a century ago, John D. Rockefeller controlled large swaths of the oil sector, including refineries, pipelines, and distributors. He even purchased rail tanker cars to assure timely delivery of Standard Oil’s products to customers. Today, Google and the other technology giants are building their own electric grids so their data centers and fiber-optic networks never experience even a second of downtime due to brownouts or blackouts. And as the amount of online information soars, their electricity consumption – and need for ever-more generation capacity (both conventional and renewable) – will continue soaring, too.
Okay. I promised to keep this short. I hope y’all have a raucous weekend.
What can you do?
1. Subscribe to the Power Hungry Podcast and give it a five-star rating here.
2. Rent or buy Juice on iTunes or Amazon Prime.
3. Buy my new book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations.
4. Follow me and Juice on Twitter.
5. Forward this note to your friends/family/colleagues so I can add them to the email list.
Thanks!