Energy Future Including Room Temperature Superconductors

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I, Brian Wang, spoke with Randy Kirk about the room temperature superconductor developments and the future of energyo srand electric cars and trucks.

Randy asked me about Elon Musk comments about his predicted future shortages.

“My prediction is that we will go from…an extreme silicon shortage today to…an electricity shortage in two years,” Musk said during an event earlier this month to discuss his new startup, xAI, which aims to develop advanced intelligence. “That’s roughly where things are trending.” Rabble-rousing isn’t new for Musk.

There’s a supply shortage of Nvidia H100 GPUs. Companies seeking 100s or 1000s of H100s, Azure and GCP are effectively out of capacity, and AWS is close to being out. gpus.llm-utils.org tracks the Nvidia H100 supply and demand. The Nvidia H100 GPU boards are selling for about $40,000 on Ebay.

U.S. data centers consume 200 TWh (Terawatt Hours) annually. This is about 5% of US electricity (4100 TWh/year).

Global data centre electricity consumption in 2022 was 240-340 TWh or around 1-1.3% of global final electricity demand. This excludes energy used for cryptocurrency mining, which was estimated to be around 110 TWh in 2022, accounting for 0.4% of annual global electricity demand. Data centers are growing by 20-40% annually. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta more than doubled between 2017 and 2021, rising to around 72 TWh/year in 2021.

Eventually, if we electrify all cars and trucks this will mean shifting 25% of oil usage to electricity which will mean we will need 20-30% more electricity globally. There would be shortages if there is not of aggressive construction of solar, wind and other energy generation.

I explained space based solar power and how it is technically feasible and will become affordable with the fully reusable SpaceX Super Heavy Starship. It will be safe to transmit the power.

The room temperature superconductors will have big impact but the impact will be staged as the material problems are resolved to enable the promised commercial products.

They will be used where the problems for developing them are most easily overcome. I think this will be with ultra-fast (800GHz+ chips) vs 4-5 GHz b

The money will made in those first niches and this will fund research to improve the materials and increase production. There will be massive economic incentive to make thousands and then millions of tons of room temperature superconductors. As supply increases then more less valuable applications will get their room temperature superconductors.

27 thoughts on “Energy Future Including Room Temperature Superconductors”

  1. If I were to invest in something today, I would invest in space deployment of computing power and data storage. With rockets, a mask to put a bunch of servers into orbit will not be such a difficult thing. There is a lot of solar energy there. The problem of heat dissipation can be solved. And starlink will provide fast data transfer. I see it as thousands and tens of thousands of small satellites with solar panels and radiators that are launched and then a subscription is sold to them.

  2. Kirk Sorensen. of FLibe energy and thorium reactors, was part of a team that studied solar power satellites cost. He said that they built this huge spreadsheet of every single cost to build it. One day they put the launch cost into the spreadsheet as $0.00 and it still did not make economic sense. Now Kirk is extremely pro space travel so he’s not dashing this lightly, but the numbers are the numbers. I my self was very pro solar power satellites until I heard this.

  3. Well, let’s be honest. There will be no electricity shortage. We have hundreds of years of natural gas to power electrical plants. These plants can be built quickly.

    In the meanwhile we can build as much solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, or space-based solar as we can afford. People who are constantly worried about an electricity shortage aren’t living in reality.

      • Good point. Blackouts and brownouts are a political problem, not a supply problem. We have abundant energy to supply all of our needs. Creating artificial barriers to energy production is crazy.

        I understand the desire to cut CO2 emissions. I am all for it.

        But let’s not kill people by cutting off electricity during dangerously hot days or dangerously cold nights.

        Cruel and stupid.

        • If only CO2 was a problem. Meanwhile we have real problems, overpopulation, overexploitation of natural resources, pollution.

  4. NetZero will solve all of your problems. Literally. No. More. Problems.
    Of course, you may not like what that actually means. But it is literally true.

  5. Geothermal is a good energy source, reliable and steady power supply and can be build faster than nuclear. Even if there are less areas, where it is viable.

    Charging cars at night will make our energy grid more efficient.

    It is normal that data center use a lot, there is a lot money in that. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple,…

  6. If we don’t build nuclear quickly there will be shortages, obviously the entire world is quickly building gas and China is building coal at a fast rate.

  7. Space based solar power is safe because a 2 GW beam has a diameter of 2 km and so only has a power of about 200 W/m2, but what if we have 10000 SBSP arrays? Can’t you hack them to all point at the same area to get 2 MW/m2

    • You’d need to have very tightly controlled phase agreement between the beams, and you’d probably get a lot of side lobes, but, sure, in principle you could do something like that.

      Assuming you can hack 10,000 satellites at the same time, and they were designed to have that capacity in the first place. It would have to be deliberately designed in.

  8. “There would be shortages if there is not of aggressive construction of solar, wind and other energy generation.”

    If there’s aggressive construction of solar and wind, this practically guarantees random energy shortages, since neither source of energy is actually reliable. Even at the present level of build-out these sources are starting to render the grid unreliable.

    In theory it’s *possible* to build a reliable grid out of unreliable sources, if you overbuild by a factor of ten or more, and have perhaps a week worth of storage.

    Or you could just say, “Screw that!” and use reliable sources of power where you don’t have to pay for a week’s worth of storage and ten times more capacity than you need. That’s what a SANE society would do.

    Sadly, I think our energy policy is no longer made by sane people.

    • Just to be clear, I don’t think space based solar qualifies as an “unreliable” source of power. Unfortunately, neither does it qualify as a “short term” source of power, and at the rate our government is attempting to force us into a non-fossil fuel future, we need power sources we can break ground on tomorrow, not launch a decade from now.

    • But Tony Seba has estimated just how much overcapacity and how much battery you would need, and it’s nowhere near your figures. We are talking about 24-48 hours of battery storage and 2-3x capacity. And the capacity will be cheaper than todays capacity, since solar cells are dropping in price rapidly.

      You may or you may not agree with his data and/or his conclusions, but then it’s up to you to show just where his assumptions are wrong.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duWFnukFJhQ&t=8s

      • I couldn’t get halfway through that video, without running into predictions he made that already failed.

        Here’s the problem: The current grid has 99.99% or better reliability. You probably go years between blackouts. Using real world weather records, solar takes about 10x overbuild and 4 days storage just to reach 99% reliability, an hour blackout every four days on average.

        This is because there’s this thing called “weather”, and solar power is really weak during bad weather, which can go on for weeks. So you need a LOT of overbuild and storage to guarantee, not that you have enough power on average, but that you ALWAYS have enough power, when people actually want it.

    • Oh do check out Server Sky.
      Put the data centers in orbit, just bigger hard drives on starling satellites

  10. Long distance undersea DC power cables just like fiber optics might be easier than space solar.

    There will be no power shortages from EVs if they charge at any time other than the 50 or so hottest and coldest hours of the year. Essentially all power plants can produce more energy. We’ll just consume more gas and coal.

    Autonomous EVs will consume way more energy than everyone thinks. Maybe 2-3x. Processors and comms consume energy. So do “dead head” miles traveled to and from chargers and between fares with nobody on board.

    They will also reduce the cost of transportation, which will induce more demand and probably enable new industries.

    • We’ve got a major war going on in Ukraine, which has included pipelines being destroyed. Do you actually want avoiding continent-wide blackouts to be dependent on nobody bombing an undersea cable?

      I could envision a world peaceful enough for that to be safe. We don’t live in it.

  11. How is space-based solar power helpful? Would we not simply be adding more energy, mostly as heat, and into the atmosphere and warming things up more?

    • While I don’t know that space is the solution. The biggest part of the problem is the CO2 content of the atmosphere. The earth absorbs many orders of magnitude more heat/energy per year from the sun (about 10,000x) than the usage of any man made power. The problem is that CO2 and other ‘greenhouse’ gases trap that energy/heat at a higher percentage than the standard air mix that the earth has had in the past 800,000 years. Even a small uptick in trapping of that energy from the sun is problematic at best. So we need to either 1. reduce the breakdown of CO2, 2. take out more than we use out of the air or 3. dim the earth or cause it to be more reflective.

      • There is no CO2 emergency. Rather, the emergency is a profound lack of integrity on the part of those lining their own pockets at the expense of the poor and middle class.

    • Pretty much all heat energy added to the atmosphere by the sun or Earth or human activity radiates out into space fairly quickly. Only a little bit is retained in the atmosphere.
      Global Warming is due to increasing the amount of heat retained.
      There would be some small warming from continuous heavy use of SSP, but the reduction in GH gases should far more than make up for that.

    • Human energy use today is about 20 TW, in total. Earth absorbs 122,200 TW. So increasing human energy use by a factor of 5, for example, is still insignificant. For comparison the capture of heat by Greenhouse Gases is about 2040 TW. If we reduce that by half, then there’s lots of room to add *useful* energy to human activities from space.

      • And if you really were concerned, you could place the SPS at L-1, and put microwave relays instead of powerplants in geosynch. That way all the power that got sent to Earth would come from sunlight that would have hit the planet if the SPS hadn’t intercepted it.

        I wouldn’t really recommend doing that, of course, since you’d need a ridiculously large phased array to get the beam size down by the time it reached the region of Earth. But it would be an interesting option if you were going to be beaming power all over the solar system anyway.

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