Virtual Energy

“I am the Alpha and the Omega” Revelation 1:8

Phew, life is a funny thing, punchlines can be nasty, sometimes brutish, but don’t lose your ability to laugh. The NYT has a piece about Google creating “virtual power plants” to meet the unquenchable energy needs of our post-human intelligence future, though it all seems very 20^th century to me.

What’s proposed is organizing electricity demand, so in times of high demand, people decrease usage, freeing up the electricity already flowing, so Google compute can go on uninterrupted. There is no new electricity, just redirecting existing supply, hence the "virtual."

The funny part is thirty years ago, back when electricity demand was measured only once a month by utility employees scrambling over fences and avoiding dogs to read spinning meters, your friend and humble narrator was a big advocate of just such organized demand systems. I’d say, “A bit could save a watt.”

However, having an ancient sense of civitas, I conceived this as part of breaking the energy tyranny imposed by industrial technologies. Not only could we all be smarter about energy use, this would be an essential aspect of citizenry in the 21^st century.

I was also, and let me tell you it was an even more radical position in the electric industry, a big advocate of solar and other distributed generation technologies. Just as with demand, you could use information technologies to aggregate supply from thousands of solar rooftops at any given time, but not through Google, or lord help us our monopoly industrial utilities, but by creating new, energy enfranchised citizen associations

Nonetheless, here we are, the NYT promoting Google, funny, brutally so. The one time prospects of individual democratic empowerment through information technologies increasingly become the realities of tyrannical corporations seeking to not just control every aspect of life, but negate as much of it as they can.

What is little understood, because if you’re a fish you don’t think about water, is how entrenched the Valley oligarchs' mindsets are in the American experience. Most especially, the misconception of cheap and limitless energy. Our entire industrial value system is based on this misconception, at its worst equating energy waste with wealth.

After all, what price can really be placed on fossil fuels? Energy from the sun concentrated over tens of millions of years in organic life, then compressed and cooked for hundreds of millions more. Where do such costs figure in a quarterly report?

We have a new, mad rush to build more energy generation for the last industrial project marketed as AI. I wrote four years ago Tech's then proposed energy needs would never be met. This is starting to become clear. So, our Tech-Lords turn to the 1970s and start talking about managing demand, which actually, if done not to feed compute but as a necessary energy restructuring of American life would be a good thing.

So be of good cheer. Energy is the Α and Ω, the good news begins with that understanding.