The great copium binge

An old local joke states “Calm down, sailors, the ship is sinking normally. There will be water for everyone.” I was recently reminded of that joke while browsing energy news, where a lot of reports appeared to have turned into self-administered doses of that new and completely inefficient of all drugs that was discovered recently by online users: copium. The corporate media is taking a lot of copium these days. And it’s not alone.

Consider this recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. How Trump’s AI, Crypto Push Would Spur Clean Energy tells us that demand for electricity from the tech sector is rising so fast, they need every last electron they can get into their cables, regardless of origin. I’ve no idea why this is being presented as news, since very few people, let alone companies, care about the origin of their electricity but that’s not the point. The point is in the headline, which is a badly veiled sneer at Trump for presumably giving a boost to wind and solar instead of killing them as threatened.

The sneerers may yet turn into the sneerees, however, if they spare a moment’s thought about how wind and solar have managed to make it this far: with subsidies and the premature retirement of baseload generation capacity. Trump wants to put an end to the subsidies and see what happens. But no, the WSJ authors are certain that the surge in electricity demand that data centres are expected to unleash on highly-suspecting utilities will result in a surge in wind and solar. Because — you will never guess — wind and solar developers say so.