(Worth reading article explaining how homeowners in rich countries might benefit from government subsidiaries for prohibitively expensive grid storeage, but third world countries cannot afford it).

The dirty little secret is that, at the scale relevant to most people, solar generation’s cost advantage is sort of beside the point. For solar to serve as the backbone of a grid, it needs to be backed with storage. That can come in the form of batteries, hydrogen, or pumped hydro. All of these are expensive; none of them scale. Storing a kilowatt-hour of electricity in a chemical battery costs an order of magnitude more than just generating it in a nuclear power plant. Which is why a 100% solar grid would be insanely expensive, even though generating solar power is basically free. 

Unfortunately, that dirty little secret—a fundamental reality of the operation of the energy grid—is often left out of the energy conversation. The solar hype machine continues to tout the benefits of solar without much understanding of how solar fits into a more complicated picture.

If all the terminology gets a bit confusing, this little fable might help.

Imagine you wake up tomorrow to news that scientists have invented a machine that renders hamburgers both environmentally benign and pretty much free. Environmentalists are delighted! There’s just one catch—the machine makes those burgers at random times, and if you don’t eat them the moment they’re made, they go bad.

Your kid, who is very concerned about the environment, hectors you into buying one of these machines. It whirs into action at 8:47 a.m. and makes three burgers, only you’re doing your school run just at that time. “Bad luck!” you think, as you throw out the spoiled burgers. The machine next springs to life at 2:09 p.m., at which time you wolf down the two burgers it makes only for the darn thing to crank up again at 4:12 p.m. when you’re at the gym. Once, it made nothing for a whole weekend. 

You start realizing that however free those burgers may be, you’re still going to have to rely on the grocery store down the street for a fair bit of your food. Along comes an environmentalist politician who decrees that, since these near-free-burgers are so eco-friendly, the neighborhood grocery store will be required to buy any unwanted burgers from you at a fixed price. This is the Burger Feed-in-Tariff, and I’m sure you can imagine how popular that rule is going to be with the grocery store. 

With the new rules, the grocery store is forced to buy the burgers your machine makes, even at times when nobody wants any burgers. The grocery store has no good options for what to do with these unwanted burgers. It can either buy the exotic, high-tech $3 million refrigerator it takes to store them, or else it ends up paying people to take burgers off its hands. 

At this, your enviro-kid rejoices: negative burger pricing! The future is here! 

But the system means mayhem for the grocery store’s whole business model. What used to be a stable clientele buying a predictable amount of food has turned into a crap-shoot. A system set up to buy food from wholesalers and distribute it to consumers now has to build a whole complicated new infrastructure to buy food from consumers as well: a complicated new “smart grocery store” infrastructure to handle the reverse flow. That’s expensive! 

Worse, when one customer’s machine starts off-loading burgers nobody wants, every customer’s machine starts off-loading burgers nobody wants. The high-tech fridges it takes to store them are insanely expensive and their capacity is limited. At times it gets so bad, the grocery store has to implement burger curtailment: paying customers to unplug their burger machines so they won’t start flooding the store with unsellable, unstorable hamburgers.

The grocery store’s operations are now in constant turmoil. In time, they’re forced to raise prices for their regular groceries to cover the additional costs associated with distributing “free” burgers. 

At which point your kid rolls his eyes at you and wonders how you can be so foolish as to pay higher and higher prices for that gnarly food from that rickety old grocery store when the burgers the machine makes are free. Green activists will scoff at outdated old polluting supermarkets that, absurdly, insist on raising prices in an age of free burgers!

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Terence Tao snorts and waves his hands dismissively when he hears that he is the most intelligent human being on the planet, according to a number of online rankings, including a recent one conducted by the BBC. He is, however, indisputably one of the best mathematicians in history. When he was two, his parents saw him teaching another five-year-old boy to count.

One of the reasons why human mathematicians become good at their job is because they make a lot of mistakes and learn what doesn’t work. AIs don’t have this data

Q. So do you think that artificial intelligence can become better than you at an activity as creative as mathematical research?

A. I think they’ll be very useful assistants. They are getting good at solving problems for which there is a lot of previous data about similar problems. The thing is that mathematicians usually only publish our success stories, we don’t share what we try and doesn’t work. And one of the reasons why human mathematicians become good at their job is because they make a lot of mistakes and learn what doesn’t work. AIs don’t have this data.

Q. So?

A. All modern AI systems are based on huge amounts of data. If you want to teach an AI what a glass of water looks like, they need millions of examples of images of a glass of water. If I pour a glass of water and show it to you, you say, “Okay, I get it.” There needs to be a breakthrough in teaching AIs to learn from very small amounts of data. And we don’t know how to do this at all. If we can figure it out, then maybe AI can become as good as humans at really creative tasks.

Q. What do you think about artificial intelligence systems being in the hands of the ultra-rich, like Elon Musk?

A. There are some open source AI models out there, although they are two or three years behind the big commercial models. It’s not good for something as important as AI to be a monopoly controlled by one or two companies, but the basic technology to build these AIs is fairly public. In principle, anyone can build an AI. The problem is that it needs a lot of hardware, a lot of data, a lot of training. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to make one of these really large models, but the cost will come down over time. There will be lots of open alternatives to AI in the future. I think there will be some need to regulate some aspects of AI. The ability of AI to generate deepfakes can be quite damaging. There are a few that could influence elections.

Q. Some of these businessmen are also a bit eccentric.

A. When these AI models came out, there was some concern that they would be used to generate propaganda, that there would be a conservative ChatGPT, a liberal ChatGPT, a Chinese Communist Party ChatGPT that would only give party-approved answers about Taiwan or whatever. This hasn’t happened. We’re going to need some regulation, but so far it hasn’t been as damaging as we had feared. What will happen soon is that we will lose trust. Before, people would see a video of an event and believe that it had actually happened. There was no way to fake a video of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Now, with AI, it is possible. The result will be that even when something is genuine, people won’t believe it. People won’t believe photos and videos anymore. How do we convince someone that something happened if everything can be faked? That is a problem. We have to find new ways to verify facts.

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Our stories help us make sense of a chaotic world, but they can be harmful and restrictive. There’s a liberating alternative

Narratives are everywhere, and the need to construct and share them is almost inescapable. ‘A man is always a teller of tales,’ wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his novel Nausea (1938), ‘he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.’

We rely on narratives because they help us understand the world. They make life more meaningful. According to Sartre, to turn the most banal series of events into an adventure, you simply ‘begin to recount it’. However, telling a story is not just a powerful creative act. Some philosophers think that narratives are fundamental to our experiences. Alasdair MacIntyre believes we can understand our actions and those of others only as part of a narrative life. And Peter Goldie argues that our very lives ‘have narrative structure’ – it is only by grappling with this structure that we can understand our emotions and those of others. This suggests that narratives play central, possibly fundamental, roles in our lives. But as Sartre warns in Nausea: ‘everything changes when you tell about life.’

In some cases, narratives can hold us back by limiting our thinking. In other cases, they may diminish our ability to live freely. They also give us the illusion that the world is ordered, logical, and difficult to change, reducing the real complexity of life. They can even become dangerous when they persuade us of a false and harmful world view. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too eager to live our lives as if we were ‘telling a story’. The question is: what other options do we have?

Narratives work by organising our experiences by connecting them into sequences, which give our lives meaning. The ability to form these sequences is something we learn very young. As the educator Carol Fox found during research in the 1990s, stories begin shaping us from childhood. Fox found that reading to children at home gives them tacit knowledge of linguistic and narrative structures, which they incorporate into their own spoken stories. Her research showed that children as young as three used stories to experiment with language as they made sense of the world. The older we get, the more we keep playing – and the more we keep relying on narratives.

As adults, we adopt different roles, including friend, lover, employee, parent, carer and more. The way we understand these roles is often framed in terms of expected behaviour. For example, we have a narrative grasp of what a ‘friend’ is, and we judge ourselves and others by how well they fit that narrative – sometimes favourably, sometimes less so.

So, why is this a problem? One issue is complexity. Seeing yourself as the main character in a story can overly simplify the fullness of life. Think of the way in which people talk about their ‘journey’ through life. Through this narrative, certain events become more significant while others are overlooked, and random events can be reframed as being part of some grand plan. Yet viewing our lives in such a narrow way hinders our ability to understand the complex behaviour of others and ourselves. For example, a child that accepts the narrative of being ‘naughty’ may incorrectly frame their behaviour as bad, rather than as an expression of their unmet needs. Stories can change us by locking us into ways of acting, thinking, and feeling.

In the 1970s, a recognition of this limitation gave rise to narrative therapy. Rather than seeing people as illogical or overly emotional, this new form of psychotherapy focused on the role of narratives in a person’s life. As the therapist Martin Payne explains in his book Narrative Therapy (2000), the approach allows ‘richer, combined narratives to emerge from disparate descriptions of experience’. A new narrative can be incredibly powerful for someone who is unaware of how their established stories are obscuring other ways of understanding their life.

The stories that might need changing are not only grand, but also minor, such as the ‘scripts’ that we rely on throughout our lives. These scripts can become habitual patterns of thinking, influencing our interpretations of family members, friends or colleagues. As narrative therapy shows, we can also get these scripts wrong, and may need help altering them.

Though narrative therapy can be effective, it is unable to help people understand what creates and shapes their narratives. It merely helps them to choose between different narratives or construct new stories about themselves and the world. Swapping one ‘script’ for another doesn’t help someone see the full range of possibilities that lie in front of them, including what it might mean to reject a narrative altogether.

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(China’s efforts to decarbonize are upending a world economy dependent on the petrodollar and, in the process, restructuring the U.S.-led world.)

You are the soul of all those who died believing in the happiness that would come in the future. And now see, it has come. The future in which people do not live for something else but for themselves.”
—Victor Pelevin, “The Sacred Book of the Werewolf”

Over the past few years, the flimsy states and territories that cover the Eurasian continent as lightly as gauze have been getting pushed and pulled into a new way of being. In response to volatile oil prices, temperatures creeping ever higher, forests burning and deserts growing, China is reordering the internal logic of the supercontinent under the banner of a technological dream of endlessly renewable electricity.

The sources of this electricity, as if in fulfillment of an ancient pagan dream, are the rays of the sun, the breeze across the prairie and the cascades of mountain rivers. While new reservoirs of fossil fuels and seams of ores are being penetrated here too, two-thirds of all wind and solar projects that are currently under construction are located in China, and the country is expected to install more than half of the world’s total solar power in 2024 alone, both within and outside its borders. Across these huge distances and extreme temperatures — what the English geographer Halford Mackinder called the “Heartland” of the “World Island” — new towns are being built, even new capitals, all linked by lengths of glass and plastic wires to vast fields of solar panels and wind turbines and mega-dams.

This monumental industrial transformation is reshaping the internal logic and economic priorities of countries from Mongolia to Pakistan to Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia. It’s reordering political alliances and trade routes across the entire post-Soviet space and the Arab world — or, if you prefer to think in historical terms, most of the Mongol Empire’s territory circa 1259. In seeking to decarbonize, China is upending Eurasia’s and indeed the global economy, whose denomination is the petrodollar, and restructuring the United States-led world. What this post-oil world looks like depends on where you visit. In Mongolia and Saudi Arabia, I discovered that the industry of the global renewable energy transition is very much oriented toward China.

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