It is so obvious that we sometimes forget it. Every great advance in human prosperity — industrialisation, transport, refrigeration, medicine, communications and computing — has depended upon our ability to produce more useful energy and put it to work.
Now we may be approaching the greatest technological transformation of them all.
Artificial intelligence, combined with increasingly capable humanoid robots, offers possibilities that only a few years ago belonged to science fiction: extraordinary increases in productivity, accelerated medical research, automated manufacturing, scientific discovery and perhaps an abundance of goods and services beyond anything previous generations could have imagined.
But there is a catch.
It all runs on electricity.
AI Is Hungry
Elon Musk has recently been warning about precisely this constraint.
AI may exist in the virtual world, but the computers running it most certainly do not. They require enormous data centres, semiconductor factories, cooling systems, transmission networks — and vast quantities of reliable electricity.
The International Energy Agency estimates that electricity used by data centres worldwide could rise from about 460 TWh in 2024 to more than 1,000 TWh by 2030.
That is more than double in six years.
And we are only at the beginning.
The US Energy Information Administration is already forecasting record American electricity consumption in 2026 and 2027, with AI-intensive data centres among the major drivers.
Suddenly energy abundance is fashionable again.
The Great Reversal
There is a certain irony here.
For years much of the Western political and corporate establishment concentrated on reducing fossil-fuel consumption and constraining energy supply in the name of climate change.
Now technology companies are scrambling to secure electricity.
Natural gas is back in the conversation. Nuclear power is enjoying an extraordinary revival. Technology companies are looking at dedicated power stations and small modular reactors. Musk himself is reportedly moving into gas-turbine technology as the demand for data-centre electricity collides with shortages of generating equipment.
The people building the future have rediscovered an old truth:
You cannot build an energy-hungry civilisation by making energy scarce.
That doesn't mean abandoning cleaner energy. Quite the opposite. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, gas, coal, geothermal and whatever new technologies emerge should compete on their ability to provide the enormous quantities of reliable and affordable energy the future will require.
The objective should be more energy, produced more cleanly — not less energy.
That distinction matters.
Meanwhile, China Built Everything
While the West argued about which energy technologies were morally acceptable, China largely followed a different strategy.
It built everything.
China became the world's dominant manufacturer of solar panels and installed wind and solar capacity at extraordinary speed. It expanded hydroelectricity. It continued building nuclear reactors.
And it kept building coal-fired power stations.
Nearly 80 GW of new coal-fired capacity was commissioned in China in 2025 alone, according to the IEA, even as renewable generation expanded so rapidly that China's coal-fired electricity generation actually declined.
That tells us something important about China's strategy.
It has not treated energy policy primarily as a contest between fashionable and unfashionable technologies. It has concentrated on building enormous energy capacity.
The result is that China enters the AI age with an industrial and electricity system designed for scale.
That could become one of the great strategic advantages of the twenty-first century.
This Is About More Than Economics
There is another reason the West should care.
In my recent post Can We Keep AI Under Control?, I looked at the dangers of increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence. Earlier, in If AI Wakes Up, It's Already Too Late, I considered what might happen if machines eventually move beyond effective human control.
But there is another question:
Who controls the most powerful AI before that happens?
China is an authoritarian state with extensive censorship, surveillance and restrictions on political freedom. If AI becomes as transformative as many of us expect, leadership in AI will confer enormous economic, military and political power.
The free world therefore has a profound interest in remaining technologically competitive.
And that competition will not be won with software alone.
It will require semiconductor plants, data centres, robotics factories, transmission systems — and the electricity to run them.
Energy policy has therefore become national-security policy.
Release the Brakes
I recently argued in Climate, Energy and Prosperity: The Debate That Shapes Our Future that modern civilisation depends upon abundant, reliable and affordable energy.
AI makes that argument even more urgent.
Climate change is a legitimate issue. We should continue developing cleaner technologies, improving efficiency and adapting intelligently to whatever warming occurs.
But climate policy cannot be considered in isolation from every other human objective.
There are consequences to a warming world.
There are also consequences to deliberately restricting the energy upon which prosperity, technology and ultimately national power depend.
Perhaps the question for the next generation is no longer simply:
How do we use less energy?
It may be:
How do we produce vastly more energy, reliably and affordably, while steadily reducing its environmental impact?
Humanity may be standing at the doorway to possibilities beyond our dreams. But reaching them will require enormous quantities of energy.
It would be more than ironic if the West lost the race for humanity's most transformative technology because it had deliberately restricted the energy needed to win it.
That would be tragic.
Previous Posts on AI, Climate & Energy
Climate, Energy and Prosperity: The Debate That Shapes Our Future — A broader examination of the relationship between abundant energy, prosperity, climate policy and technological development.
Can We Keep AI Under Control? — Looking at the emerging challenge of maintaining control over increasingly autonomous AI systems.
If AI Wakes Up, It's Already Too Late — Exploring the longer-term risks of artificial superintelligence and what happens if effective human control is lost.
Can AI Write From The Heart? — A wider look at the rapidly developing capabilities of artificial intelligence and what may continue to distinguish humans from machines.
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