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2 sats \ 5 replies \ @Cje95 25 Oct \ parent \ on: MONEY CLASS OF THE DAY: Money Illusion and Unit Bias, Bitcoiner style econ
Not worried in the slightest. I look at the grid considered the weakest ERCOT and all we have seen since the almost blackout is enormous surge in numerous power additions to the grid including battery storage.
The US wasn't trying to onshore for decades. We were retiring coal plants for renewables because it wasn't going to cause any grid issues. However, now the power demand surge has come and grid operators were still retiring plants without the necessary backup capability. So there were and are growing pains but we are addressing them. We are restarting power plants we need and breaking ground on others that will only help drive down the costs.
Not to mention we are getting ready to send off a data center experiment into space lol.
this graph does not give you concern?
Nor this ?
Nor the overall argument given in the link?
'China’s ability to cheaply and rapidly build massive energy capacity pressures the U.S. to pour its limited resources into a race it is ill equipped to pursue. And so, the U.S. is forced into a zero-sum choice where every gigawatt diverted to an AI data center is a gigawatt that isn’t available for rebuilding its domestic manufacturing base, or worse, one that risks destabilizing the civilian grid, spiking consumer electricity bills, and threatening blackouts.
While Large Language Models get the public hype, the actual race is for the commanding heights of the 21st century: autonomous systems, national logistics planning, economic modeling, and advanced materials science.
People in Washington are terrified, and for good reason.
In the Cold War, the U.S. forced the USSR to prioritize military production over the civilian standard of living. China is now turning that same playbook back on America, but with a different weapon. By forcing the U.S. to sacrifice its energy stability just to stay in the race, China is using its energy surplus to create a compounding technological gap that America’s fractured, high-cost grid cannot overcome. Yet, the U.S. has no choice but to stay in the game just as the USSR did during the Cold War.'
Wow - I didn't realise some in the government are so in denial of reality.
Maybe you are just here to placate and calm the citizens who are still reluctant to acknowledge the empire is crumbling...
The US space program, and AI and 'onshoring' generally, is grounded, for the next decade, at least, unless the supply of rare earths from China is regained.
China has already largely won the trade war, and USA, clinging to its legacy exceptional privilege, is only just beginning to realise it.
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It's hilarious to me you think you can speak on how Washington feels with any sort of absolute certainty like you do. The US continues to build out and hook up data centers.
Vogtle was a first of a kind project. Those are always expensive and have issues that's why they are called first of a kind. For what it's worth your whole graph is wrong TerraPower started construction last year on their place in Wyoming and Oklo broke ground on two facilities one kn Idaho and one in Oak Ridge. You also have the Clunch River site and X-energy site that are currently under review. Plus DOE has 9 more projects breaking ground/have broken ground with three set to reach criticality by next July.
This doesn't even touch the microreactors that are being ramped up as well or the restarts going on. Those restarts are also under construction so add 3 more to the list. Suddenly it really changes the equation huh? This also doesn't factor in the fuel fabrication plants that have broken ground or the
It's not denial of reality its watching the private sector innovate. That's something China doesn't have at all they have to publically brag and boast but in the end only time will tell if they can outrun their debt crisis that makes the US debt issue look like rookie league. Population is falling their youth unemployment is wildly high… they stopped reporting numbers for a reason
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It amuses me that you think you can respond convincingly to an article you did not read or if you did you did not digest the content of.
How deep does the denial of reality in Washington go?
'More importantly, China’s state-owned companies build only a handful of reactor types and they do it over and over again. Having standardization streamlines licensing, simplifies the supply chain, and keeps a dedicated, specialized engineering workforce, like teams of specialized welders, moving seamlessly from one site to the next. When China ran into the same problems with the American AP1000 design that crippled the Vogtle project, they didn’t give up. They studied what went wrong, tweaked the design, developed their own domestic supply chains, and are now building nine more of their own version, all on pace to be completed within five years at a drastically lower cost. As one consultant put it, “China is practiced at building really big things... and those project management skills are transferable.”'
This graph says it all really-
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The denial is clearly deeply entrenched.
The US didn't copy and paste the British Empires model of global imperialism, with Britain still holding your hand even to this day?
Emerging empires have always copied the predecessor and pirated wealth from the declining predecessor. Why should China be expected to play it differently?
'And it’s not just nuclear. China is building out renewables capacity at a mind-boggling rate, and the latest figures are hard to even comprehend. In just the first five months of 2025, China installed 198 GW of new solar, blasting past the one terawatt cumulative milestone. The pace is staggering with 92 GW of that solar capacity having been added in May alone. As another analyst pointed out, that’s the equivalent of installing “almost 100 solar panels every second.”
Being the “world’s factory” means having your very own supply chain. For the first time last year, the top four wind turbine makers in the world were all Chinese. Similarly, China enjoys a majority market share in the manufacture and export of photovoltaic cells. As one analyst from the Asia Society bluntly put it, “When it comes to clean energy, it no longer makes sense to talk about competition. There is only one player. The U.S. is not even in the room.
As the U.S. cancels $22 billion in clean energy projects and sees wind investment shrink to a decade low, China is churning out the “wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars... all over the planet.” They aren’t just positioned for the data center boom; they’re the ones building and selling the entire energy infrastructure for it.
These lower energy costs ripple through the entire economy, compounding over time and creating a competitive advantage that could last for generations. Cheap, abundant power is a fundamental economic multiplier. Its effects reach far beyond the tech sector. It drastically lowers the input costs for all foundational industries: steel, cement, chemicals, plastics, and advanced materials. This, in turn, makes all types of manufacturing, from electric vehicles and batteries to the solar panels and wind turbines themselves, exponentially cheaper to produce.
With the cost of electricity becoming the dominant factor, China can effectively subsidize its entire technological ecosystem. While other nations are forced to choose between powering AI data centers or maintaining their industrial base, China is building the capacity to do both. The Chinese approach creates a virtuous cycle where cheaper energy allows for cheaper compute, which in turn accelerates breakthroughs in big data, machine learning, and even energy production itself. We’re already seeing this feedback loop in action. A research team recently used AI to control the ultra-hot plasma in the HL-3 tokamak reactor. By training an AI model, they were able to stabilize plasma in ways traditional, slower containment methods cannot. It’s a type of of a breakthrough that can unlock the next generation of power.
These advantages ensure that the high-value industries of the future will inevitably thrive and concentrate in China, where energy is cheap and there’s plenty of it to go around. It is a key economic advantage to unlocking the technologies of the future.'
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