The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Why Green Energy Can't Satisfy Electricity Demands || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

Would you try to fly a kite when there's no breeze? Or try to surf when there are no waves? If you answered 'no' to those questions - CONGRATS - your basic analytical skills are much better than those tasked with the green energy buildout. Now we just need to test your math skills… Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/why-green-energy-cant-satisfy-electricity-demands

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Northern Indiana, the Nipsco coal power plant. That is not a nuclear cooling tower. It's just coal cooling tower. This power plant is on schedule to be decommissioned around 2025 and then replaced with wind and solar. But I don't know how many of you guys have been to northern Indiana, but this is neither a windy nor sunny area. More to the point. If things go with the Chinese and to a lesser degree the Europeans in the direction that I think it's going to, and if the Americans decide they still want stuff, the industrialization wave that's coming here is going to be. like anything we've seen before. And it'll be a lot faster than what we did in World War II. But it also means that we need to generate a lot more electricity wherever that comes from,

because manufacturing takes more power than services, and doing the processing for things like lithium and steel and the rest takes a lot more power than it does for normal manufacturing. So we need to conservatively increase the power plant in the country in transmission capacity by at least half. So not saying that coal's the future or anything like that, I'm just saying we need a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot more. And that assumes we don't do the green transition,

because if we electrify transport, then we need to double the power plant. And honestly, we need to do this before the end of the decade. So chop, chop.