Arthur Kroeber

But still, in most countries, it only accounts for about 15% to 20% of the total final consumption of energy.

So it is still actually a minor player in the global energy equation, despite having been around for 150 years and being very critical in a lot of applications.

China very early on recognized –

that they needed a lot more electric power.

The original reason was very prosaic.

They had a lot of power shortages in the early 2000s that were making it hard for their factories to run.

And they said, oh, we've got to build a lot more generating capacity, most of it fueled by coal, just so we can keep our factories running.

That was the first thing.

And then they started to think about it a little bit more, and they started to say, hmm, actually, what do we want?

Well, we know we're failing, as we talked about earlier, we know we're failing in this drive to make cars with internal combustion engines.

And it looks like we're never going to be able to crack that nut and have our own Toyota or General Motors.

But no one's making electric cars.

Maybe we can be the first to do electric cars, right?

So they said, got to do that.

Then they said, oh, we need to enhance our domestic transport infrastructure.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a giant high-speed rail network just like Japan, except we're 20 times larger than Japan, so it has to be 20 times as big.

So let's do that.

And by the way, this is all going to be electrified.

So they created a couple of core hub industries, the premise for which was you need gigantic quantities of electricity to get these things working, right?

If everyone has an electric car and everyone's charging their battery, huge draw, right?