Arthur Kroeber

It's going up like this.

It's rising very rapidly.

Everyone else is increasing their electricity consumption very, very marginally.

And now you see in things like AI, what is one of the big constraints on AI development at scale?

It is essentially the power that you need to power these data centers.

Who is best placed in the world to do this at home?

China, right?

And they have also concluded that, you know, AI aside, that having cheap, abundant electricity is really central to...

all of the major growth industries of the 21st century.

So they are now determined, I think on a strategic basis, to have an electricity system that just produces as much power as humanly possible from whatever fuel source you can find, to interconnect this via grid as efficiently as you can so they're leaders in ultra-high voltage distribution technology.

And we will be able to keep our electricity prices so low that that will make it very difficult for anyone anywhere else in the world to compete with our manufacturing, with our AI, with our whatever.

Anything that electricity goes into, we will have this competitive advantage.

And so they've been very – and I think they're basically right about that.

And the point here is that if you're able to get a few of these sort of enabling –

all-purpose technology decisions right earlier and then scale them up, then a lot of good things can happen as a result of that, regardless of how effective you are at picking winners sector by sector in industrial policy.

Well, they add basically a France or UK on average every year.

It's a good question, and we're verging a little bit beyond my realm of competence here because I don't pretend to understand AI very well.

I'm still very unclear as to economically where all the benefit accrues, right?

And so I

I guess my theory, if I abstract away from AI and just think about this, okay, this is a situation where you've got a new technology.