Rory Stewart

speaker

22,825 appearances 85 recordings 4 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 9 Sep

Rory Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 85 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 16.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Rest Is Politics · 558. The 'Cockroach' Uprising and Should We Stop Data Centres? · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

We're never going to have full independence, but the data centers are the foundation of our strategic autonomy. voice-verified

So I'm starting with that, and then we can solve the problems on the electricity and water. voice-verified

The problem is that the problem with renewables in general, which is that when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing, there's no electricity. voice-verified

And the data center and the chips and the model needs to run 24 hours a day and needs to be cool 24 hours a day. voice-verified

And this is the problem. voice-verified

And this is the thing that we don't talk about enough with renewable energy, that unless you have enormous hydropower, voice-verified

And this actually is partly what the Saudis are saying when they're talking, when you say to them you have huge solar. voice-verified

Unless you have incredible storage capacity or you have hydropower and dams, which we also don't want to build for environmental reasons, you have to have the backup of fossil fuels to deal with the problem of what happens when the sun's not shining. voice-verified

So you can't run data centers just on renewables. voice-verified

Let me begin by agreeing with you. voice-verified

So you're completely right that the electricity use is enormous. voice-verified

Globally, we're using about 415 terawatt hours, which is about 1.5% of global consumption. voice-verified

And that's scheduled by 2030, not very long to come, four years' time, to be up to 3%. voice-verified

So to put that in context, steel is about 5% of global consumption. voice-verified

And steel is very, very big. voice-verified

So it's putting AI slightly below things like steel and the general kind of construction industry stuff, which gets up to sort of 8%, 9%. voice-verified

UK, because we have much less industrial manufacturing, we basically de-industrialize partly because of our push for net zero, partly because of our energy costs. voice-verified

So we don't have much industry. voice-verified

It's projected in the UK to get up to about 6% of UK electricity consumption. voice-verified

So voice-verified

Showing 5081–5100 of 22,825 · page 255 of 1142