Zach Dell

And it is one of the strongest correlations in economics.

There is no such thing as an energy-rich poor country.

Energy abundance and human prosperity are just inextricably linked.

I think that realization was part of why I was taken by the energy industry as a college student.

and has gotten me so excited to work in this space.

One way to think about this is that the viability of certain industries is defined by the cost of electricity.

Once you hit a certain cost of power, you're able to do things you previously were not able to do.

For example, desalinization.

It's very expensive unless you have access to cheap power.

And there are tons of examples of this where heavy machining, manufacturing, industrial use cases where the thing didn't make sense before power was cheap enough to make the math pencil.

Anything that's energy intense, the lower the cost of the electricity, the higher the returns of that activity.

Lowering the cost of power at the micro level, at the home level,

is a massive benefit to homeowners and people who are trying to make ends meet.

And they think about buying my groceries and paying my electricity bill in kind of the same way.

Also at the economic level, it unlocks new technology.

So take AI, for example.

In a world where power prices just continue to go up, the cost of compute continues to go up linearly with those increases.

In a world where the cost of power goes down, the cost of compute goes down too.

And that allows us to do things with these models that we wouldn't be able to do if those costs were to only increase.

So we are currently in a regime of increasing electricity prices