Are we going to run out of power? | Karim Abou Zahab
episodePreviously titled “Are we going to run out of power?” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 27, 2026
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Good morning, Michael.
Good morning, Sam. How are you doing?
I am doing all right now that I have some coffee.
Okay. Now, Sam, as always, I have a question for you. Do you think you could go without mains electricity for one day? Go full analog, if you will.
For a day? Yes. For like multiple weeks? Absolutely not. What about you? Do you think you could do it?
Well, I live in very rural England, so I get power cuts quite a lot. Like a horse sort of sits on a power line or like a tractor knocks over a power line or something. It happens all the time. So I have actually gone without power for 24 hours. I think I probably could. I think it'd be quite nice, actually, if I had a bit of notice. Anyway, you or I might not have to live without electricity ourselves, but with humanity's ever increasing demands for the stuff, working out how to budget effectively and get the most out of what we have is becoming more important than ever. I'm Michael Bird.
I'm Sam Jarrell.
And welcome to Technology Now from HPU.
modern day infrastructure loves energy according to the global energy review in 2025 from the international energy agency or the iea which we will link to in the show notes i think they know what they're talking about data centers are estimated to have consumed 415 terawatt hours of electricity in 2024 that was 1.5 percent of the entire global electricity consumption
Oh my, that sounds like it could make for quite the light show. And we are building more and more data centers, right?
Yeah, exactly. And in fact, by 2030, the IEA expects this figure to have doubled. Technology is advancing at an increasing pace, but it's now starting to come up against the physical constraints of just how much energy we can produce.
Exactly. And I don't know about you, Michael, but I'm also seeing energy prices going up at the moment. So I would imagine this is leading to some very tough questions when it comes to finance for this sort of project.
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of my energy bill at the moment, but yeah, very much so. Whether the electricity is coming from renewables, oil, gas or even nuclear, the soaring demand on our power grids are starting to cause problems for organizations. So to find out more about how organizations and businesses can try to respond to these changes, I met with Karim Abu Zahab, a principal technologist in the Sustainable Transformation team in the wider Living Progress Organization here at HPE. And the first thing I wanted to know was from his perspective, why is energy such a hot topic at the moment?
Energy has been a topic that has been coming up a lot in the past couple of months to couple of years. And if I can summarize it in a tiny sentence, I would say that under the current system that exists, companies need to have limitless growth to a certain extent. However, energy is not limitless. So the energy that we have currently in the world is quite limited. This topic has been coming up quite often. So I guess what we're saying here is we're using more energy than we have potentially. Yeah, exactly. So there's a very interesting day that happens every year. It's called earth overshoot. And earth overshoot is basically when we as a planet utilize more resources in a year or in a certain time, then the planet can actually regenerate in that certain year.
And that is causing a lot of issues. So there are a lot of sources that we can use to generate energy. And the type and amount of energy that I'm using actually does not only affect from a carbon perspective, but it also affects from a price perspective. And this is something that organizations are really thinking about these days. So using less energy isn't necessarily a sort of green issue.
It's a financial issue as well, because if you can use less energy, you can spend less money doing the thing that you need to do with that energy.
Yeah, exactly. So if we're talking with folks from the industry and we're talking about carbon footprint, we're talking about emissions and so on, not everybody would be interested in having that conversation.
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