Elon Musk warns of electricity crisis | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

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GUEST BIO:
Elon Musk is CEO of X, xAI, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[LexClips]

Guest bio: Elon Musk is CEO of X, xAI, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.

[Headinavise]

I worked for ATCO for 15 years. I thought I was going to retire working in the "electricity" business. After 5 years of unprecedented growth and massive hiring the company began lay offs. I can't believe I got laid off from an electric utility company.

Nothing special about electricity or green energy... don't get excited.

[HomesteadEngineering]

If you own a house with a roof that gets a lot of sun, then you can generate your own battery backed electricity. I recommend you do that.

[Dreadnought]

Maybe Elon should start a utility company….cause tripling electricity capacity will take decades and I couldn’t even venture a guess as to cost….I was an electrical utility construction supervisor in Alberta for years….he would first need armies of nonexistent linemen, PSE’s and electrical engineers. He is right about the step down transformers, we used to source ours from Hyundai Heavy Industries in Korea…took one year for a single transformer….now imagine every one wanting one…..good luck.

[justaspivoriunas]

Do not forget, robots replacing workers also will need a lot of electricity.

[newfie-dean]

Some people like the prime minister of Canada think that electricity is a magic horn of plenty, that there’s an endless supply that you just magically pull from the air.

[ywtcc]

It's hard to imagine a tripling of electricity capacity without nuclear being heavily involved.
It might be worth looking at regulating small nuclear devices a little differently. If the amount of fuel is really small, the safety concerns are nowhere near as severe.
I can imagine an economy of plug and play shipping container sized reactors having use in heavy industry.
If they're convenient enough to transport, all the servicing and production could be done off site, in a central facility. So, there's an opportunity for an economy of scale there. And, if they're that size, then they could even power their own transportation!
In terms of the physics involved, nuclear technology looks the most promising, to me. It's a very different source of energy that's an order of magnitude more concentrated than even the most powerful chemicals. I think it's a shame we haven't figured out a better way to harness it, yet. It seems like there's a lot of solvable problems in this area of energy production.

[TheCLARKE]

Electric cars were the solution to the very expensive "Fossil Fuel Crisis" and now we gonna have an Electicity "Crisis"

[festeradams]

You could add to that an aging infrastructure, since most here in this country dates to the 50's and 60's; and is extremely vulnerable to physical and "online" attacks to the software running most of it.

[catherinethemba]

Living this reality in South Africa. We have to have solar panels and generators.

[Danaman]

Batteries are not the answer unless your selling them.

[johans]

Hopefully the AI will be smart enough to realise it was a bad idea and switch itself off. Which would be preferable to switching us off

[mattb]

I think there’s a lot of low hanging fruit in replacing inefficient appliances with efficient ones in homes. For example, we replaced our electric water heater with a hybrid one in February of this year. Then in June we bought our first EV, a model Y. Between those two changes our electricity bill/usage is unchanged overall. Which would be the same as if neither of those upgrades ever happened, except now my transportation is electrified. We are currently doing some remodeling on our home such as new windows, replacing the sheathing on our south wall with zip r for more insulation, and after that we will look at a new AC that is much more efficient. Last, we just got solar panels which will reduce our strain on the grid by even more and even charge our EV directly by the sun.

[upvotecomment]

Green tech is not enough for USA Consumption
Oil is what make Electricity right now (mostly comes from the Middle East and Russia)

[MichelleLyn]

My bf is an electrical engineer and he’s already told me about this. Exactly why we are NOT getting electric cars. We also utilize a generator and we will be investing in a very large one. Electricity where we live is already very expensive. Only thing about batteries is there’s no good way to dispose of them.

[ChristianStout]

EVs need to start carrying onboard diesel generators.

[kensJAMZ]

Instead of spending $300k on pulling power to my off grid cabin, it runs solely on Solar and Hydropower. Been the best thing yet and having Starlink is a huge game changer with being connected to the world still.

[RahYoRaijin]

Thank you guys for letting me listen to this conversation ❗️🔥

[rugbyfrlife]

Wow. I'm pretty on-point with global shifts, but I hadn't even considered this. Sure, I understood that electricity usage would grow as nations modernise, but I didn't really put 2 and 2 together and realize replacing all the cars with electric, and installing electric heating would pretty much triple local demand. Pretty nuts.
We need more generation.

[eugenetkachev]

You cannot triple an output of anything in few years, there is not enough lithium to produce energy for everything. Making heating electric instead of gas is insane.