During the desperate days of the energy crisis in the 1970s, it looked as though the shortage was permanent and we would have to change the way we lived, worked and played to accommodate it.
In the end, it was technology that solved the crisis.
For fossil fuels, 3D seismic, horizontal drilling and fracking were used. For electricity, it was wind and solar, and better technology for making electricity with gas — a swing from burning it under boilers to burning it in aero-derivative turbines, essentially airplane engines on the ground.
A new energy shortage — this time confined to electricity — is in the making. There are a lot of people who think that, magically, the big tech companies, headed by Alphabet’s Google, will jump in and use their tech muscle to solve the crisis.
The fact is that the tech giants, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Meta, are highly interested in electricity because they depend…
