> wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy
Can you clarify what leading in energy means? And what concerns do you have?
Do you mean we, in the U.S. are in a tarpit of regulations and red tape that makes setting up a nuclear power plant up impossible? Or something else?
IMHO, leading in energy also needs to take into account where that energy takes us and what it unlocks. I immigrated to the U.S. so I am extremely bullish so do consider that below.
My California perspective is that energy is going to be even more decentralized. I have not paid an electric bill in years and get a check from my utility once a year where they pay me wholesale rates for my net export. I net export because I rarely use any meaningful energy at night that my 5kwH battery pack cannot provide. Once battery prices fall even further, I will dump everything into my local storage and draw no gross power from my utility at all. For all practical purposes, I will be off grid.
Anyone in California has the technological ability to get there as well. The utilities dump GWh of solar energy because we produce so much!
The issue we have in the U.S. is one of horrible policies and regulation.
Your typical townhouse in the city block isn't going to be able to put 20 panels on their roof because their HOA is going to throw a fit. The owner won't be allowed to install it themselves and would have to pay an electrician tens of thousands of dollars because the city isn't going to permit it otherwise. The obstacle of installing $5k worth of parts is incredibly disappointing.
From my perspective, technologically, solar energy is going to become cheaper as storage continues to fall in price.
This will empower increasing productivity. In my case, once the GPU market becomes consumer friendly and less constrained, or fundamentally different LLMs are released that are CPU friendly but I can't imagine that possibility yet, I will buy more GPUs and increase my self host LLM capacity. Today, as of right now I an getting "Insufficient capacity" errors from AWS attempting to launch a g6.2xlarge cluster and puny 24GB GPUs cost a lot making renting from AWS a better choice. The responses from the coding models blow my mind. They often meet or beat the kind of code I would expect from a junior engineer I would have to pay $120k/yr for and that would be a cheap engineer in SoCal. A GPU cluster including running costs would be fraction of that so I would be able to expand quicker with less.
Whole offices are going to become more compact and continue to become decentralized or even remote. Their carbon footprint is then going to go practically zero (no office security patrol, no HVAC, no heating, etc). More people will be able to start businesses (higher GDP) with less, increasing the GDP per Co2 emissions.
My childhood friends in the E.U who are in the same space that I am in are less enthusiastic. My friends in Germany who bought a hundred PV panels is not happy at all.
So which country will lead in energy and what would they be doing?