Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, has raised questions on the power generation capacity of the United States even as the tech industry is accelerating towards the AI-first model. He also emphasised that China is making huge investments in renewable energy sources, like nuclear and solar energy – something that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has previously warned about. While speaking at Institute of Politics Harvard Kennedy School, Schmidt said that the US has not produced new electricity while China has surplus power.
“In America, we have essentially produced no new electricity because it’s very hard to provision electricity. China has infinite electricity because of their incredible investment in renewables and so forth,” he said.“They built something like 120 gigawatts of new renewable energy in the last five years, and some number like that,” Schmidt pointed out, only to be interrupted by Graham Allison, an American political scientist and professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, who said that “every day in China, another gigawatt of electricity is added to the grid” and that happens all year.
Elon Musk’s ‘electricity warning’ to US
In May this year, Musk responded to a post which claimed, “If China’s 888 GW of installed solar operated at U.S. capacity factors, it would generate 44% of U.S. electricity.” The Tesla CEO said that “Most people don’t realize how much solar power China has installed. Enough to power half of America!”Recently, Musk sounded the alarm on America’s energy infrastructure crisis, saying that the US is lagging power generation capacity is a “major competitive disadvantage” as China races ahead in the global power race. He was responding to market analyst Adam Kobeissi’s analysis in which he claimed that China now commands 3.75 terawatts of power generation capacity – nearly three times the United States’ 1.30 terawatts.
‘US losing renewables race to China’: Eric Schmidt
Schmidt also raised questions on US’ nuclear power generation. He said that as compared to China, US is not generating any nuclear energy.“How big is a nuclear power plant? About 1.5 gigawatts. So that’s the scale of electricity revolution is taking place in China. How many of those plants have been built in America? Zero. And we are certainly losing the renewables race to China, for the reason that everybody here knows. So they have a lot of power, we don’t. We have a lot of chips, they don’t,” he said.Similar arguments have also been shared by market analysts. China is said to be aggressively expanding its nuclear infrastructure with 34 reactors currently under construction, which is more than the next nine countries combined. It has also been reported that nearly 200 additional reactors are either planned or proposed for future development. The US, in stark contrast, has no large commercial nuclear reactors under construction.
