200GW Hiding in Grid, Sodium Batteries 10x Cheaper, Wave-Powered Datacenters w/ Ramez Naam | EP #280
In a Nutshell
AI faces a power bottleneck not from energy costs—which remain cheap relative to GPU spending—but from grid interconnection delays stretching to 2031 for hundreds of megawatts. The grid itself is the constraint, not generation capacity, forcing data centers toward behind-the-meter natural gas turbines and flexible load strategies like Texas's new interruptible load policies. Meanwhile, solar-plus-storage costs continue plummeting—with sodium-ion batteries promising another 10x drop—while fusion startups target commercial power by 2028-2032 and ocean-based data centers exploit wave power and free cooling.
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In the US, if you put in a request for hundreds of megawatts of power to build a data center today, good luck getting that power before 2031. New technologies like sodium ion batteries could drop the cost of batteries by a factor of 10. The very first solar plus battery load power plants are already affordable. Batteries are plunging in cost and are going to drop another 10x ultimately.
Elon Musk has talked about space-based data centers. Ten gigawatts a year is like five or six launches of Starship a day. Unless exponential growth hits absolutely full-on, this looks prohibitive for 15-20 years.
Ramez Naam is a computer scientist, investor, and author who became the leading voice in the exponential decline in the cost of solar, batteries, fission, and fusion. He is the founder and managing partner of Planetary VC, investing in energy companies. He is the author of The Infinite Resource and the Nexus trilogy.
When presenting to one of the top three or four oil and gas companies in the world, they initially wanted to grill Ramez before allowing him in front of key people. After two hours of discussion about solar, they decided he needed to present to the main group.
Ramez spends every day, all day tracking developments in energy. He says this is what everyone does when living in the singularity.
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