Comment by dan-robertson

I don’t think that’s a great description of what’s going on here. I think there are two things:

1. The actual thing the authors spend a lot of time thinking about seems to be more generally how to make good use of solar power for things that people find valuable – synthetic fuels desalination, etc – and the implications of the sun only shining some of the time – maybe you don’t want to pay more for more efficient systems as then you want steady power which is more expensive.

2. I think the blog post is a bit of a response to lots of public discussion about AI data centres. IMO seems better to see what someone who thinks a lot about energy has to say than eg, a government suggestion that you delete old pictures to reduce water consumption.