What mattered this week

Britain's fastest AI computer met the British summer. The summer won 🥵

What broke? Dawn, Cambridge's flagship AI supercomputer - when June hit 30C+, the cooling gave up, and it shut down. Still offline.

Why do I care? The UK is not built for this heat, and it’ll get worse. What do we do?

Read more: Data Centre Dynamics

Cuba relied on fossils. And the US just turned it off.

All of Cuba? All of it. 10m people without power. Grid out.

Why? US energy blockade: Only one Russian oil tanker since Jan.

The lesson? If you import your energy and need regular deliveries by ship, someone else owns the switch. Ain’t the same for solar, wind, batteries, nukes.

Read more: Bloomberg (£); Reuters

Watch this develop: Europe really low on gas

It’s July - why do I care about gas? Storage is at a five-year low, so EU’s buying hard. Prices going up. Could be a really rough winter.

Who's smiling? Russia, as Europe needs its gas. And the US, now the biggest supplier.

Read more: John Kemp

One thing to worry about

Big Tech promised to be green. But their emissions are up, big time.

Microsoft: emissions up 27% (AFP)

Amazon: up 16% (Geekwire)

Google: now 81% above the 2019 baseline it promised to shrink (Google's own report) Google uses roughly the same power as New Zealand 🤯.

One thing to be optimistic about

Big moment: Global solar just passed 3,000 GW.

The first terawatt took more than 20 years 😀

The second took 3 😄😄.

The third: under 2 🥳🥳🥳.

If you’ve got more time…

All you hear: the energy transition means kids dying in mines.

Cobalt out of the Congo, lithium out of the Atacama, copper from… anywhere.

And it’s true: an electric car needs 6x the minerals of a petrol one. Solar needs silicon. Wind needs steel. Generators need rare earths.

But what mining does fossil fuels require?

Turns out: the energy transition is about to radically REDUCE what we pull out of the ground. Read more here