Jim Johnson interviews a guest about solar shingles as a fast solution to rising electricity demand from AI and crypto. A million homes annually could add 10 GW of capacity, equivalent to 10 nuclear plants, while gas turbines take 5 years to build and Georgia's nuclear project cost $30 billion over 24 years.
Questions this video answers
About five years.
$30 billion and 24 years from start to finish.
Five million homes per year.
About one million sites.
Roughly 10 gigawatts.
Chapters
The way the country and the world in general is moving with technology right now, it's creating a need for an immense amount of power. You've seen some of the big AI type farm server plants. How does that affect our need for energy? What's that going to do to like your traditional energy sources? It's going to draw heavily on them. And so how does that affect the normal average homeowner? And can it even produce what's going to be necessary? Especially in the world of AI, there's so much going on there is drawing energy. I don't think people really understand that side of what AI is doing.
Yeah, I walked into just a very small like crypto mining farm one time and the heat that was put off by those servers required, you know, not just the power to run those servers, but also the air conditioning and the cooling and all that. Those need to run, you know, 24, 7, 365, requiring a tremendous amount of electricity. And the truth is that solar, particularly solar, is really the only electricity source that can be frankly installed in days. Whereas everything else, gas turbines are the next quickest that you can install it. And the lead time on gas turbines right now about five years. Right. Nuclear, I love nuclear, but the last nuclear plant we built in this country, in Georgia, $30 billion. It took 24 years from start to finish. That's not happening in the time that we need. This is why I'm so passionate about residential, particularly solar shingles, because there's so. There's 5 million homes in the US that need new roofs every year. At least half of those homeowners have thought about seriously putting solar on their house. And about a million of those sites are really good locations for it. If we could do like you know, a million homes a year, that's, that's like 10 gigawatts, like 10 new nuclear plants worth of electricity. What we can do is very, very, very possible. We just need to be allowed to do it.
