David Roberts
Writer of the Substack Sparks From Culture; zealous fan of my family, my Shih Tzu, all things Substack, NYC (lifelong resident); forty year career in finance, n...
“There is no road to decarbonization that does not involve radically increased demand for electricity because we're going to be switching everything over to electricity. So, in some sense, when I see this drive in demand for electricity cast as a bad thing, I get very nervous.”
Volts · Climate & Energy · October 2026
Context
Roberts pushes back on his own guest, a critic of data centers, setting out the clean-energy view that rising electricity demand is needed anyway and that data centers are exposing a grid that isn't ready.
Transcript
…just level of uncertainty about where this goes next is so wild that it's hard to pin anything down. But tell us your best estimate based on the sources that you trust. What's happening to data center, what's happening to power sector emissions right now? And what are the projections telling us?
…the renewable sector, right? Like it was kind of felt like you're at the helm of the ship. And it really kind of sucks to have this feeling of like a lot of effort and a lot of progress, not being undone, but I would say kind of slowed down or diverted somewhat in a way that I think we can avoid.
I was going to get to this later, but might as well talk about it now. Like, I mean, I have such mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I do not want us to come out of all this thinking that increased demand for electricity is bad for reasons that I know you understand. We want increased demand for electricity. There is no road to decarbonization that does not involve radically increased demand for electricity because we're going to be switching everything over to electricity. So, in some sense, when I see this drive in demand for electricity cast as a bad thing, I get very nervous. I get nervous about that. And, you know, the positive spin on this, and I think the spin you're getting from a lot of clean energy people is we're going to have to ramp up electricity demand regardless. We're going to have to transform the grid to accommodate this new demand. We're going to have to grow renewables really quickly to keep up with it. All this is showing us is that we're not ready…
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