The Bitter Lesson in Electricity
The bitter lesson in AI: simple methods that scale with compute beat complex methods that encode human cleverness.
The same lesson applies to energy: don’t bet against scale.
Solar and wind are pure scale plays. They follow Wright’s Law—costs drop predictably with cumulative production. Solar costs dropped 90% in the last decade. They’ll drop another 90% in the next. Once you build them, they need no inputs to produce energy. No fuel supply chains. No extraction. Just manufacturing scale and free photons forever.
We learned the bitter lesson for AI—that’s why we’re betting everything on data centers. Ironically, we’re still betting on energy systems that fight scaling laws.
Fossil fuels are anti-scale. Peak oil isn’t about running out—it’s about extraction costs rising forever. That’s what anti-scale means: the more you do it, the harder it gets. Everything about fossil fuels embodies this. Gas plants are massive, complex, custom installations—large and bespoke, not small and standard. You can’t stamp them out on an assembly line.
Fossil fuel advocates make the same mistake as those chess researchers who bet on human intuition. They optimize for today’s constraints—baseload, energy density, existing infrastructure. But scale always wins. Solar + batteries will eat everything, not because they’re green, but because they scale.
Don’t bet against manufacturing scale. The bitter lesson for electricity is already written.
