Put a gigawatt into a data centre and roughly 700 megawatts of it becomes heat inside the chips. Another 250 to 300 megawatts gets spent moving that heat back out of the building. That is Drew Baglino's description of what a data centre physically is, and it is the most useful lens on this page. Nothing here is a story about producing more energy. All five are about somebody going after a loss.
Hannah Ritchie makes the same case from the far end of the wire, with the biggest number attached. She puts the useful fraction of a dollar of gasoline at around 20 cents, the rest going out as heat and friction. Electrify the world's cars and change nothing else, no fewer miles and no smaller fleet, and by her account total energy use falls by at least two thirds. That is not an environmental argument. It is bookkeeping, and it explains why she is more interested in electrification than in almost anything else being marketed as a climate solution.
The losses in the middle are the ones nobody photographs. Baglino's pitch is that the box between the grid and the load is largely unchanged 60 hertz kit in an oil filled steel case, from a supply chain that had no reason to improve while US demand grew at 1 percent a year. Switch at hundreds of kilohertz using silicon carbide and the magnetics shrink with the frequency. He claims 100 times smaller by volume for the transformer section and roughly half the grid to chip loss, which on a gigawatt site he turns into about 35 megawatts of compute nobody had before.
Then the same instinct twice more, in places you would not look for it. CATL's sodium pitch barely mentions energy density, because on a concrete pad a heavy cell is fine. The claims that carry it are around 30 percent less heat, auxiliary draw halved, and a couple of points of round trip efficiency. And the Cayenne S, on Out of Spec's reading of the window sticker, makes 657 horsepower from the same pack as the base car. What changed, the reviewers say, is how the rear motor sheds heat.
What happens next is unusually checkable for a page like this. The sodium video puts CATL's first Chinese deliveries next month and international ones around June 2027, so the gap between a 200 GWh plan and a shipped product has a date on it. Ritchie's US electric vehicle share, which she says has sat near 10 percent for years, decides whether any of the efficiency argument reaches American driveways. And by his own schedule the electric truck world tour is due at the Caspian in October, chasing a record defined by how rarely it has to plug in.
AI Uses About Half a Percent of the World's Electricity, and That Is Not the Problem
Hannah Ritchie, introduced here as a senior researcher at the University of Oxford and deputy editor of Our World in Data, spends this interview letting air out of numbers that get quoted badly. On AI she cites International Energy Agency estimates putting all data centres at roughly 1.5 percent of world electricity, with AI specific facilities at about half a percent. Her argument is that the share is the wrong frame. Demand that size, served from a handful of locations, is a local grid problem rather than a global generation one.
The figure that lands hardest is about China. Ritchie says its annual increase in electricity generation is now equivalent to adding a Germany sized grid every year, and that last year all of that growth came from solar and wind. Against that she sets Europe and the United States, where she says demand has been flat or falling for decades.
On costs she gives solar and batteries down more than 90 percent over the past decade, wind 60 to 70 percent. The part she says is consistently underrated is electrification itself, on the grounds that a gasoline car turns only around 20 percent of the fuel you buy into motion. We have made a version of that argument here before, in Under Your Hood: A Space Heater That Occasionally Moves Things Forward.
Tesla's Former Powertrain Chief Is Rebuilding the Box Between the Grid and the Chip
Drew Baglino spent 18 years at Tesla and left running powertrain and energy. His company, Heron Power, targets the grid's least photogenic hardware: transformers and switchgear. His argument is that US demand grew at 1 percent a year or less from the 1980s through the 2010s, and a supply base with no growth had little reason to improve. He says switchgear is now one of the longest lead time items for anyone building a data centre or a factory, in a market fragmented across roughly 3,000 US utilities.
The product is a solid state transformer. Rather than isolating at 60 hertz inside an oil filled steel box, he says wide bandgap devices in silicon carbide and gallium nitride switch hundreds of thousands of times a second, and the magnetics shrink roughly in proportion. He puts the transformer section of Heron's first product at 100 times smaller by volume per unit of power, with the same semiconductors interrupting current directly rather than through a mechanical switch.
The efficiency claim matters most. Baglino says grid to chip losses can be cut by about a factor of two, which on a gigawatt data centre he translates into roughly 35 megawatts of additional useful compute. He also argues, and this is his position rather than a settled one, that data centres make unusually good utility customers, because they draw close to their connected capacity around the clock and, with storage on site, can hold a grid up rather than drop off it.
Porsche's Cayenne S Electric Brings 657 Horsepower and an Oil-Cooled Rear Motor
Out of Spec reads the window sticker on camera at 490 kilowatts and 657 horsepower for the Cayenne S Electric, which sits between the base car and the Turbo. The change is at the back. They say the base car uses a Macan derived rear motor with water jacket cooling, while the S gets a directly oil cooled unit closer to the Turbo's, with a narrower rotor and stator, and they call it the most rear biased Cayenne Electric currently sold. The battery is unchanged, quoted at roughly 113 kWh gross and 108 usable.
This is also their first look at the Coupe body, which they say is EPA rated at 316 miles against 295 for the Turbo. They put pricing near $128,000 to $131,000 depending on body. Read it against our earlier coverage of the same channel timing the base car at 4.33 seconds to 60 mph with launch control, and a 108 kWh Cayenne covering 344.7 miles. The S adds no capacity. It changes what the same capacity is allowed to do.
CATL Is Building Sodium Capacity Around 200 Times Its Sodium Shipments
Ben Alexxander's reading of CATL's sodium plan is that the scale only makes sense if you stop thinking about cars. He reports planned annual sodium ion capacity of up to 200 GWh, with 40 GWh going into one Chinese plant on 5 billion yuan of investment, which he converts to roughly $741 million, and a further 160 GWh at a second base in Shandong. Sodium storage shipments this year, he says, should land near 1 GWh, so the capacity being laid down is something like 200 times the current shipment rate.
Contracts already signed, according to the video: 60 GWh with HyperStrong across three years, close to half of CATL's entire 2025 storage battery sales of 121 GWh, plus 5 GWh with Alfen and 2 GWh with Solarpro in Europe. For scale he cites Bloomberg figures of about 307 GWh of new storage added worldwide in 2025.
The engineering argument is that weight stops mattering once a battery sits on a concrete pad. He gives current sodium cells at about 175 Wh per kg against roughly 205 for LFP and 265 for high energy NMC, and CATL's Tener sodium module at 42 tons for more than 30 MWh. What sodium buys instead, he says, is around 90 percent capacity retention at minus 40 C, roughly 30 percent less heat, and auxiliary consumption cut from about 2 percent to 1. He also relays IEA expectations that China will hold more than 95 percent of planned global sodium manufacturing capacity in 2030.
A Closed Border, 80 Charging Stops, and a Truck With No AC Charger
The Q&A is filmed in Bolzano with a DAF XF Electric hauling 15 Alpitronic 400 kW chargers north to Germany. The substance is the world tour. He says the Mercedes eActros 600 and its custom living cabin are long term loans rather than gifts, that the project came together in about four months, and that the sponsorship agreements carry no editorial oversight beyond checking the cause of a breakdown with the manufacturer before speculating on camera.
Two details matter more than the rest. The eActros 600 has no onboard AC charger, so he carries a mobile DC unit to work from industrial three phase sockets where public DC charging does not exist. And the record he is chasing is defined by efficiency rather than speed: the fewest charging stops and the longest distance between them, logged himself through GPS, state of charge and metered energy, because he says Guinness certification is expensive and slow. The route avoids Russia and Iran, which means the Caspian in October with the Georgia to Azerbaijan border closed since 2020.
Bottom line: Baglino has the most useful idea on this page and the hardest sell, because nobody buys a transformer for the joy of it and 3,000 utilities all want it their way. Watch whether Heron lands a data centre customer rather than a pilot. Ritchie is right that electrification is undersold, and the US sitting at 10 percent EV share is the whole problem in one number. And if you are actually cross shopping a Cayenne Electric, the S is the one. The base car is not slow, it is just not $128,000 quick.
Commentary on third-party videos. Figures and claims are as presented in the sources and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.