ESSAY TEMPLATE
The Two Curves: Energy Cost and Intelligence Cost
The central economic story of this decade is the convergence of two falling cost curves: energy and intelligence. When those curves drop together, they can increase both industrial throughput and quality of life.
1) What’s actually changing
Energy systems are becoming more modular, software-directed, and cost-compressible over time. In parallel, usable intelligence is becoming cheaper through model efficiency, better inference, and practical workflow integration.
2) Why this compounds
Cheaper intelligence improves how we plan, design, and operate systems. Better systems reduce waste and bottlenecks, which lowers real costs. Lower costs increase adoption and experimentation, creating another wave of optimization.
3) Operator implications
- Track cycle-time and reliability, not just model benchmarks.
- Treat power and permitting timelines as first-class product constraints.
- Build resilient supply and execution networks, not single-point dependencies.
4) The practical test
If this thesis is right, teams that combine energy realism with AI-native operations should ship faster and at lower all-in cost than peers that optimize only one side of the equation.