Coordinated with Fredrik — Episode Recap
On January 30, 2026, SpaceX filed what looked like the most boring piece of regulatory paperwork imaginable. An FCC application. A string of numbers. The kind of thing you scroll past.
Except this one was for permission to launch one million orbiting data centers. And in the preamble, they called it “a first step towards becoming a Kardashev Type II civilization.”
That is not normal language for a permit application. That is a declaration of intent for a different species.
This episode digs into what that filing actually means, and why it forces anyone working in energy to confront a question that used to be reserved for philosophy seminars: are we wiring the planet, or wiring the solar system?
Three visions, one fork in the road
The episode walks through three competing models for where energy goes from here. They sound like they belong in different centuries, but all three are showing up on balance sheets right now.
The Earthbound Optimizer. This is Professor Mark Jacobson’s model out of Stanford. His thesis is that we can run 100% of civilization on wind, water, and solar. Not just electricity. Everything. Transport, heating, industry, agriculture, the military. All of it, with existing technology. No fusion. No miracle batteries. No carbon capture.
The physics behind it is surprisingly straightforward. Combustion is terrible at converting energy into useful work. A gasoline car turns only 17-20% of its fuel into motion. The rest is heat and noise. An electric motor runs at 90-95% efficiency. A heat pump moves three to four units of heat for every one unit of electricity you put in. Jacobson calculates that simply by electrifying everything, we cut global energy demand by 56.4%. The upfront cost is around $61.5 trillion, but annual energy costs drop from $17.8 trillion to $6.6 trillion. That is a six-year payback with an infinite tail of savings. Any board would fund that project in a heartbeat.
So why haven’t we done it? Because the model assumes 80% of daily electrical loads can be shifted within an eight-hour window. Charging your car at 2 AM instead of 6 PM? Easy. Asking a steel mill or a data center training an AI model to pause for eight hours? That is where the model meets reality.
The Orbital Industrialist. This is the Musk play. He looked at the seven-year wait for a new substation in Virginia, the zoning fights, the interconnection queues, and decided that the grid is a political problem. Rockets are a physics problem. He prefers physics problems.
In a sun-synchronous orbit, solar panels get 99% uptime. No clouds, no night, no atmosphere scattering the light. A panel in space generates six to eight times more energy per year than the same panel on Earth. The whole idea is to move the heavy compute, the training runs that take months and consume staggering amounts of power, off the planet entirely. Train the model in orbit where energy is constant and free. Beam the finished weights back to Earth. Learning happens in the sky. Thinking happens on your phone.
The catch is cooling. Space is a perfect insulator. There is no air for convection. The only way to dump heat is radiation, and to radiate at the scale of gigawatt data centers you would need radiator panels the size of Gibraltar. Silicon chips melt long before the radiator reaches efficient operating temperature. You might need entirely new semiconductor materials, gallium arsenide or silicon carbide, that can run at 300-400 degrees Celsius. It is not just about launching servers. It might mean reinventing the chip.
The whole bet rides on Starship driving launch costs from $2,700 per kilogram down to $200, maybe eventually $10. At $10 per kilo, you can launch heavy, cheap, standard server racks. Mass stops being a constraint. The engineering tradeoffs change completely.
The Cosmic Architect. This is the Dyson swarm endgame. Not a solid shell around the sun (that is physically impossible), but trillions of individual satellites orbiting in dense formation, each capturing a sliver of sunlight. Musk’s million satellites would capture roughly 0.00000000004% of the sun’s output. A rounding error on a rounding error. But the expansionist logic says once you start, you do not stop.
The theoretical blueprint is called the Mercury Loop. You land self-replicating mining robots on Mercury, which is rich in metals and sits right next to the sun. They mine the surface, build thin-foil solar collectors, and use electromagnetic railguns to shoot them into orbit. Those collectors beam energy back down to power more mining. It is an exponential feedback loop. Researchers at Oxford calculated you could dismantle the entire planet in about 31 years.
Even at that scale, thermodynamics wins. The Landauer limit means every bit erased generates heat. A Dyson swarm eventually cooks itself if it thinks too hard.
The Jevons Paradox sitting in the middle of all this
This is the tension that runs through the entire episode and connects directly to how any energy company should think about the next decade.
Jacobson argues that efficiency leads to sufficiency. Electrify everything, coordinate the loads, and demand goes down. We can get by with less.
The expansionist view says the opposite. William Stanley Jevons noticed in the 19th century that when steam engines got more efficient, coal consumption went up, not down. Cheaper energy means more uses for it. If you unlock cheap orbital compute, demand does not flatten. It explodes into virtual worlds, planetary simulations, uses we cannot even conceive of yet.
If Jacobson is right, energy companies are optimization businesses. You squeeze value out of a more or less static system. If Musk is right, you are preparing for a grid that needs to double, then triple, then quadruple. It is not a conservation problem. It is a throughput problem.
The one thing all three visions agree on
Whether the power comes from a rooftop in Palo Alto, a satellite 500 kilometers up, or a ring of collectors around the sun, the bottleneck is always the same: coordination.
Jacobson’s model only works if 80% of load is flexible. That requires massive demand response, virtual power plants, automated dispatch. Space solar needs laser downlinks, ground stations, collision avoidance for a million moving objects, all managed in real time. Even the Dyson swarm needs orchestration at a scale that makes today’s grid look like a toy.
The hardware is not the hard part. The connective tissue is. California proved this in 2024. They hit 117% renewable coverage in some intervals. Battery storage grew 2,100% in five years. But they also threw away 3.4 million megawatt hours of clean energy because they could not move it in space or time. Germany spent three billion euros just on redispatch, paying plants to turn down in one place and up in another to manage congestion.
The electrons are there. The infrastructure to get them to the right place at the right time is what is lagging.
The ownership question nobody wants to talk about
Jacobson’s world is distributed. Rooftop solar, community wind, local batteries. Hard to monopolize sunshine when it falls on everyone’s roof.
The orbital and Dyson worlds are centralized by nature. You need to be a trillion-dollar entity to launch rockets at scale. You need to own the mass drivers on Mercury. It recreates the dynamics of the oil industry. A few players control supply, everyone else is a customer.
We are choosing between energy democracy and energy tycoons. Or some hybrid of the two.
So what does this actually mean?
We receive 10,000 times more energy from the sun than we currently use. The scarcity is not natural. It is a scarcity of infrastructure and coordination.
Musk’s orbital play is, at its core, a hedge against our own dysfunction. A bet that we are too slow at building transmission lines, too tangled in zoning fights, too bad at aggregating distributed resources to keep up with what AI demands. So he is routing around the zoning board entirely.
Maybe he is right about that. But today, right now, the fight is still on Earth. It is the last 10% problem. It is making the load follow the sun. It is the boring, unglamorous work of connecting millions of devices into something that behaves like a single coordinated system.
Whether the future is on Earth or in orbit, the operating system for the energy transition is the same: coordination software, protocols, aggregation. The unsexy layer that makes any of this actually work.
We are currently deciding, in boardrooms and regulatory filings, whether to wire the planet or wire the solar system. And every battery you aggregate, every flex load you optimize, is a vote in that election.
Keep coordinating.
Listen to the full episode on [Coordinated with Fredrik].
