Did Powell talk about utilities energy business shrinkage, in the presence of continued population increase?
I guess not, as you would have mentioned it, it far outweighs any of things mentioned.
It only started around 2005, at least in UK, but now utilities energy supply is down by around 20 percent whilst population is up by more than 10 percent.
I am sure similar disparity exists in US, it is easy to check.
A population does not reduce fundamental energy requirement, we can't change the basic fact we all need at least 150 Joules or so per second, 24/7 to carry on living, the utilities energy we use at home is proportional to this.
So, since utilities energy business is declining, trending to zero, there is energy from somewhere else conversely scaling up.
That energy can only be solar, it is the only one installed in significant numbers of community and domestic places to relieve the burden of fuel bills.
Doing the math using applicable domestic energy unit prices, the value of the utilities energy business lost in UK stands at more than 500 Bn.
That loss, is what was gained by domestic and community solar.
In 2022 alone, 50Bn was added.
Next year, with the trend continuing as is, it will be 160 Bn added.
The tricky part of understanding the consequence of that, on inflation, is understanding something fundamental about solar energy vs any other, is that solar energy comes for free, from a donor external to Earth, thus independently from Earth capital.
Things created from solar are truly additional to the existing capital of Earth.
So in effect, by starting to use solar, we are starting to add significant capital, to the existing base of what we've always thought of as a fixed quantity, in the study of economics to date.
It worked for thousands of years, but can't work much longer now that it is being physically expanded by us not only using solar power, but continuing to scale it up, forced by nature, in the same way as any plant in nature scales up after it starts to form its first leaves.
How this affects inflation, whichever way we look at it, is that more money must be issued, to enumerate the newly ever expanding base of capital.
The money issued can't be in the form of money-as-debt, because that translates to a promise to do work, which none is associated with the Joules received from solar, there are no Joules of work expended per Joule of energy received from solar, it is donated, truly for free, after installation of the facility to receive it.
So money issued as debt, or any obligation to repay can't enumerate the economic product of solar, regardless if those Joules just pushed back some Joules coming from the grid, or were converted to hydrogen, which functionally replaces fossil fuels, or even further to food (See "Solein"), reducing the burden of humanity on the conventional food chain, all of it, is valuable economic product, doing valuable, tradeable things in the economy.
So it isn't production playing catch-up to issue of money any longer, it is now issue of money playing catch-up to production, which is scaling up with population growth, as ever.
There, you maybe see the real reason for inflation.
It isn't that too much free money was issued at all, it is that not enough is being issued.
This explains the reason the US Dollar went up when trillions were being issued as stimulus, not down as expected by conventional economics.
The intrinsic value, the energy content, in terms of Joules per token, of the former US petro-dollar, is being systematically reduced to zero, because not enough of it is being issued, to reflect the actual Joules of energy being put to economic use, by domestic and community solar.
That is the real reason for your inflation, and the inflation we are seeing in all currencies around the world, except maybe the currencies of China, which actually has to follow suit, sooner or later.