Comment by RobinL
9 hours ago
One thing missing but important to understand is the energy embodied in buying 'stuff'. At a very rough approximation, the cost of stuff, especially consumer goods manufactured cheaply, is quite a high percentage energy.
When you look at people's energy usage, quite a lot of it ends up being the embodied energy in the stuff they buy. For quite a lot of people, it's probably the largest category of energy consumption. I once had a very rough go at calculating this here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy_usage/
One may look at aluminum as a solid form of energy. In fact, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery
One gram of finished 3nm packaged semiconductor is roughly equivalent to half a kilogram of refined aluminum in terms of energy cost. If you want to spend a lot of energy for not much mass, photolithography is fantastic.