How much electricity would a billion robots require, and where does it come from?

As a rough working estimate, we assume a humanoid robot consumes around 10 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day. That number will vary a lot in practice, since a robot doing heavy physical labor will draw more and an idle one far less, and efficiency will improve as the hardware matures, but it is a reasonable midpoint for scaling.

From there the arithmetic is straightforward. One hundred million robots at 10 kWh per day works out to roughly 400 terawatt-hours per year, which is about 10% of current US electricity use. Scaling up to a full billion robots, the figure becomes roughly 3,600 to 3,700 TWh per year. To put that in perspective, the United States generated a record 4,430 TWh of electricity in 2025, up 2.8% from the year before, and global generation reached around 31,700 TWh, with renewables overtaking coal for the first time to supply more than a third of the world's electricity. So a billion robots would need an amount of electricity approaching the entire annual output of the United States, or somewhere around 11 to 12% of all the electricity the world generates today.

That is a large number, but it is not an unprecedented or disqualifying one. The grid routinely absorbs major new sources of demand. Data centers, electric vehicles, and air conditioning are each adding hundreds of terawatt-hours of new annual demand right now, and global data center consumption alone is on track to roughly double to around 950 TWh by 2030. A robot fleet is a new load of the same broad order, phased in over a decade or two rather than arriving all at once.

The more important point is where the electricity comes from, and here the labor disruption connects directly to the energy disruption we have analyzed for years. Our work shows that solar, wind, and batteries (SWB) are already the cheapest form of new electricity and are capable of supplying vast quantities of near-zero-marginal-cost power. Solar is the fastest-growing power source in the world and has been doubling roughly every three years, so the supply needed to power a robot fleet is precisely the kind of cheap, abundant, rapidly scaling electricity that SWB is on track to deliver.

These two disruptions reinforce each other. Humanoid robots will help manufacture, install, and maintain the solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries that power them, while the falling cost of clean electricity makes robot labor cheaper still. Energy is therefore best understood as an enabling investment that must be built out in parallel with the robot fleet, not as a ceiling on how many robots we can deploy. A nation that goes all-in on humanoid robots will need to go all-in on clean energy at the same time, and the good news is that the cheapest path to that energy is already the one the world is racing down.

Explore the evidence...

• The per-robot estimate and the headline figure come from our blog How much should we invest in humanoid robotics?, where a rough calculation shows that 100 million robots consuming 10 kWh per day would need about 400 TWh per year, roughly 10% of current US electricity consumption. Read the blog here.
• The scale becomes clearer against today's grid. According to Ember's Global Electricity Review 2026, solar generation reached 2,778 TWh in 2025, a 30% jump in a single year, and it has continued to roughly double every three years. Solar alone met three-quarters of the world's growth in electricity demand that year, clean power met all of it, and renewables overtook coal to supply more than a third of global electricity for the first time. Global solar output is now about the size of the entire European Union's electricity demand. That puts the roughly 3,600 TWh a billion robots would need into perspective. It is a little more than all the solar electricity generated worldwide in 2025, and it would draw on the fastest-growing power source on the planet. See Ember's review here.
• A robot fleet is the same kind of large, fast-growing new load the grid is already learning to absorb. The IEA estimates that global data centers consumed around 485 TWh of electricity in 2025, having grown about 17% that year, and projects this will roughly double to around 950 TWh by 2030, accounting for about 3% of global electricity demand, which is comparable to the entire electricity consumption of Japan. A billion-robot fleet would be a larger load still, but one of the same character, added gradually over a similar span of years rather than all at once. Read the IEA analysis here
• On where the power comes from, our energy research shows that a solar, wind, and battery system can meet effectively all of our electricity demand, and would generate a large surplus of near-zero-cost clean power we call SWB Superpower. Watch RethinkX co-founder Tony Seba explain how SWB can meet 100% of global energy demand, and read about SWB Superpower here.

• For the full analysis of how a 100% SWB system would work, including regional case studies, see our Rethinking Energy report here or our Understanding Stellar Energy Report here.
• The reason the energy and labor disruptions accelerate one another is the subject of Insight 9 in our insights into humanoid robotics: robots make the build-out of energy infrastructure cheaper and faster, while cheap clean energy drives down the cost of robot labor. Read the insights here.

Witness the transformation

In the span of just fifteen years, the working horse went from providing the vast majority of road travel to a tiny fraction of it. The automobile had arrived, and the fate of the horse was sealed. We are now on the cusp of a disruption every bit as swift and complete, except this time, we humans are the horses.

A convergence of sensors, computing, actuators, and batteries now gives humanoid robots the capability to perform both cognitive and physical work. AI is already taking on cognitive tasks once reserved for people, and humanoid robots are bringing the same capability to physical tasks. For the first time, the supply of available labor can expand as fast as machines can be built and trained. These systems are already approaching cost parity with human labor across much of the global economy, and their cost will keep falling while their capability keeps rising.

This is about far more than cheaper labor. Robots will create an entirely new and vastly larger labor system in which the marginal cost of labor approaches zero. The result will be a sweeping tide of falling costs, rising quality, and explosive productivity that forms the foundation of an era of superabundance. The nations, industries, and individuals who recognize this early, and who choose to protect people rather than jobs, will be best positioned to navigate the transformation and capture its extraordinary benefits.

Learn more about the disruption of labor and its implications for jobs, society, and the economy.