Cummins has a new sermon about paradise. It opens on a Maldivian beach and closes in a humming data centre. In between, a bloke in Melbourne sells you battery containers as moral cover for diesel, AI and luxury resorts. The episode is shorter. The bullshit is not.
Paradise, Sponsored By A Genset
They start you on the beach. Waves, warm breeze, the whole brochure. You are supposed to forget the generator room out back that smells like a ferry engine on a hot day.
Then the voiceover snaps you into “how is all of this powered”.
The answer, surprise, is not systemic change. It is microgrids, diesel and whatever Cummins can fit in a steel box. Every line in this thing is dressed up as a deep reflection on the “energy transition”. It is not. It is product placement with better sound design.
Kim plays friendly host. Sherif plays the adult in hi-vis. Together they walk you from Australian rooftops to Pacific islands and resort pools, all under a banner called “Technology meets purpose”. Translation: we have found a way to keep selling engines while talking like Greenpeace with a LinkedIn account.
The constant, from start to finish, is diesel. They just keep adding garnish and new buzzwords and hoping you do not notice the main course.
Batteries As Bolt-On Repentance
Sherif reels off uses for BESS like he is reading the back of the box. Energy shifting. Off grid hybrids. Peak shaving. Backup power. Demand response. EV charging. It sounds smart. That is the point.
The honest version would say this: we have too much solar in the day, not enough at night, and a grid built by drunk Victorians with a coal fetish. To fix that we need aggressive fossil shutdowns, demand work and storage that is not bolted to endless new loads.
The Cummins version says: think of it like a “time machine” for energy. You store it when it is cheap and clean, use it when it is expensive and critical. Very cute. Also very convenient that the time machine only arrives inside a Cummins branded container that sits next to the same old generator.
It is repentance as a bolt-on accessory. Keep the snake. Sell it a halo.
You never hear about end of life. You never hear who owns the arbitrage. You absolutely never hear “and yes, this is how we start shutting down diesel for good”. That is not the story. The story is “diesel plus” until the sun burns out.
Islands, Resorts And The Diesel Hangover
Then we go island hopping. Pacific communities, small diesel stations, frequent outages. Fair enough. That is a real problem.
Sherif says solar plus BESS can cut diesel use by 30 to 40 percent. Good. Useful. Also nowhere near where we need to be. If your liver is wrecked, you do not brag about cutting from ten pints to six and call it recovery. You are still slowly killing yourself.
He gets emotional about clinics and schools having steadier power. That matters. What he does not say is that the new “independence” still depends on a corporation in another hemisphere and a permanent fuel supply chain. The clinic just swapped one kind of handcuff for another with nicer anodised handles.
Then we get to Fiji and the Maldives. Resorts that burn diesel 24/7 so strangers can sit in infinity pools and pretend to love nature. They want eco points on the brochure without turning off a single bloody air con unit.
Cummins rolls in with hybrid microgrids and suddenly the islands have “renewable” stories to tell investors and Instagram. The engines keep chugging. The fuel trucks keep sailing in. The only real difference is the marketing department now gets to use words like “differentiator” with a straight face.
It is not decarbonisation. It is guilt management.
Data Centres Get Their Halo Too
Halfway through, the beach disappears and we are in data centre land. Racks, blinking lights, the heartbeat of the digital world.
Here is the unvarnished truth: data centres are the new coal face. They chew through staggering amounts of electricity so we can stream, doomscroll, mine crypto and ask chatbots for salad recipes. AI has turned the dial from unhealthy to downright stupid.
In the episode, none of that is questioned. Growth is a given. AI is inevitable. The only thing up for discussion is how to keep the lights on without looking like total arsonists.
Enter BESS again, now in a hard hat and a halo. It smooths peaks. It supports the grid. It lets data centres “participate in demand response”. That last phrase is corporate for “we get paid twice while everyone else deals with the mess”.
Sherif is very clear that data centres already trust Cummins gensets. The sales job now is to strap the same badge onto a battery cube and sell the package as “integrated, low emission”. It is not low emission. It is slightly less visibly filthy, front of house, while the back room still breathes diesel and fossil powered grid.
The digital world gets its uninterrupted dopamine drip. Communities downstream get more concrete, more cabling, more excuses.
From Twenty Minutes To Nine, Funny That
Old Power Onward episodes rambled on for twenty minutes plus. Soft piano. Long anecdotes. Enough time to really marinate in the PR stew.
This one suddenly clocks in under ten. They even publish the timestamps – 00:00, 01:22, 02:33 – like they are proud of their new “tight” format. They should be honest and list one more chapter at the start: “00:00 – Legal finally noticed people are taking the piss”.
Because TCAP did. We literally pointed at the previous episodes and said: you have made twenty minute infomercials for your own products and you think nobody notices.
Now, magically, your big global clean energy sermon wraps in 08:54. Less time to name actual islands. Less time for real numbers. Zero time for awkward questions about how many megawatt hours are installed, how many engines have been retired or how much of that AI load is just rich blokes teaching chatbots to trade meme coins.
Shorter does not equal honest. It just means the grift has learned to move quicker.
When “Purpose” Means Pushing Product
The emotional ending is straight from the PR playbook.
Sherif says it is not about technology, it is about people. He talks about pride, hope, independence. Kim closes by telling us we must build the future of energy in a way that protects the planet, and that embracing innovation gets us closer.
On the surface, fine. Nobody with a functioning brain is against clinics keeping lights on or communities spending less on fuel. The tech can help.
But zoom out. Look at the pattern.
- Diesel is still the starting point in almost every scene.
- BESS is sold as a way to make that diesel cheaper and prettier, not obsolete.
- Data centres and AI are treated as sacred. Their demand is destiny, not a political choice we could actually push back on.
- Luxury resorts get to print “microgrid” on the brochure while keeping every fridge, pump and jacuzzi running on a fossil safety net.
There is no mention of absolute cuts. No mention of upstream mining damage for all these batteries. No hint that a responsible company might say “no” to certain new loads or commit to actual timelines for scrapping engines instead of surrounding them with shiny cubes.
“Purpose” here is simple. Keep Cummins hardware welded into the global energy system for as long as possible, then call every minor efficiency tweak a revolution.
What A Grown Up Story Would Admit
A grown up version of this episode would sound different.
It would name the projects and show the numbers, not just the sunsets. Baseline diesel use. Post project diesel use. CO₂ tonnes off the books. Dates when generator sets are due for scrappage, not refurbishment.
It would admit that some AI capacity should never be built. That some resorts cannot have 24/7 American style excess with a green badge slapped on top. That in a climate emergency, “customer demand” is not a law of physics.
It would talk honestly about the damage at both ends of the chain – from the mines that feed your batteries to the fumes coming out of your engines – instead of using the word “purpose” like an air freshener.
Instead we get a beach, a server rack, a nine minute sales job and a lot of careful editing.
The snake is still wrapped round a diesel tank. The batteries are there to make sure you feel good while it squeezes.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project