Also an important part that keeps getting left out for some reason: they're doing so illegally. They are running unpermitted turbines. They claimed the turbines were off and journalists had to use thermal cameras mounted on drones to prove that they are indeed running. Then a non-profit had to sue them to get them to agree to turn off the turbines by 2027...
That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to white collar crime.
and they (and many other AI data centers) run on some of the environmental/health hazard worst kinds of gas turbines available (i.e. cheap portable ones)
A well build gas power plane can be one of the cleanest fossile fuel power plants with neither huge issues of air nor sound pollution (compared to other fossile fuel, it still isn't perfect by far)
Same btw. for data center cooling, my office was for 3 years above a data center of a super computer in the mittle of a city and there where no sound issues at all (through yes it was a special case in many ways).
I mean yes, it costs more and many well established companies for high quality gas turbines are booked out.
Still using the kind of gas turbines which can bring back literal acid rain shouldn't be an option at all.
Lets also not speak about the environmental/health damage the production of the natural gas through fracking does.
Which bring us to a common nonsense argument, people going on and on about hoe economically expensive/harmful climate protection is, but totally missing that many oft he circumvented laws are not for climate protection but are for environmental protection for the sake of humans health.
To make thinks worse most of this data centers seems to be more about making money, then being in any way relevant for winning any AI race...
No, there are extreme consequences only when toes are stepped on. For example SBF... If it was run by Musk or Trump you can be sure there would be no sentence. I'm not arguing what SBF did isn't a crime. I'm saying if that deserves 20 years, then everything else should also be equally punished.
It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar. The race dynamics make the discount rate on GPU deployments very high.
Solar is preferable when you have a ton of unproductive land and longer timelines to set it up - it’s certainly going to be cheaper than gas when everyone goes sets up NG plants as option 1 for new energy capacity.
The other confound is that China is the primary supplier of battery and solar tech, I’m sure that supply chain risk becomes part of the calculus when setting up so much infrastructure.
For scale, the current DC is about 8k acres, and the solar to run 7.6GW is almost 40k acres.
cheap, dirty, loud "tbh. shouldn't exist" kind fo gas generators are far more available and what is widely used
but also huge part of the solar supply bottleneck is artificial due to import regulations from china and both the US and EU having failed to secure meaningful domestic solar supply chains.
»It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar.«
Idk. about any specific data center but many of this data centers aren't for AI training / making advancements on the AI race. They have sufficient resources for that already AFIK.
They are to run AI, so that the 100th app can force an AI agent down your throat weather your want or not /s. (Or in more optimistic words, so that the AI adoption can spread as fast as their is demand.)
The problem is that the grid can’t get built out fast enough. You’ll probably see most AI data centers switch to grid power in the coming years using mostly wind and solar because it’s simply cheaper as well
Remember when they said they couldnzt electrify the grid for ev's so they opted to just not do anything with ev's. Now datacenters are getting rushed in so fast and breaking the grids so hard they can illegally running generators
They could (and should be required to) build out their own solar/wind/battery infra as part of standing up a new datacenter. So much money is being wasted on poisoning our air and further enriching the richest companies in the history of the world.
You totally can. I've seen cases a rat gnawed a circuit breaker and blacked out a DC. Fires too. It's not an industrial manufacturing facility. Computers can just be shut off and on. There's also nothing needed to bootstrap the other parts like cooling etc.
Are the UPSes actual batteries or just backup generators? If they're generators then that defeats the point. If they're batteries then it's kinda just regular solar then?
But that's the point. It's not like a solar DC would suddenly lose power because of cloud cover. Large scale batteries can provide amble ride through inclement weather to allow a graceful shutdown, and weather forecasts at that scale are accurate enough to predictively model your energy availability.
AI training is unique because it's not interactive workload serving.
Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.
In modern times you combine solar energy with wind power and batteries and you already have 90% of the load covered. Then combine that with cheap, easily adjustable gas power plants to complete the picture for cloudy, windless winter days.
There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.
Comparing 24/7 AI training to operating hospitals 24/7 is a bit of a false equivalency, don't you think?
Besides, hydroelectric is commonly used as baseload where available. Additionally, there are big strides happening in power storage options to smooth the effective baseload of solar and wind.
I would argue that coal energy only makes sense in an anachronistic society doomed to fail.
You've been confidently wrong a couple times now - or maybe intentionally misrepresenting the facts?
In the US there are several states where hydro is the majority source of baseload electricity: Washington, Idaho, Vermont, Oregon, etc.
Outside of the US there are several countries that source more than 90% of their electricity from hydro - at higher percentages than Norway even: Paraguay, Albania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Namibia, Zambia, Tajikistan.
You also don't have to build mountains to utilize hydro. There are areas that are utilizing pumped hydro to store the kinetic energy to smooth the baseline.
I've worked in energy and ran the numbers. Renewables only make sense for a pre industrial or deindustrializing society. When you need power to make shit they are useless. Which is why the industrial revolution moved from water to coal in the first place.
Or we can turn off the net negative data centers in order to keep our Hospitals running smoothly, rather than taking the entire grid down so some psychopaths in Silicon Valley can LARP at creating their silicon God.
- Running billions of dollars worth of GPUs only 30-50% of the time insanely wasteful. Everyone else is running them at 99% duty cycle or close to it.
- Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are. Transmission is already a bottleneck in many states. Adding tens of gigawatts requires non-trivial large scale infrastructure investment by… the utility companies, not SpaceX. Not to mention regulatory hurdles, etc.
- Battery production is already mostly maxed out, so obtaining tens of gigawatt hours of capacity on short notice is a decent percentage of global production.
Gas and other fossil fuel power plants can be deployed adjacent to the data centres for effectively zero transmission loss and no long powerlines that upset the NIMBY types.
They can work 24/7 and are largely available right now, but as others have pointed out the turbine blades are a limiting factor with these too.
> Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are.
these data centers dont care that much about network throughput - you can sneakernet the training set into place and inference on the text isnt that taxing on the network
there's a reason the ai datacenters are being built wherever the power is cheapest and theres the lowest regulations. there's no real physical location requirement, so you could actually put them close to the solar power generation
You’re talking about one of the most hated person on hearth with one of the worst reputation. The literal Nazi salute guy. I don’t think he cares much about positive PR like that
* you can run data centres on grid electricity, which can come from mostly-renewable sources (in short, you need gas mainly as as an occasional backup).
* running things off-grid is dumb, and they’re only doing it because they’re desperate to get their data centres up and running yesterday so that they’re the ones who get to the singularity first (or some approximation thereof).
* the US electricity grid is f**d, mostly for the same reasons you can’t build any linear infrastructure in the United States - too many bodies hold veto powers and use any such infrastructure as an extortion opportunity.
* The spike in gas-powered generation for data centres is essentially a US phenomenon. Globally, the vast majority of new electricity supply is coming from renewables.
* in a sane world, Amazon and new large-scale data centre providers would face punitive carbon charges to incentivise them to switch to mostly renewables as soon as possible.
Gas is ridiculously cheap in the US while it's often the most expensive source of electricity in the rest of the world.
We're currently seeing a bifurcation where Asia bets on anything but oil and gas while the US goes in the opposite direction. Note that anything but oil and gas includes coal, so this isn't about the environment.
At least these sites (its more than Amazon) are being built near the energy source they will consume. Straight out of the ground into a turbine and then into the electron spinners.
Also there's not a lot of anything where these sites are located (Near El Paso). The 4-5 Road Runners who live around there will probably appreciate the change.
No one cares about West Texas, it's about the 33 million tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and warming the world.
Reminder that the USA are the country that historically burned the most fossil fuels, the world's largest extractor of oil, the only country trying to do a 180 on coal power.
Half of the world has experienced unprecedented heatwaves that will become the norm in 2050.
A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country?
Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the climate.
A wind/solar/battery solution is not even really much more expensive than gas power and it’s far less dependent on fluctuating fuel prices.
I'm absoltutely not defending the environmental decision, but these datacenter projects seem to be funded mostly by free cash flow (not borrowed money), from the hyperscaler profit margins.
I don’t think business really wants interest rates that high. Without conspiracy theories, a simpler explanation is that this is simply democracy in action. People don’t want the spending reigned in, and they don’t want their taxes raised.
If I understand correctly, for speed of deployment they're building a less-efficient simple-cycle plant (instead of the typical combined-cycle). Even though it's larger, the efficiency is worse than a typical natural gas plant.
Natural gas is basically a waste product that gets flared off in many oil-producing parts of Texas. If this private power plant can use that gas for something productive then I guess at least we're no worse off. But it's not clear that is what is happening.
Which is nonsense. There's plenty of pollution that's been diluted as much as it possibly can be and is still problematic. CO2 is an obvious example. Or consider leaded gasoline or mercury. You have to be careful not to eat too much fish or you'll have trouble with the mercury in it. That's been diluted by the entire ocean and that didn't solve it.
also, i don't necessarily mean to endorse this worldview in terms of its potential impact on policy, though there may be some truth to it, technically speaking.
A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere.
Permitted maximum of 10 grams(2 nickels) of CO2 per hour for every person in the US. 33 million tons * 2000 ton/pound * 454 g/pound / 365 days in a year / 24 hours in a day / 342.6M people in us = 9.984 grams
It sounds... pretty good? It's not going to put pressure to the existing grid. Nor it will use freshwater. Near to the data centers themselves so the waste from power transmission is minimalized.
Except for that largest polluter in the country part. Our children and their children’s children and so on will curse our generation for what we did to them.
Yes, but those are a priority below massive solar and wind deployment because nuclear is another way to say emissions will rise for decades before the plants come online and start displacing fossil fuels. There are a few edge cases where nuclear might be necessary but there is an enormous amount of fossil fuel usage which could easily be replaced except for political capture by the oil and coal industries.
Nuclear is good for the last 10% (and very contextually - it maybe makes a lot of sense in Alaska but far less sense in Arizona, for example), but mostly we should be building more solar/wind/batteries, as they can be built both faster and increasingly cheaper over time (the cost of batteries has dropped ~97% in the last 20 years IIRC, solar and wind have similarly been dropping in price).
The main argument for nuclear besides "baseload" is that nuclear plants can potentially last for a century and will thus amortise its capex quite easily and afterwards become relatively cheap for most of its life. Except, given just how quickly solar is dropping right now, it's unreasonable to assume that 50+ years from now (so, in ~2076) already-built nuclear will be cheaper than contemporary solar tech (I.e. solar panels built in 2075). In fact, it's unreasonable to assume that nuclear plants will necessarily be longer-lasting than future solar panels, given current research into self-healing solar panels (which clearly isn't commercially ready, but very likely will be within 50 years). Even if they can only self-heal 3 times, that's 4x the lifetime for 120 years total, and much longer if the base lifetime of the panel is more than 30 years. And frankly nuclear will never beat solar panels on operational costs - nuclear has a 24/7 guard, a nuclear reactor and a turbine, whereas the closest thing PV has to moving parts is the de-dusting machines.
Similar logic for solar also applies to wind and batteries, of course - their price has been dropping like a rock for decades. And that compounds - if both solar and batteries get twice as cheap and their lifetime lasts twice as long, then the whole package becomes 4x cheaper. And the cheaper wind turbines get, the fewer batteries solar needs to plug the holes in intermittent generation.
A quick aside: a lot of focus on solar lifetimes assumes the minimum will be the average, but e.g. 1980s solar panels are still in operation with only 10-20% performance degradation IIRC so the popular assumption that solar panels last only 30 years seems a bit ridiculous.
China's nuclear stats should be kept in perspective by the way: IIRC ~90% of the generation they're building is non-nuclear renewables. They're also building more of basically everything than the rest of the world combined, so an absolute stat like "they're building 37 of X" isn't particularly useful except for conveying that China is building a lot of stuff.
To repeat, though: the US should still build nuclear plants (unless/until they get financially blitzed by renewables). My point here is to keep it in perspective.
And I don't mean to insinuate you said otherwise, I'm just kind of pre-emptively responding to a stereotype/common set of associated arguments, I guess.
Making this argument is a strong indicator that you are extremely under-educated on this subject or motivated to make dishonest arguments.
There are a variety of commercial reactor design families that CANNOT melt down. Literally impossible for have a Chernobyl or Fukushima from the designs. These are not new. There is no reason anyone feeling like they know enough to contribute to this sort of discussion should be unaware. HTGRs, MSRs, SMRs, LMRs, SFRs...
"Sometimes nuclear plants melt down and cause widespread problems for very long timescales" is a nonsense argument to use against "We should build new reactors" when the new reactor designs we would be building can't melt down.
So they can have cancer and not work... I guess that's better then working and having cancer. Or the people just starve instead so we don't have to worry about the pollution.
Carbon tax is the only way, you need to pay for picking up the garbage from the road or the air, the cost to clean op pollution and trash needs to be accounted for.
Currently the largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) project on the planet has failed to meet it's goals. Had it actually met the design goals it would be part of an LNG power source that manages to reclaim only 80% of the CO2 it releases.
That's not net zero, it falls short, and that's a good attempt but hardly viable.
The desired goal is to eliminate further emissions and also go further and claw back some of those gigatonnes of previously sequestered CO2 released by humans over the past century.
Carbon capture gets downvotes because it’s not working anywhere at scale. The fossil fuel industry loves it because it’s saying they get paid now and maybe someone else gets paid later, and their industry doesn’t have profits cut, but anyone planning to continue living on earth would prefer we stop polluting now because that is proven to actually work at scale.
Yes, by burning fuels we release carbon from the thing being burned, it gets mixed with oxygen, and released into the atmosphere as co2.
As the suns energy warms the earth, the earth radiates heat back out and away from the surface and normally back out into space. co2 also acts like a blanket for that radiant heat, and traps it inside.
More co2 in the atmosphere traps more energy around the planet like an insulated wrap.
To reduce this, we have to extract the carbon out of the atmosphere and store it.
Let's add as well "SpaceX’s Terafab will rely on natural gas power plants, not Tesla solar panels" to the mix :o(
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/spacexs-terafab-will-rely-...
Also an important part that keeps getting left out for some reason: they're doing so illegally. They are running unpermitted turbines. They claimed the turbines were off and journalists had to use thermal cameras mounted on drones to prove that they are indeed running. Then a non-profit had to sue them to get them to agree to turn off the turbines by 2027...
That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to white collar crime.
White collar crime is the only crime that should be eligible for the death penalty.
and they (and many other AI data centers) run on some of the environmental/health hazard worst kinds of gas turbines available (i.e. cheap portable ones)
A well build gas power plane can be one of the cleanest fossile fuel power plants with neither huge issues of air nor sound pollution (compared to other fossile fuel, it still isn't perfect by far)
Same btw. for data center cooling, my office was for 3 years above a data center of a super computer in the mittle of a city and there where no sound issues at all (through yes it was a special case in many ways).
I mean yes, it costs more and many well established companies for high quality gas turbines are booked out.
Still using the kind of gas turbines which can bring back literal acid rain shouldn't be an option at all.
Lets also not speak about the environmental/health damage the production of the natural gas through fracking does.
Which bring us to a common nonsense argument, people going on and on about hoe economically expensive/harmful climate protection is, but totally missing that many oft he circumvented laws are not for climate protection but are for environmental protection for the sake of humans health.
To make thinks worse most of this data centers seems to be more about making money, then being in any way relevant for winning any AI race...
They probably take portable ones so they can claim it's not a permanent installation and they can skip a lot of planning permission that way.
No, there are extreme consequences only when toes are stepped on. For example SBF... If it was run by Musk or Trump you can be sure there would be no sentence. I'm not arguing what SBF did isn't a crime. I'm saying if that deserves 20 years, then everything else should also be equally punished.
Don't understand why. AI training can be run during the sunny days. Could be a good PR opportunity for Musk, I'm surprised he doesn't take it.
Especially if he buys from his own company.
When you spend many billions buying GPUs, you want to maximize utilization, and not turn them off during the night.
It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar. The race dynamics make the discount rate on GPU deployments very high.
Solar is preferable when you have a ton of unproductive land and longer timelines to set it up - it’s certainly going to be cheaper than gas when everyone goes sets up NG plants as option 1 for new energy capacity.
The other confound is that China is the primary supplier of battery and solar tech, I’m sure that supply chain risk becomes part of the calculus when setting up so much infrastructure.
For scale, the current DC is about 8k acres, and the solar to run 7.6GW is almost 40k acres.
Natural gas generators are also a supply bottleneck. https://www.naturalgasintel.com/news/turbine-shortage-threat...
_decent, clean_ gas generators have a bottleneck
cheap, dirty, loud "tbh. shouldn't exist" kind fo gas generators are far more available and what is widely used
but also huge part of the solar supply bottleneck is artificial due to import regulations from china and both the US and EU having failed to secure meaningful domestic solar supply chains.
»It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar.«
No, it's just physics.
no, it's not physics but politics which are the problem here
Idk. about any specific data center but many of this data centers aren't for AI training / making advancements on the AI race. They have sufficient resources for that already AFIK.
They are to run AI, so that the 100th app can force an AI agent down your throat weather your want or not /s. (Or in more optimistic words, so that the AI adoption can spread as fast as their is demand.)
The problem is that the grid can’t get built out fast enough. You’ll probably see most AI data centers switch to grid power in the coming years using mostly wind and solar because it’s simply cheaper as well
Remember when they said they couldnzt electrify the grid for ev's so they opted to just not do anything with ev's. Now datacenters are getting rushed in so fast and breaking the grids so hard they can illegally running generators
EVs aren't popular in the US due to the Republicans being beholden to oil and gas interests and the Democrats to unions. The grid was just an excuse.
They could (and should be required to) build out their own solar/wind/battery infra as part of standing up a new datacenter. So much money is being wasted on poisoning our air and further enriching the richest companies in the history of the world.
»Don't understand why.«
Because you cannot turn a large datacenter with thousands of aggregates, power supplies and so on off and on like a toaster.
You totally can. I've seen cases a rat gnawed a circuit breaker and blacked out a DC. Fires too. It's not an industrial manufacturing facility. Computers can just be shut off and on. There's also nothing needed to bootstrap the other parts like cooling etc.
I totally can. And if it's powered by solar (low inertia) there's less obligations to supply side, solar panels will just get warmer a tiny bit.
Batteries exist, and are getting better all the time.
Datacenters literally have UPS power supplies to let them gracefully shutdown and start up.
A 4 hour grid battery and a weather forecast would easily let a training run follow energy availability.
Are the UPSes actual batteries or just backup generators? If they're generators then that defeats the point. If they're batteries then it's kinda just regular solar then?
But that's the point. It's not like a solar DC would suddenly lose power because of cloud cover. Large scale batteries can provide amble ride through inclement weather to allow a graceful shutdown, and weather forecasts at that scale are accurate enough to predictively model your energy availability.
AI training is unique because it's not interactive workload serving.
when the GPU capex overshadows everything else your idle hardware is burning enormous amounts of money
I would assume that training pales in comparison to inference when it comes to energy use, taking into account the number of inference users
I wouldn't assume that. I would wish to see numbers on that first.
I don't see why this isn't obvious. Terafab is a FAB not a datacenter.
Hospitals can also just run on the sunny days.
Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.
Unplug a ventilator for five minutes and a patient dies.
If unplugging a data center for five minutes can have a similar effect, then every AWS or cloudflare outage would have been a mass extinction event.
In modern times you combine solar energy with wind power and batteries and you already have 90% of the load covered. Then combine that with cheap, easily adjustable gas power plants to complete the picture for cloudy, windless winter days.
There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.
If you run a washing machine sure.
If you need to run an industrial process, not so much.
Comparing 24/7 AI training to operating hospitals 24/7 is a bit of a false equivalency, don't you think?
Besides, hydroelectric is commonly used as baseload where available. Additionally, there are big strides happening in power storage options to smooth the effective baseload of solar and wind.
I would argue that coal energy only makes sense in an anachronistic society doomed to fail.
Where available is limited to Norway. Building enough mountains per capita in the rest of the world is somewhat difficult.
You've been confidently wrong a couple times now - or maybe intentionally misrepresenting the facts?
In the US there are several states where hydro is the majority source of baseload electricity: Washington, Idaho, Vermont, Oregon, etc.
Outside of the US there are several countries that source more than 90% of their electricity from hydro - at higher percentages than Norway even: Paraguay, Albania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Namibia, Zambia, Tajikistan.
You also don't have to build mountains to utilize hydro. There are areas that are utilizing pumped hydro to store the kinetic energy to smooth the baseline.
I've worked in energy and ran the numbers. Renewables only make sense for a pre industrial or deindustrializing society. When you need power to make shit they are useless. Which is why the industrial revolution moved from water to coal in the first place.
Oh you ran the numbers!? If only you had led with that.
Even China has seen a stark reduction in the percentage of electricity generated from coal plants over the past decade. Are they deindustrializing?
Everyone knows coal is a dead end. Maybe you should run the numbers again.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources...
That's a funny statistic to focus on when the actual use of coal for electricity has increased by 50% over the same period.
It's almost like they are using it to cover baseload or something.
You realize that link shows the exact opposite of what you're saying it shows, right?
It shows that the percentage share of electricity generated from coal in China peaked at ~80% in 2007 and was at ~54% last year.
The above listed Washington, Idaho, Vermont, and Oregon are all industrialized societies.
Or we can turn off the net negative data centers in order to keep our Hospitals running smoothly, rather than taking the entire grid down so some psychopaths in Silicon Valley can LARP at creating their silicon God.
The reasons are:
- Running billions of dollars worth of GPUs only 30-50% of the time insanely wasteful. Everyone else is running them at 99% duty cycle or close to it.
- Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are. Transmission is already a bottleneck in many states. Adding tens of gigawatts requires non-trivial large scale infrastructure investment by… the utility companies, not SpaceX. Not to mention regulatory hurdles, etc.
- Battery production is already mostly maxed out, so obtaining tens of gigawatt hours of capacity on short notice is a decent percentage of global production.
Gas and other fossil fuel power plants can be deployed adjacent to the data centres for effectively zero transmission loss and no long powerlines that upset the NIMBY types.
They can work 24/7 and are largely available right now, but as others have pointed out the turbine blades are a limiting factor with these too.
> Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are.
these data centers dont care that much about network throughput - you can sneakernet the training set into place and inference on the text isnt that taxing on the network
there's a reason the ai datacenters are being built wherever the power is cheapest and theres the lowest regulations. there's no real physical location requirement, so you could actually put them close to the solar power generation
I hope you get paid for apologizing for the worst people in the world.
and would be cheaper in the long run? or maybe they could even do solar + storage.
i guess even at this stage “gas is easier” is still winning…
You’re talking about one of the most hated person on hearth with one of the worst reputation. The literal Nazi salute guy. I don’t think he cares much about positive PR like that
Elon has aligned with the hard-right. He'd rather own the libs and hurt the global south than do that.
Some thoughts:
* you can run data centres on grid electricity, which can come from mostly-renewable sources (in short, you need gas mainly as as an occasional backup).
* running things off-grid is dumb, and they’re only doing it because they’re desperate to get their data centres up and running yesterday so that they’re the ones who get to the singularity first (or some approximation thereof).
* the US electricity grid is f**d, mostly for the same reasons you can’t build any linear infrastructure in the United States - too many bodies hold veto powers and use any such infrastructure as an extortion opportunity.
* The spike in gas-powered generation for data centres is essentially a US phenomenon. Globally, the vast majority of new electricity supply is coming from renewables.
* in a sane world, Amazon and new large-scale data centre providers would face punitive carbon charges to incentivise them to switch to mostly renewables as soon as possible.
> you can run data centres on grid electricity
The reason they're not doing that is because grid providers can't grow their supply fast enough to support new AI data centres.
Yes, they said that.
Gas is ridiculously cheap in the US while it's often the most expensive source of electricity in the rest of the world.
We're currently seeing a bifurcation where Asia bets on anything but oil and gas while the US goes in the opposite direction. Note that anything but oil and gas includes coal, so this isn't about the environment.
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220350
256 comments, 8 hours ago
At least these sites (its more than Amazon) are being built near the energy source they will consume. Straight out of the ground into a turbine and then into the electron spinners.
Also there's not a lot of anything where these sites are located (Near El Paso). The 4-5 Road Runners who live around there will probably appreciate the change.
West Texas is basically Mad Max 2.
No one cares about West Texas, it's about the 33 million tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and warming the world.
Reminder that the USA are the country that historically burned the most fossil fuels, the world's largest extractor of oil, the only country trying to do a 180 on coal power.
Half of the world has experienced unprecedented heatwaves that will become the norm in 2050.
Stop burning fossil fuels.
Don't these things get more efficient as they scale up? One big plant is probably better than 30 small ones.
A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country?
Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the climate.
A wind/solar/battery solution is not even really much more expensive than gas power and it’s far less dependent on fluctuating fuel prices.
> Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery?
It's more capital intensive, and interest rates are 8%, because our elected officials are completely incompetent.
8% interest rates don’t seem to be a problem for financing all the data centers and AI hardware.
Amazon can afford to power their data centers with clean energy.
It’s not called “Climate Pledge But Only If It’s Less Capital Intensive Arena”
I'm absoltutely not defending the environmental decision, but these datacenter projects seem to be funded mostly by free cash flow (not borrowed money), from the hyperscaler profit margins.
I am curious how renewables + battery compare here, if at all feasible.
I thought there was a gas turbine shortage?
They’re absolutely not that incompetent. They’re on the pockets of people who profit directly from this.
Follow the money, and all that.
I don’t think business really wants interest rates that high. Without conspiracy theories, a simpler explanation is that this is simply democracy in action. People don’t want the spending reigned in, and they don’t want their taxes raised.
If I understand correctly, for speed of deployment they're building a less-efficient simple-cycle plant (instead of the typical combined-cycle). Even though it's larger, the efficiency is worse than a typical natural gas plant.
Natural gas is basically a waste product that gets flared off in many oil-producing parts of Texas. If this private power plant can use that gas for something productive then I guess at least we're no worse off. But it's not clear that is what is happening.
efficient in money, nothing is said about other metrics
it's quite possible to have more product made, thus more pollution (or less materials consumed, thus less)
but concentration definitely will rise
sometime in the energy sector once told me "the solution to pollution is dilution"
If we all just get a little cancer instead of some people getting a LOT of cancer then Amazon will be able to power its robot factories!
Which is nonsense. There's plenty of pollution that's been diluted as much as it possibly can be and is still problematic. CO2 is an obvious example. Or consider leaded gasoline or mercury. You have to be careful not to eat too much fish or you'll have trouble with the mercury in it. That's been diluted by the entire ocean and that didn't solve it.
*someone in the energy sector
also, i don't necessarily mean to endorse this worldview in terms of its potential impact on policy, though there may be some truth to it, technically speaking.
They meant "to not get caught, we just dilute".
uh, that’s nonsense.
co2 is problematic because of concentration - the sheer volume.
leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration.
dilution still helps!
Of course it helps, but where are you going to dilute more co2 these days?
that is exactly the issue. still worse 6” from the tailpipe.
A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere.
Permitted maximum of 10 grams(2 nickels) of CO2 per hour for every person in the US. 33 million tons * 2000 ton/pound * 454 g/pound / 365 days in a year / 24 hours in a day / 342.6M people in us = 9.984 grams
It sounds... pretty good? It's not going to put pressure to the existing grid. Nor it will use freshwater. Near to the data centers themselves so the waste from power transmission is minimalized.
These lucky Texans get to enjoy all this AI data center natural gas powerplant pollution.
Except for that largest polluter in the country part. Our children and their children’s children and so on will curse our generation for what we did to them.
I agree, America should finally build more nuclear power plants.
China is currently building 37 reactors simultaneously [1].
> [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-c...
Yes, but those are a priority below massive solar and wind deployment because nuclear is another way to say emissions will rise for decades before the plants come online and start displacing fossil fuels. There are a few edge cases where nuclear might be necessary but there is an enormous amount of fossil fuel usage which could easily be replaced except for political capture by the oil and coal industries.
Nuclear is good for the last 10% (and very contextually - it maybe makes a lot of sense in Alaska but far less sense in Arizona, for example), but mostly we should be building more solar/wind/batteries, as they can be built both faster and increasingly cheaper over time (the cost of batteries has dropped ~97% in the last 20 years IIRC, solar and wind have similarly been dropping in price).
The main argument for nuclear besides "baseload" is that nuclear plants can potentially last for a century and will thus amortise its capex quite easily and afterwards become relatively cheap for most of its life. Except, given just how quickly solar is dropping right now, it's unreasonable to assume that 50+ years from now (so, in ~2076) already-built nuclear will be cheaper than contemporary solar tech (I.e. solar panels built in 2075). In fact, it's unreasonable to assume that nuclear plants will necessarily be longer-lasting than future solar panels, given current research into self-healing solar panels (which clearly isn't commercially ready, but very likely will be within 50 years). Even if they can only self-heal 3 times, that's 4x the lifetime for 120 years total, and much longer if the base lifetime of the panel is more than 30 years. And frankly nuclear will never beat solar panels on operational costs - nuclear has a 24/7 guard, a nuclear reactor and a turbine, whereas the closest thing PV has to moving parts is the de-dusting machines.
Similar logic for solar also applies to wind and batteries, of course - their price has been dropping like a rock for decades. And that compounds - if both solar and batteries get twice as cheap and their lifetime lasts twice as long, then the whole package becomes 4x cheaper. And the cheaper wind turbines get, the fewer batteries solar needs to plug the holes in intermittent generation.
A quick aside: a lot of focus on solar lifetimes assumes the minimum will be the average, but e.g. 1980s solar panels are still in operation with only 10-20% performance degradation IIRC so the popular assumption that solar panels last only 30 years seems a bit ridiculous.
China's nuclear stats should be kept in perspective by the way: IIRC ~90% of the generation they're building is non-nuclear renewables. They're also building more of basically everything than the rest of the world combined, so an absolute stat like "they're building 37 of X" isn't particularly useful except for conveying that China is building a lot of stuff.
To repeat, though: the US should still build nuclear plants (unless/until they get financially blitzed by renewables). My point here is to keep it in perspective.
And I don't mean to insinuate you said otherwise, I'm just kind of pre-emptively responding to a stereotype/common set of associated arguments, I guess.
Have you seen the nuclear plant disasters that need a thousand years to clean up? Two of them so far and it hasn’t even been a century
Making this argument is a strong indicator that you are extremely under-educated on this subject or motivated to make dishonest arguments.
There are a variety of commercial reactor design families that CANNOT melt down. Literally impossible for have a Chernobyl or Fukushima from the designs. These are not new. There is no reason anyone feeling like they know enough to contribute to this sort of discussion should be unaware. HTGRs, MSRs, SMRs, LMRs, SFRs...
"Sometimes nuclear plants melt down and cause widespread problems for very long timescales" is a nonsense argument to use against "We should build new reactors" when the new reactor designs we would be building can't melt down.
Not if the benefits of automating basically all forms of labor reach them.
So they can have cancer and not work... I guess that's better then working and having cancer. Or the people just starve instead so we don't have to worry about the pollution.
Might be benefits, might be downsides.
the benefits of unemployment
We have fully automated AI slop TikTok feeds and it only cost the earth.
Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for sharebolders
Reach them? You mean reach Elon Musk.
Carbon tax would shift the economics in favor of renewables.
Carbon tax is the only way, you need to pay for picking up the garbage from the road or the air, the cost to clean op pollution and trash needs to be accounted for.
I don’t think it would - tokens are so profitable and the race dynamics make the deployment timelines for most renewables untenable.
Throughput for solar projects is very high and increasing, latency is unfortunately also very high.
A carbon tax would have been a fantastic solution in the 1990s
It is too late now. There are no pare to optimal solutions left
Someone’s gotta stop this who idk - that’s the problem
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220350
At this point, there are enough commenters in both threads to justify a merger.
Finally, a structure worthy of its namesake.
These jet engine gas turbines create air pollution in the forms of formaldehyde and NOx and noise pollution.
> 7.65 gigawatt gas power plant
This is another level of insanity, right there.
Second largest hydrocarbon power generator in the world. Unreal.
> That’s in sharp contrast to Amazon’s commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2040...
Liars
"Shareholder Value Pledge Arena"
I like this for the clarity. No more wishy-washy Is Amazon Evil?
It's just Amazon ~ Fuck Yeah We're Evil
Alternatives exist but they aren't free...
https://www.aga.org/decarbonizing-through-carbon-capture/
https://www.energyindepth.org/study-finds-carbon-capture-and...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277265682...
TIL mentioning a viable technology that would reduce emissions here but delay a forced transition to renewables is an instant downvote.
Viable?
Currently the largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) project on the planet has failed to meet it's goals. Had it actually met the design goals it would be part of an LNG power source that manages to reclaim only 80% of the CO2 it releases.
That's not net zero, it falls short, and that's a good attempt but hardly viable.
The desired goal is to eliminate further emissions and also go further and claw back some of those gigatonnes of previously sequestered CO2 released by humans over the past century.
* A climate solution or distraction? - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-18/chevron-gorgon-fails-...
* ‘A shocking failure’: Chevron criticised for missing carbon capture target - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/20/a-shocki...
Carbon capture gets downvotes because it’s not working anywhere at scale. The fossil fuel industry loves it because it’s saying they get paid now and maybe someone else gets paid later, and their industry doesn’t have profits cut, but anyone planning to continue living on earth would prefer we stop polluting now because that is proven to actually work at scale.
Co2 is pollution now?
I think I learned about CO2 as a greenhouse gas in 1st geade ~23 years ago, what rock have you been living under?
On an industrial scale, yes, of course.
Which rock have you been hiding under for the past 30 years ?
Yes
Yes, by burning fuels we release carbon from the thing being burned, it gets mixed with oxygen, and released into the atmosphere as co2.
As the suns energy warms the earth, the earth radiates heat back out and away from the surface and normally back out into space. co2 also acts like a blanket for that radiant heat, and traps it inside.
More co2 in the atmosphere traps more energy around the planet like an insulated wrap.
To reduce this, we have to extract the carbon out of the atmosphere and store it.
It's the main greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. Where have you been?
Sure, but it's only damaging globally. It's no more damaging to the local environment than to anywhere else on the planet.
This is indisputably true, but downvoted without comment...