To me, if that concern is addressed, I would be ok with it (a more suitable location would be nice though), and planting a few extra trees is not going to cut it.
Why not? If a company can credibly plant enough trees to offset, say, a century of their facilities carbon impact - that seems pretty good to me.
Do you have a source that that is the requirement? It's not my understanding.
You cannot "offset carbon" by just planting trees.
You also need to wait until they grow, chop them down, and not burn them but burry them underground instead.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/carbon-benefits-wood-bas....
(1) building burns (2) building is torn down and wood rots (3) building eventually collapses and wood rots
i.e. if you don't bury it, it eventually returns into the carbon cycle
Windpark Noordoostpolder: 430MW
Your theory is good as a theory but in practice not. The entire power grid is currently not setup to hold a location so perfect for Facebook. If they cared about the environment and the power grid they’d put it somewhere else. As it’s currently it’s the pupation that would be paying for this addition for the grid and there are plentiful other interesting economic things to do with that kind of power use.
Honestly the fact that it’s Facebook does matter but way less than you think.
Consider that the EIA says NL consumed 3.818 quad BTU in 2019 ... this is about 1.1e12 kW-h, or 800x what a 160MW data center would consume. This size of data center, though fairly large, would still be much less than 1% of the energy story of that country.
Generally, data centers use far less energy that people suppose, compared to transport and industry.
So I would be surprised if that DC doesn’t require more energy than Amsterdam (at least the population, not sure how much heavy industry is there, but probably not too much)
""400 MW is equivalent to the electricity consumption of 200,000 households""
https://www.amsterdam.nl/en/policy/sustainability/renewable-...
So either they are taking all electric energy consumption and not the consumption of the household as their basis or (and more likely) they are talking about installed peak capacity necessary to provide the required electric energy over the year. But we would have to look where their marketing got their data from.
[1] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/netherlands/energy-consump...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder for the size of the wind farm.
The facility, which will use 1.38GWh of electricity and cover 166 hectares (410 acres) of farmland, is expected to run on green energy and provide the local economy a boost but has been criticised by some politicians and environmental campaigners.
1.38gwh is almost trice the optimal output of Flevoland and is indeed more in line with the total power consumption of Amsterdam. And will instead reflect several percentages of the national use.
https://tech.fb.com/engineering/2021/04/renewable-energy/ Facebook's renewable energy projects are pretty impressive and if other energy usage estimates in this thread are to be believed they've added more than they consume.
This large American company is simply giving the Dutch something on which to focus their own abundant hypocrisy.
(FTR I'm Dutch so I see this constantly in news, I'm part of this wasted-time group...)
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/total-energy/to...
However, it will only become abundant and cheap if those sales are permitted and investors expect that such opportunities will continue in the future, providing them a positive ROI on building 10Y or 100Y of generation capacity. If they expect their energy sales to be capped at X+Y due to hostility from the ignorant public, they will not build.
Let's opt for a solarpunk future where we pass Kardashev Type I and rapidly accelerate toward Kardashev Type II, not a post-apocalyptic dystopia.
Sounds like a good idea, but why start here specifically? There does not seem to be a general ban on expanding other things, e.g. installing a new AC when you don't even have solar panels yet is not discouraged let alone prohibited. Now facebook wants to build something and we trip over each other to complain about it. I mean, yeah, it's facebook, nobody cares if they have to find a suboptimal location and we're a good country to find dwarsliggers in general, but are we doing it for the climate or are we doing it because we don't like facebook?
FB was proposing a huge DC, and got attention for it. There is now a blanket moratorium and the country is investigating the effects.
Sure, the fact that it's FB probably increased scrutiny. But there's now some blanket ideas here. And honestly, FB could have tried more if they wanted to ("We will finance building out of green energy capacity to triple of our consumption" could have been a real smart move). Yeah, we don't ask other people to do it, but other people don't have billions of dollars at their disposal to make large scale changes! And it's 200MW! A big number, and a huge project. Yeah, you'll get more scrutiny.
(And yeah, making some law that new housing has to have solar panels in general would not be a bad idea!)
EDIT: https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2020/12/04/200-mw-sola... this 200MW australian solar farm looks to cost $300M. Now it's not apples-to-apples cuz of loads of reasons (in particular large swaths of land would be needed). But let's imagine being able to build 400MW out for 1 billion euros. That is a decision that somebody at FB could make.