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It's a useful stepping stone, and probably better for the environment than not doing it, but ultimately the emissions still happen. The sad reality is that in some areas there is no emissions free energy to buy no matter how much you want to. Some would say not to put datacenters there, but if there are customers wanting them I understand why companies do it (even if I don't agree).

Well… the emissions happen so long as someone else wants to buy fossil power, but you can hardly blame the DC company for some other company wanting to buy fossil power.

In the case where I came across it, the problem was contractual. Only one vendor could supply power to that site. So by applying that hack, ① new renewable energy generation was built ② a conventional power plant lost a contract with Otherco and ③ another conventional plant gained a contract of the same size. After a while the contractual problem was solved.

IMO it doens't make sense to choose site based on something as flimsy as a contract. Contracts are changeable on a timescale of months or years, buildings last longer.

If the emissions still happen, its not useful in doing anything for the climate.

What are "the emissions" in your sentence? When a new server boots in such a DC, the increased power usage is matched by increased regenerative power generation, so what are "the emissions" that "still happen"?

> and buy fossil power in Seattle.

And sell elsewhere. The CO₂ doesn't stay in place very long, so it doesn't really make a difference when you move emissions from one place to another.

If we had a world without wind it would be different, but we do have wind on this planet.

If its fossil power, the carbon from it got removed from the ground and inserted into the surface carbon cycle. Lacking any large-scale method to put it back into the ground, this is a irreversible process.

The damage is done regardless of where the emissions happen. Shuffling the location of the emissions around does not help.

It also does not hurt.

The Guardian blames companies who use regenerative power, and who pay to have regenerative power generation expanded faster than would otherwise be possible. IMO that blaming hurts.

This is offset by the amount of fossil power you replaced in Kansas by selling the clean power you purchased there. The net emissions are zero.

The "net emissions" are zero because "having 1 fossil plant running somewhere" is your baseline. You only move the location of that plant around.

If you buy solar credits from KC to use in Seattle, you've increased the solar generation in KC without affecting demand in KC. This will idle one plant's worth of fossil generation in KC. In Seattle, you're buying one plant's worth of additional power. In Seattle excess demand is generally met by buying Hydro from BC, but let's assume worst case and it spins up previously-idle fossil.

So in KC you're +1 solar, -1 fossil. In Seattle you're +1 fossil. Net: +1 solar.

Right — this only works because someone else wants to buy fossil power. If no one wanted to buy fossil power this would stop working. But if/when we get that far, there shouldn't any need for hacks like this.

No, there are two consumers, the baseline is two units of fossil energy. The clean energy you're paying for is still being used by someone in lieu of more fossil energy. It doesn't just disappear.

Ahhhh, that makes more sense! Thanks for explaining :)

I think it's useful to look what happens at the margin. If you are connected to the grid, or could be reasonably connected, all the power you use comes from the source with the highest marginal costs in the region. Most of the time in most places, that means a power plant burning fossil fuels. If the demand goes down permanently, that power plant will be the first to shut down.

If you buy existing clean energy to compensate for your emissions, overall emissions will remain the same, no matter which hacks or accounting tricks you use. That clean energy would be produced and sold anyway, because the marginal costs are so low. If you can't avoid emissions and want to compensate them, you must invest in new renewable capacity that replaces fossil fuels somewhere.

If you buy so much solar that it leads to expansion of facilities, this "hack" will have you buying so much fossil power you are in effect subsidising the other fossil customers and thus prolonging their use of fossils. You definitely shouldn't count that power as 100% renewable.

It only works as a clean bypass of you buy so little you don't impact the local fossil market, but this is a discussion about large data centres so that's basically never satisfied.

That argument applies to my personal electricity bill too.

I buy my power from a company that supplies 100% regenerative power and gets most of its power from new generation facilities, 350 of them so far. Those 350 deliver power to about a half-million people, which obviously took market share away from existing fossil plants and pushed the market prices down.

So by that test, what action does not prolong the use of fossil fuel? You're making the test much too strict.

You've got that backwards. If you're using a solar credit from KC in Seattle, you're subsidizing the cost of power in KC. Solar generation is built in KC, but demand is unaffected. Therefore the price of power drops in KC, crowding out fossil there and lowering the price of green power.

In Seattle you've increased demand without increasing generation, raising the price there. Yes, fossil generators may be built to satisfy this new demand, but that's unlikely in 2024. In Seattle in particular, excess demand is generally met by buying hydro from BC.

> Close. The office in Kansas City wouldn't use it, if that office existed. Suppose you can get solar power in Kansas City, but can't transport it to Seattle, maybe due to lacking interconnect capacity, maybe lack of contracts among the power companies, it doesn't matter. What you do is buy 1GW of solar in Kansas, sell that same power as fossil power in Kansas and buy fossil power in Seattle.

If I’m understanding this correctly:

1. You buy 1MW of solar power in location X, and don’t use it.

2. You sell 1MW of emissions producing power in location X, that someone else uses

3. You buy 1MW of emissions producing power in location Y, and use that.

Net result: 2MW of emissions producing power used, 0MW of solar power used, and a claim of net-0MW of emissions produced?

Yes, it’s a “clever hack”, but accounting sleight of hands are just that. Most charitably magic, less charitably outright falsehoods.

> IMO it's a fair and good hack: When you open a new site and use that hack to buy power for the new site, the corresponding new power generation is solar. It's just solar with two additional accounting hops

I don’t understand how you got to this outcome from the first position. Can you help me understand what steps I missed for this to actually have good outcomes resulting in solar power actually being used?

I’d love to be wrong and for this to actually be actually good outcomes combined with clever accounting - those are absolutely the most satisfying solutions, both to design and read about (for me personally, anyway): where clever people are coming up with creative solutions to solve bureaucratic bullshit, while also achieving good outcomes.

EDIT: Child comment has helped me spot the error in my comprehension leading to incorrect math: “ What you do is buy 1GW of solar in Kansas, sell that same power as fossil power in Kansas” - I didn’t read ‘same power’ properly in my first read. I’ve left my comment as-is despite it now being completely wrong as a result of that, and glad to have been wrong

> 0MW of solar power used

No, the 1MW solar power was used. It was used by someone who believed that it created emissions. But the emissions were instead produced in Seattle rather than Kansas. The accounting relies on the person buying power in Kansas not to care that it's fossil fuel power that they're purchasing. They know that there's emissions from their power use, but they don't know where those emissions are.

Gotttchaaaa, thank you. I see my misunderstanding in my previous: “sell that same power as emissions producing power”, I missed the ‘that same’ part.

Thank you!

Sorry about the terseness.

I think it's a really clever hack. An admirable way to drive forward installation of regenerative power plants, faster than the infrastructure/contracts would otherwise allow.