Clean energy isn't even some virtuous thing, it's just no-brainer smart energy policy. The only reason for Google to be backpedaling on its pledge is political. It's in a backsliding petrostate and it has to play the political game.
No. That is not true
* Unless you are evil using school yard excuses is off brand. You do the right thing
* Carbon free energy is cheaper to produce these days, so the premis is wrong
This politics. Burn the planet, it is what Trump would do
If it's cheaper to produce, then there's no point in doing anything special, because it'll just take over via market forces. The "problem" with renewables is that the economics are fantastic in the marginal case, but if you need it to take over baseload when the sun is down, wind isn't blowing, etc., it's much more expensive because you need to build energy storage, which fossil fuel generators get for free. Going from 50% of power generation to 100% is going to be many multiples more expensive than 0% to 50%.
Until things like flow batteries become economical, in places without rivers you can dam for generation/pumped storage, it's probably not going to be feasible to go 0% carbon unless you just replace all of your baseload generation with nuclear or something.
It is taking over via market forces. New utility-scale solar+battery capacity is already cheaper than building a new coal plant.
The only reason it's not doing it more quickly is because of government intervention in the markets in the US to nerf it.
Another option for powering data centers is small modular nuclear - but again, China is far ahead on that with the helium-cooled pebble-bed model, although it really seems optimized for high-temp industrial process steam generation over electricity at present - so no, cheap safe nuclear power is not coming to the USA anytime soon.
Certainly, Trump's vitriol on wind power and solar power could mean a loss of government contract opportunities for AI-centric firms that promote such energy source - but still, the tariffs on China's monoocrystalline PV panels go back a decade and are just as supported by both political parties, because the major donors to both parties see renewable energy as a threat to their profit margins, be they on the executive or the shareholders side of the equation.
The kerosene lamp manufacturers don't want to be replaced with electric lightbulbs. This kind of monopolistic investor capitalism always stifles innovation and progress - all they see is the losses from collapsing demand for fossil fuels, and if the raw inputs are solar and wind instead of oil and gas, it's harder to collect rents.
Because the US should be doing it domestically, just like China is.
The incentive to do is partially based on tariffs, but the incentive hasn't spurred the private sector and supply chain maintainers into action, and a more comprehensive strategy would need to be done. There is no consensus for further subsidies from the national government to spur this production either.
However, really the answer to dumping is to exploit the dumper viciously, buy as much below market rate product of theirs as you can while they bleed money (especially a capital good like solar panels).
The US could be driving down the cost of energy nationwide with the dumped power generation equipment. Lower cost energy could then be turbocharging (nearly) every other industry in the country.
The only industry this harms is fossil fuels, and solar is being hamstrung to protect this legacy industry at the cost of all potential future industries.
Pretty much by definition, products that can be dumped are ones that can be manufactured with easily scaled production equipment at low margin and high volume. If you can dump your competitors out of business, so can someone else, to you.
And that's the way it generally happens (c.f. DRAM in the 80's). The "dumping" phase of a technology curve is succeeded not by a cartel with a tight grip on the previously competitive market, but by an extremely competitive market of producers all undercutting each other. Almost everyone wins, except the original high-margin producers. But they (c.f. Intel in the 90's) tend to move on to other products anyway. No one wants to make junk for a living.
Which makes very little sense, because the US solar panel industry is practically nonexistent. There are some companies that do last-stage assembly of solar panels in the US - probably to meet "made in USA" requirements - but the solar cells themselves are almost all made overseas.
In short, there's nothing there for China to dump on - the US is not a competitive threat to China in this sector. All indications are that Chinese solar panels are cheap because they're being manufactured in immense volumes to help meet China's own energy demands. The international sales are a bonus, not the primary goal.
And at the cost of the future, period. Climate change promises to be extremely onerous to future generations, from a purely economical POV.
Tariffs leading to expanded US solar panel production might be one of the few things that would lead Trump to cancel tariffs. Solar is somehow offensive to him.
pointing out that the current efforts don't do that is all that needed to be said. your criticism of that comment, to me, proved that you understood the comment enough that one needs to look further into the motivations.
I'm not suggesting that you're one of those types, but it reminded me of that ludicrous line of reasoning.
Understanding that the mismatch exists, why it exists and what can be done to steer things in the desired direction is something I can get behind though!
this is just a massive self-own at this point
And it would be a lot cheaper to run those factories if solar power were cheap.
What evidence you have to justify your accusation?
From another poster here
Now, in their 2025 Environmental Report at https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2025-environmen...:
"We aim to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030." and "We aim to reduce absolute, combined scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 emissions by 50% from a 2019 base year by 2030." (They also restate the thing about "to neutralize our remaining emissions" a bit later in the document.)
We also all saw Sundar being paraded around like a prisoner of war at the inauguration (to be generous, another interpretation being that he is an enthusiastic collaborator in a despotic regime). He's clearly involved politically in this regime, and they have made their stance on clean energy clear. To be willfully blind to that reality is simply a choice I'm not making.
Often data centers need to run at three nines of availability (ie: 99.9) and at that level of availability the price of solar power is many multiples of conventional power due to the cost of batteries and over provisioning.
But your point otherwise stands; solar + battery is cheaper than any fossil fuel form of power.
Which is good, because carbon offset are a scam.
Now, if you are a fossil fuel megacorp and want to burn the entire cap and trade system to the ground, creating a 'carbon offsets are a scam' meme and destroying the 'trade' side is a great way to manufacture consent to get rid of that pesky 'cap.'
The problem is that what gets exchanged in the marked is a certificate but the purpose of the market is to create a positive externality. This means the buyers and sellers don't have an inventive to be honest.
The buyer of the carbon credits doesn't actually need the carbon to be captured. They just want a certificate for X credits, so they can emit elsewhere or get some other benefit.
The seller doesn't actually need to capture the carbon. As long as they can make a convincing enough case to the buyer that they did capture the carbon, the buyer is happy to buy.
This is unlike a typical market where the seller does have an incentive to fool the buyers into a buying a subpar product, but the buyer has a lot of economic incentive to actually not be fooled.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/mrr-enforcement
The bigger issue, as mentioned above, is that there's often a time lag between when the seller receives the money and when the seller can actually put it to use to reduce carbon emissions. One of the biggest sellers of carbon credits, for instance, is CA high-speed rail, which is decades away from completion. If it doesn't actually complete, it's not going to take any cars off the road or planes out of the sky, and so all the carbon credits it sold would just allow fossil fuel emitters to maintain status-quo emissions.
But as a way of diverting private resources from CO2 emitters to greener alternatives, cap & trade has been pretty effective. Over half the cars in my Bay Area city are now EVs; Tesla was kept afloat for many years by selling carbon credits.
In the case of geo-politics if the US wanted to install solar to cover its energy load it would essentially be a massive payment to China for the solar arrays since there isn't productive capacity in the US. It would also end up being a long term dependent on future purchases of solar from China when they would need to re-up every 30-40 years at end of asset life.
30-40 years of cheap, CO2 free energy sounds pretty good to me.
Edit: US has no competitive way to manufacture panels, and with cheap imports, it never develops such industry!
We should look to non Chinese suppliers strategically, but they can't remote shutdown panels in an instant like Russia can stop a flow of gas.
Ther rated lifespan for a solar panel is on the order of 20-30 years, but they're still producing 70-80% of their output after that time. They last a very long time - if not destroyed from above.
Unless war compels it. But there's no Nordstream of solar panels that can be shut down in the meanwhile.