New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketing purposes to get social permission to build DCs. Despite this, companies are “forced” to build their own “dirty” power sources since political power is disrupting green energy build out. Despite this, demand is still high so that compute costs are continuing to rise. Despite this, our economy is increasingly predicated on a few companies using more compute than geopolitical rivals with cheaper electricity. Despite this, those in power are, again, unwilling to create a compromising policy (aka clean energy) that voters actually would demand before tolerating more DCs.
What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?
But hey, line go up!
It’s bad to pump non-renewable fossil aquifer water in Arizona for evaporative cooling, but using cooling towers in an area that gets 30” or more of precipitation per year is probably not going to hurt anything.
The issue isn't comparative usage to existing hookups, it's new cost burden on the local community where a data center is built. Which is why DC propogandists switched to the golf course measurement, it confuses the original concern, the cost to the community of new DC hookups to municipal water or the very limited amount (of expensive to the community) available hookups that were intended/funded by the community for other purposes.
If Canada was a US state it would rank around 4th or 5th in terms of economic size and power. There's a lot of doomerism, but I seriously doubt the US is going to lose its top 4 or 5 economies in the next 50 years.
If you want to go really doomer, then I think it's actually more likely that Canada would become a US state instead of the US economy shrinking to the size of Canada.
But this is all nonsense talk anyway.
What's going to replace it? Rapidly aging China?
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-POPULATION/AGING/gdpzao...
There's so many ways to slice the data, I'm not sure there's an apples-to-apples comparison between US and China. However, it's fair to say both economies face demographic headwinds.
Using the age profile of a country with over a billion people to dismiss its geopolitical power has no credibility.
More appropriate to point out their (our) lack of domestic chip production and outsourcing of critical technologies.
The first two charts are for GDP, which correlates pretty well with geopolitical power. Moreover if we're going by population, wouldn't that imply India, and then later Africa are going to be superpowers?
Conventionally, a continent isn't a superpower. A country is.
A "in general" correlates with geopolitical power doesn't necessary mean you can point at a specific case look at their GDP and come to a good conclusion. Especially not if it's as much of a special case as China.
> wouldn't that imply India, and then later Africa are going to be superpowers?
which might actually happen. If the US falls further from grace and the situations stays like that for a few decades, or the US and another huge power (e.g. China) fall into some costly conflict then India or a union of African countries have a serious chance to become a world super power.
---
=> But more relevantly this discussion is going into red hering argument direction:
- No one argued that you should go _only_ by population, the argument is, that if a country with a gigantic population shrinks hugely they still have enough people left to wage large scale wars.
- Similar no one (should) argue that GDP is by itself meaningful for such an assessment, it's one imperfect not supper reliable statistical point. Especially given how things move wrt. dark factories (i.e. fully automated => no light one as no human there), AI and similar. Yes, if GDP is supper low or high that says a lot, but a lot is not everything and a average GDP for decade long trends in a word looking to face a major time of change means not much in any direction.
- Similar we are speaking about decade long developments, current military strength ist also just another non fully reliable indicator. E.g. Germany post WW1 had close to actual 0/no military strength, and then there was WW2 just a few years later...
and it's not China being hadwaving "special" but the measurement you are applying really not working well for a country which is only half capitalist and half planed economy. Which is a separate argument from dark factories which is about (non low end) production in China getting increasingly decoupled from human worker and in turn is way less affected from a population collapse then it would be in other countries. This has nothing to do with robot armies, an argument you just made up, even if China would lose half their population they still had more people and in turn can theoretically man a larger army _even if they have a by % much larger population collapse_, they don't need any Robot army. Similar no one said their system is superior. Or do you mean the US, as a two party system with an extremely powerful president is something some would call semi authoritarian. Either way China having done some pretty effective decisions in recent years in some areas doesn't in any way mean it's the better system. Like a Monarch can do grate decisions, but Monarchy is still is a very bad system.
Either way I also can't follow you how you jump from a listing of rough facts to there supposedly being a fact free zone.
What there isn't is a single simpel conclusion.
I mean it's a discussion where a single bad decision of a larger power can easily cause a unpredictable chain reaction which completely changes what are and aren't likely outcomes.
The world is inherently complex and not everything has a simple black/white conclusion, actually most things don't have one. You can only look at all available metrics and do a guess what the future will bring.
Also, sorry but the economist hates China with a passion, you really shouldn’t believe a thing they say on the topic.
Note I'm just linking charts and figures, not their editorials. It's ironic that you accuse "economist hates China with a passion", but the best refutation you can come up with is some handwaving about future robot armies. How do we know you're not just hating US (or loving China) with a passion?
It’s adorable that you think charts and figures can’t be biased or malicious.
> handwaving about future robot armies
Yeah and you would’ve said the same thing about China’s EVs, solar panels, or any number of other areas in which the Chinese state demonstrated both accurate foresight and ability to execute on long-term strategic economic/technological plans. And you would’ve been wrong. As you are now.
US government is working overtime to make sure legacy technologies stay around while the rest of the world is investing into the future.
"Rest of the world"? Europe isn't even a player in the AI race. China might be better placed, but they also lag the US in terms of model development and capital deployed. They've been catching up, but that's not the same as "[American will] be in a similar place to Canada at best". That would require a lot of things to go right for China and/or a lot of things to go wrong for the US.
>"Rest of the world"? Europe isn't even a player in the AI race.
I think the legacy technology he is referring to is the more about the electrical generation method rather than the AI use of that electricity.
AI will not make it easier to build a house, to harvest a corn field, to assemble a car. AI will not improve weather forecasting accuracy- this is already pretty much 99.999% solved. So AI will not improve standards of living.
All this to conclude that China’s standards of living will improve while America’s will stagnate (or worse)
But sure, go ahead and enjoy those AI videos-some of them are even funny.
It also had the support of a lot of the population of the areas it controlled and at least toleration by the majority. Most of its colonial civil service and military were people fro the colonies.
I'm not sure if I'm mis-reading your comment, but:
The idea that you "need a single extremely powerful country to replace it or the US will stay in its position" just doesn't add up. I'm not fully sure if that is what you meant but I have seen that argument a few times.
_There doesn't need to be a replacement._
For most of the worlds history there wasn't a single leading world supper power, just regional super powers, or supper powers in specific sectors.
And if we speak about who could become a supper power _after the US stops being one and there isn't one for some decades_. Then there are a bunch of candidates.
E.g. China has a population collapse issues, but due to it's cut throat ruthless government and total population number and lead in factory automation might be from all countries with similar problems by margin the most likely to overcome it without power collapse.
E.g. the EU might have many issues (as it's members has many issues) but the general concept has proven hugely successful. And what people forget is EU is the cherry on top of a huge stack of treaties which can be extended to 3rd parties independent of full EU membership. Like e.g. Canada, which doesn't plan to become an EU member, but might join some of this treaties as result of the non stop hostility from the US. Same for military treaties between NATO members which are independent of NATO like e.g. JEF, which would likely be open for letting Canada join. Anyway way to many words. But the end result may be a world supper power which is not one entity but a complex lossy coupled network of countries.
Then there have been some other cross country unions and countries, which want to gain super power relevance but have so far been too irrelevant due to a combination of corruption, bad luck and sabotage by existing powers etc. But if we speak about going for a few decades without any leading super power and maybe prime canidates harming each other (e.g. a US <-> Chineese war) then they do actually have a chance.
The OP goes further than merely claiming that US will lose its spot as the top power. It claims it won't be a world power at all:
>in 50 years America won't be a world power any more. It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best
For reference, Canada ranks #11 in GDP, below Russia and even Brazil. On military spending it ranks #16, below Poland and Spain. It doesn't have nukes. To suggest US will ever come close to that in 50 years is laughable.
which is very much possible
50 years once just a blink in human history is today enough to have 2 major industrial revolutions
nukes are not an argument for anything but main land defense from invasions
Look Russia, it was considered on of the most powerful countries military wise and cleanly in the top 10 economically. Many treated it as a 3rd place behind USA/China. It probably will be neither military nor economically overly relevant in 10 years. Through comparing a war economy with peace economies by most normal usable standards (e.g. GDP) isn't very meaningful. Yes it has nukes, no one will invade it (in a traditional large scale sense out side of some border conflict). But it's economy looks like the kind of war economy which leads to a complete economical collapse once the war ends (i.e. burning core substance) end while it's military could be very experienced now, by treating soldiers as highly disposable its unclear how much that actually is true.
Now look at the US, it has lost the majority of soft power thanks to incompetence (and it was maybe the nation with the most effective soft power). It has alienated most of it's allies, especially it's closest allies. Both from a military and economical POV. It's highly dependent on China, and tries to change that have shown very mid to bad outcomes. On the other hand China is increasingly less dependent on it (and the EU) and increasingly less attackable by sea blockades and other non-hot war counter measures the US had. It's behind on automated production. Countries are increasingly less willing to tolerate US bases on their ground which are essential for it being able to project power. The economy is increasingly dependent on a few pillars, which are strong but can crack anyway. The might claim AI leadership, but practically it looks like the price they payed to get there is one which not only will not pay of but can not pay off, it's just way to high. War is also increasingly going back to ways where even if you have superiority the cost of waging it is still severely high, in such a situation you can't force leadership by military force, if you try it likely will end similar to Germany in WW1. Lastly the internal instability Trump has brought by dismantling checks and balances and arbitrary gutting of programs which turned out pretty essential for stability is bad enough to argue things like a putsch series or civil war being _realistic possibilities_ (not guaranteed at all, but possible where it wasn't realistically possible before).
If you put everything together the US dropping temporary out of the top 10 of overall most powerful countries is, not very likely but, very much possible.
It does have absurd geographical advantages, and nukes to make sure it keeps them basically for ever (as long as it doesn't splinter which isn't very likely tbh.). So the drop would be most likely be temporary at most.
Still it is possible, it's the price to pay for first squandering all trust/goodwill gained from WW2 over a few decades of greedy, egoistic, egocentric, ethical catastrophic politics. And then going complete "unpredictable, untrustable, instabile, high risk, publicly considering to start war with NATO or at least half of the EU (JEF+some others)" in recent years.
But it is not an argument even for that. Imagine Russian tanks are crossing the border towards your capital. Will your government use nukes is such case?
and if we look on some of the more extreme cases: France Nuclear doctrine is not "we could decide to use nukes if our country is invaded" but roughly more like "we use them by default in such a case and you would need to overrule this to not use them"
Through this is for a "full on invasion in the classical sense". This is unlikely to bee seen as triggered for e.g. colonies or some back and force on border disputes (including e.g. attack on supply lines behind the border).
nukes only work as a deterrent if you are willing to use them if a (deep) bottom line is crossed, like foreign tanks heading to your capital
I'm not saying this is good, just that you really shouldn't rely on people not using nukes.
Russians will send you back 10x warheads. Are you going to use nukes knowing that?
It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Just this week, amongst other news:
* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.
* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.
* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.
* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.
Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.
I wouldn't have expected a famous singer to make such a song, given that America was always portrayed in italian pop music with a positive image, and negative views were relegated to mostly political groups or singers with political themes
- MAGA who doesn't care what Europe thinks - not-MAGA who are just as shocked and disappointed as everyone else on the planet
Also, at least the Italian government is still dancing the tip tap regarding a position on America, not taking any definitive stance or doing anything significantly different than before, which is a big rift wrt what people want. Only exception for defense expenses
It's tough being here and feeling powerless to stop it. Beyond voting, campaign donations, judicious choice of employment, etc.
Anyhow, you're welcome back should you change your mind. In my book, anyway.
You guys are the meekest sheep to ever been led astray by a howling, undisguised wolf.
What more does this regime have to do to warrant massive, historic, disruptive, non-peaceful protests in the USA?
Have you seen protests in France? Bringing the country to a halt is the least you have to do in order for us to ever have faith in the USA again.
Until then, nothing any US citizen can say online will do anything to restore trust. If you're not rioting, you're complicit. It's as simple as that.
No. But wouldn't that be MORE reason to fight for a different future?
It's not about being too meek to fix things. It's about half the country wanting what's happening.
Why would the US ally with Russia, who is a Chinese and Iranian ally?
That's just uncritical thinking.
The United States is the single largest bilateral provider of direct military equipment, intelligence, and defense funding to Ukraine (a European country) against Russia.
I don’t think the comment above you is suggesting that is a possibility, but rather saying “things are so bad that the only imaginable way to get worse would be <outlandish unimaginable scenario>”. In other words, it seems to be hyperbole.
By absolute dollars, single country: US > EU institutions > Germany > UK
By absolute dollars, bloc vs. bloc: EU/Europe combined (~$237bn+) now exceeds the US (~$130bn), especially after 2025
By per-capita/GDP burden: tiny front-line states (Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway) far outstrip both the US and the larger Western European economies — the US actually ranks closer to the bottom of the pack on a relative-effort basis, behind Germany, the UK, and virtually all Nordic/Baltic states
Between February 2022 and January 2025, average expenditure per European resident stood at $394; by April 2026 that figure had risen to $618, driven by the total spending by European NATO countries on Ukraine exceeding $237 billion, including $96 billion contributed just since January 2025.
Average European (across NATO's European members) $618 per person (2022-2026)
United States (my estimate: ~$130bn total ÷ ~340m population)≈ $384 per person
The beef from a single hamburger uses far more water than a year of ChatGPT usage. Few try to reduce consumption in favor of more efficient foods by comparison. It’s about perception.
Can you tell me how much water a data center uses? If you have strong opinion on the construction of data centers I hope you can answer this basic question about data centers. (Many opposed to them cannot)
A lot, but not all, of these datacenters are using evaporative cooling, which is what kicks their water usage so high.
So a 40MW datacenter will consume around 4 million liters of water per day if it is evaporatively cooled.
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
There’s around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California for a total water usage of 1,625,000*1,000,000=1.625×10¹² gallons (or 5 million acre-feet) per year.
365 million gallons of water per year for one data center is 1000 acre feet of water. California’s alfalfa crop uses as much water as 5,000 of these data centers.
1000 acre feet is approximately 40 hectare meters. Or, you know, about 1.2 billion liters.
Over on this side of the ocean, we’ve got freshwater lakes larger than entire European countries. There’s a lake over here, it has an island on it. That island has a lake, which has an island in it. And there’s a lake on that island.
We need units of measurement that represent large things. If you don’t, that’s ok.
Works well in places that need to represent things large and small. Europe, Canada, Australia, and pretty much everywhere else.
But enjoy your cubic furlongs and tablespoons.
Because DCs are, and that is the concern local communities have. Not random comparative statistics whose purpose seems to be to take valid local community concerns and pretend they're just a joke. How much do alfa growers in California add to my water bill? How much will new municipal water hookups by new data centers impact my water bill? One is a valid concern. One is just a BS attempt to discredit the valid concern. Because that is how this shady industry operates. On BS. On manipulation. And they wonder why they are more and more disliked.
The reason these DC use so much water is because it uses less electricity to evaporatively cool than it takes to cool with a heat pump.
You are trading water scarcity for energy scarcity.
In my personal opinion, the right tradeoff is more electricity. Also IMO, these DCs should be required to build out solar + battery + wind offset plants which supply their energy either directly or indirectly by selling to the grid operator at a discounted rate. If you want 40MW of power, you need to deploy 40MW of solar (not peak, but yearly average output) and a 400MWh battery plus all the grid hookups required.
The end result for residence should be lower energy bills, not higher bills.
No, you already know they use flood irrigation.
Why is a municipal water system allowing a data center connection that will strain their distribution network? They’re well within their rights to say no, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t holding a gun to their heads.
Deep pockets have a way of bypassing practical concerns. [1]
Zuckerberg likely isn't holding a gun to their heads, instead it's more likely he's putting wads of cash in their pockets.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/08/texas-corpus-christi...
That’s overstating it. A couple clarifications.
It banned foreign (edit) made equipment because it’s known for cybersecurity issues. It was the FCC that restricted new foreign-made connected inverters over grid cybersecurity concerns. [1]
1. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adds-foreign-produced-power...
> This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms.
The $1.2B is real, but it wasn’t payment to stop construction. RWE agreed to surrender three offshore wind leases and settle related claims. Anyways, RWE’s three leases were in very early development and weren’t expected online until the 2030s. [2]
You can still think both policies are bad. But those are different claims.
2. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/rwe-says-reached-12...
1. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaics-supp...
If one is trying to attack the threat you claim, one might ban all internet capable inverters.
To ban all, even fully offline ones, means the threat you describe is an excuse.
The ban covers any inverter with any wireless communication whatsoever. Bluetooth is specifically called out, despite necessarily being local-only and not enabling an internet connection.
I suppose you could make the argument that with Bluetooth, the app that communicates with it has internet access and thus it's the same thing. However:
The ban does not cover a power inverter with no integrated comms, but has a serial port into which is plugged a "sold separately" wifi dongle. Neither does the ban cover an inverter with an ethernet port. It covers solely wireless communication.
I think home devices that phone somebody-elses-home are a cancer anyway.
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-423682A1.pdf
They’re network-connected and remotely controllable. The concern is compromise of the vendor/cloud infrastructure allowing large numbers of inverters to be manipulated simultaneously.
Or even Trojan horse style malware is a possibility I suppose (Stuxnet).
That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at
Energy is big money. Anything that disrupts the status quo is immediately vilified. It got to the point that our major party at the time lead a “gas fired” green energy policy.
They got voted out, the new guys implemented a subsidised home battery policy. In the space of a year it has destroyed the economics of a carbon fuelled grid. All the economics pointing to renewables being the way forward were proven correct.
Everyone gets their back scratched. If you’re a consumer and you invested, you have a massively discounted personal power station that generates you money. If you operate the grid, your transmission costs and peak transmission costs went down. General consumer prices went down because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs. Everyone in won.
Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story. Don’t let rhetoric become your reality.
If only.
Chevron’s Gorgon project will be ongoing for decades and making money hand over fist flogging LNG out of Australia to overseas customers.
It'll be a massive source of previously sequestered CO2 and claimed to be "the largest CO2 sequestration project on the planet* .. with the minor catch of (re-) stashing away a very very tiny portion of the CO2 released. Something, something, not let it out in the first place?
Still, could be worse, at least they're not planning on fracking the Kimberley.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. CO2 sequestration sounds good in theory. But...
> with the minor catch of (re-) stashing away a very very tiny portion of the CO2 released
You can read more details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_gas_project#Carbon_Diox...
What now?
Where in Australia have consumer prices gone down?
> because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs
I don’t understand what you’re trying to day here.
> Power prices to fall for most customers, with bigger drops for businesses
> What is driving [lower prices] is a reduction in the cost of producing electricity. We've seen a lot more batteries and solar systems come into the electricity market in the last 12 months. They've been making the market much less volatile," Ms Savage said.
> "We've not needed as much gas and hydro generation in the evening peaks, and that's what's really cut that cost of wholesale generation."
An article from a month and a half in the past.
Still waiting.
https://www.aer.gov.au/news/articles/news-releases/aer-relea...
A bit misleading comment .. Yes , but after prices went up from renewables
As if the established industry has no incentive in the opposite direction? Everyone is going to act in their best interests in this system, that's how it's designed, the whole point of government is to mediate the system in the best interests of the whole.
I'd have to say there are lots people who do not believe the government is acting in their best interests. Its one of the reasons why Pauline Hanson's "One Nation" party has gained a lot of traction.
Well the tax payer, would be paying the 30% subsidy for Home Battery deployments, which I understand is severeral $Billion 8.5 AU at present.
One group of loosers will be people who can not afford to participate in this program. It would seem another group would be users who cannot shift their electrity demands from peak times when electricty will become quite expensive.
I suspect after they are quite widely deployed. Government could change conditions in future that they must be available as virtual power plant (VPP)
There has been a rush on these since people want access to cheaper power and they believe to avoid the power increases to come. That there will be big increases in power , especially during peak time is the forced introduction of smart meters which allow easy tariff change etc ....
The timeline is several years
Nice opportunity for the rest of the world, though.
Probably one of the biggest flaws of a Democratic system is that a voting majority can mandate a situation that harms literally everyone against the will of everyone else even when those harms are well documented and absolutely provable.
"The majority voted for it" isn't a great answer for the question "Why exactly are we letting the bus driver drive us all over this cliff edge to our fiery deaths?"
"Stop the bus! I want off!"
"Nope. The vote's done. You're stuck with the result."
"Well, what if I voted against driving over the cliff edge?"
"Nope. Majority rules. We all die now."
Not all democracies are equal and the US system is barely "democratic" - it's spiralled in a two party not broadly representative Hotelling's Law swampland.
The excess deaths and human misery (both that which is increasingly clearly ongoing, and we have to look forward to) are going to be tragic.
It really wouldn’t hurt if the developers involved tried even a little bit to be good neighbors and to select sites where they’re not going to be a nuisance and net negative to adjacent communities at minimum.
The blatantly extractive, externalizing mindset of this all reminds me of the attitude that mining companies have taken towards Appalachian states for over a century at this point.
It's a complete failure of the state in having any kind of foresight.
China, in comparison, has around 2X excess electric production capacity in their grid. That's what made mining Bitcoin, and now ultra-cheap LLM inference, economically viable.
I don't understand what "despite this" is doing here. People have thoughts about what good/bad policy should be, independent of what good/bad policy should do all the time.
This is not an argument for or against data centers, but rather against populism. People have too many feeling about too many things, that should simply should not be decided by feel (and, sometimes, not enough about things that should).
- [0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/musks-xai-is-being-sued-ov...
Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
Who gives a shit who started it? The ones who continue engaging in it, should clearly be punished as they're working against humanity's best interest of keeping this planet survivable.
If you're one of the largest companies in the world, constantly brag about how environmental friendly you are and how much you care about "sustainability" or what the trendy word is today, and you end up building a data center that sets a record in pollution (either directly or indirectly), you're doing something massively fucked up and are misaligned with the rest of the people on this planet.
> Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
I guess this is what late-stage capitalism gives you ultimately, companies who feel like it's fine doing whatever because competitors are also doing whatever. No one I know have been cheering for anything like that, I suggest if you have people cheering about stuff like that near you, get far away.
https://www.selc.org/press-release/naacp-asks-court-for-emer... and the previous link I referenced.
One would think if there is even a suspicion (even if it hasn't been ruled in court yet) about large-scale harmful toxic emissions, the police and relevant authorities would at least quickly do some samples or what not, to figure out if they need to put an immediate stop to it until the courts ruled either way.
But seemingly it's still ongoing and no harm no foul?
If that were true, I doubt the DOJ would step in and attempt to squash the lawsuit
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-administratio...
This is the case for lots of things. Negligence can turn into "reckless disregard for human life", breach of contract could amount to fraud, and many other cases.
You’re not wrong that an average person would be in trouble with the law if they took even remotely the same action.
One could also ask where’s the EPA, since they openly acknowledged laws were being broken back in January. [1]
But xAI has added more turbines since it started years ago, and the water recycling plant is paused [2].
As for doing something about all of this, I suspect it’s even less likely now that Anthropic is using it for compute [3].
1. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
2. https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-memphis/xai-puts-water-recyc...
It should absolutely be focused on anyway. I don’t know how you got the other impression. The US gov paying to stop windmills and solar is insane.
An all-out global nuclear war (all nuclear nations landing 10% of their warheads in populated areas) would be a disruption comparable to COVID at best.
Wouldn’t we expect tens of millions of casualties, nuclear fallout rendering large swathes of countries uninhabitable, and ensuing total societal collapse once the globalized western world is separated from their foreign means of production?
https://www.icanw.org/new_study_on_us_russia_nuclear_war
Fallout would cause significantly more casualties. Then there are the environmental effects. Science on that has evolved over the past few decades, so wikipedia is a good starting point for an overview.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
Since none of this is certain and we're talking about risks, considering the worst cases seems appropriate, and those involve agricultural collapse, several billion dead, mass extinction, and an ozone hole covering most of the planet. It might not kill off the human species, but modern civilization would struggle to recover.
So the most interesting thing to take away from this: There is a lot of demand for more power and in this instance it's satisfied by gas. Which is still much better than coal. Which is still much worse than renewables.
It's a catch22 problem because nuclear is much slower to build than a data center so there is no demand from the data centers. And the nuclear plant doesn't know the demand will be there in 5 years once with gas soaking up demand. So the build it and they will come strategy is risky. Building infrastructure is like a muscle that gets stronger with repetitions. The cost will only come down once some are built but nobody wants to build at the current high prices. Govt help is needed to kick start it.
This race to the bottom will have plenty more to give us in the coming years.
It's very trendy right now to get mad at datacenters, but I'd much rather energy come from natural gas than from an existing coal power plant. (Obviously, renewables would be better than either.)
Eg https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
In other words, they are using gas turbines because the politicians are stupid.
Texas is not at all against renewables. Maybe, just maybe, whatever axes the people building data centers are optimizing on rule out solar/wind over factors other than "renewables are for leftists, so fuck that we're gonna burn gas even if it's more expensive."
> 11.40% of TX electricity is from solar
This is... Not a huge statement to me. My home state is at 16% solar, and we're calling it inadequate. [0] Its not a 1-to-1, as we have probably 10% of the people, and 1/3 of the landmass. More spread out, different demand, so a completely different landscape.
But 11% is not some victory dance.
[0] https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/about-energy/news/news-stories...
I am glad Victoria is doing well. Texas could always do better but keep in mind what % you’re quoting that Texas has 7x the solar capacity that Victoria has. I suspect that will get even more aggressive has batteries have become more cost effective at utility scale.
No need—the current ones are uploaded directly into my mailbox regularly by Randy Weber, my district rep.
I can certainly believe that oil and gas pay better bribes, and that this incentivises a certain kind of politician who seem to be over-represented among conservatives in the US. But that doesn't explain the widespread dislike among the conservative end of the general population. Is it just groupthink or Overton Window -nudging using social media? Or is there something more psychological going on? Some kind of disgust reaction?
So yes, wind and solar are cheap. Depending on where in Texas you are, gas is cheaper.
How do you reconcile that with your theory?
Texas accounts for 40% of new solar capacity installed per year at this point.
It does lag behind an inefficient and expensive rooftop solar, and has no State mandate for homeowners to build it.
That said, I think this is enough to show that Texas doesn't hate solar, so there's probably a different reason for selecting gas to support the data center. If I were to Hazard I guess, it would be stability and demand curve
> I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity
presumably they put zero value on stable production or count subsidies as income
Texas has very cheap gas; it’s also good for solar. They are very competitive price wise, so it’s kinda depressing they are using gas. But it’s probably a slight price edge plus better reliability.
More people will be using AI during the (work)day, than at midnight. Then they could do half solar, half gas.
Also "more expensive" when it comes to solar isn't meaningful until you also consider timeframe. Solar panels pay themselves off in a few years, and after that they basically generate "free" electricity. Gas never becomes cheaper or free, every year it will cost money.
Timeframe is accounted for if you look at levelized cost per kWh. The levelized cost of natural gas is 5 to 11 cents/kWh. In the sunniest spots, the levelized cost of solar with enough battery storage to provide 24/7 power is about the same, if you want >90% reliability. The usual four hours of storage is only enough to account for the "duck curve" during the day.
https://www.pv-tech.org/solar-pv-and-storage-cost-declines-d...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
Solar and batteries keep getting cheaper so hopefully they will be clear winners soon, at least in sunny areas.
First: global usage.
Next: I even wonder why frontiers labs don't sell batch processing and spot prices to keep 100% utilisation. If they do that and I suspect they will it will be 24/7 maxxed.
Imagine this: Fable at 98% discount because but you need to wait. Then imagine: bots that scan your tickets for easy low priority tasks to do when those cheap tokens come.
Let alone research batch compute needs. Training and so on.
One concept will drive this shift: GAAP profitability.
The flip side of course is that gas turbines are in short supply and manufacturers are in no hurry to build out production capacity for what is effectively obsolete technology with a very uncertain future. A lot of the projects being announced may never get delivered for the simple reason that there are long waiting lists for these things.
And there is the notion that related investments might end up under water when the few plants that do get built start struggling economically in ten years or so. These are not very attractive long term investments. The short term interest in securing any capacity at all is overriding this. Of the well over a hundred GW of data centers planned until 2035, probably only less than a 30-40% will actually get built; if not less. Michael Liebreich is predicting only about 35GW will be realized. His estimate is that there simply is no more production capacity that can be committed than that.
It will be interesting to see if this Amazon plant actually gets built. For now Amazon can afford to gamble on this and just write it off if it doesn't work out.
If policy changes in a few years, I expect a lot of these projects to get unceremoniously cancelled when it turns out that they are a combination of under water financially and behind on schedule because of component shortages anyway. Also, it only takes a few failed projects for everyone to get cold feet. Premature closures of new gas plants could happen if renewables get cheap enough. Those are already happening in some places.
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208686
Meta, for instance, plans a $13B data centre in Sturgeon County.
https://www.vozpopuli.com/indux/en/alberta-approved-a-932-me...
They all plan on powering them by building massive natural gas generating stations with each. In a free for all race to destroy the environment and doom humanity (aside from your plutocrats who'll live in their bunkers). Until a week or so ago Meta still had a clean energy pledge, but finally they just abandoned that silly greenwashing lie: https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-e...
We are basically in the end game now, and despite that weird guy running through these comments telling everyone how great everything is going to be in a hundred years, things are looking utterly grim.
The dominant political party frames natural gas as "clean", because it isn't a dirty as coal; and Alberta natural gas in particular as "ethical", because not Russia or Saudi.
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None of this is preordained. We, the phyical persons, can choose how we want to live, and what constraints the corporate persons must accept.