Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country
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https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/spacexs-terafab-will-rely-...
Especially if he buys from his own company.
i guess even at this stage “gas is easier” is still winning…
Regarding EVs, the US started to fall behind in 2019, and the gap has only continued to widen, regardless of administration:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electric-car-sales-share?...
Electric buses should be a no-brainer, yet New York comes last among US states in a recent market survey:
https://theicct.org/publication/zero-emission-bus-and-truck-...
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.
No, it's just physics.
Because you cannot turn a large datacenter with thousands of aggregates, power supplies and so on off and on like a toaster.
A 4 hour grid battery and a weather forecast would easily let a training run follow energy availability.
AI training is unique because it's not interactive workload serving.
- 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.
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
That “elsewhere” has to be far enough away to get different weather.
This means a grid capable of transferring 100% of the needed power.
So even if you plopped a new DC in the middle of a field of panels you’d still need a ~1 GA grid connection… or a battery array many times the size as you’d otherwise need just to cover night time usage.
They want to build the data centres right now, but the power companies and other energy suppliers are booked solid for 5+ years out.
Money or not, you can't just click your fingers and instantly get regulatory approval, or spin up a facility to build parts that only a handful of places have ever figured out how to mass-manufacture.
Gas turbine blades are especially difficult, but batteries and panels are not far behind. There are a surprisingly small number of shops capable of making power switching gear and transformers too.
And I want them to behave in a decent way, but universe does not ensure we get what we want.
They should be forced to build a grid in a way that does not speeds up global warming. What they want should be irrelevant.
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.
There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.
If you need to run an industrial process, not so much.
A more economical way would be to build nuclear power plants that power electrolyzers most of the time and provide power to the grid when necessary.
In the US, gas power plants make more sense due to ridiculously cheap gas, but even then the capacity factor of those power plants is much higher than 10%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It shows that the percentage share of electricity generated from coal in China peaked at ~80% in 2007 and was at ~54% last year.
Quebec produces far more electricity via hydro than any single US state, some of which gets exported to the northeastern US.
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.
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.)
That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to white collar crime.
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...
* 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.
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.
The reason they're not doing that is because grid providers can't grow their supply fast enough to support new AI data centres.
256 comments, 8 hours ago
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.
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.
it's quite possible to have more product made, thus more pollution (or less materials consumed, thus less)
but concentration definitely will rise
co2 is problematic because of concentration - the sheer volume.
leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration.
dilution still helps!
when people suffocate in the fire from CO2 - that's concentration
and dilution helps people to not literally die from that
global warming due to CO2 levels everywhere is entirely different problem. (and if we could dilute CO2 into the space, it would also be solved, lol)
This is just not true, and you seem to agree with that.
Yes, CO2 is problematic because of the sheer volume. The sheer volume means that dilution does not solve the problem.
Leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration. Which means that dilution does not solve the problem.
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.
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.
It's more capital intensive, and interest rates are 8%, because our elected officials are completely incompetent.
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 thought there was a gas turbine shortage?
Follow the money, and all that.
If you look at a 30-year fixed mortgage chart, the <6% rate situation only existed between roughly 2008 and 2021. At no other time in the history of the 30-year fixed rate mortgage was it ever that low. Ever.
Throughput for solar projects is very high and increasing, latency is unfortunately also very high.
It is too late now. There are no pare to optimal solutions left
China is currently building 37 reactors simultaneously [1].
> [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-c...
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.
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.
Liars
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.
Also, I call BS on your claim it's not working anywhere at scale.
https://www.catf.us/resource/carbon-capture-storage-what-can...
What do you want? To keep chasing the perfect or to embrace digging ourselves out of this mess by whatever means? I think I know the answer and I'll bet we disagree.
But I too would prefer we pivoted to renewables and nuclear, increasingly renewables over nuclear with time, but I'd have to move to China for that (yet they ended up firing up the coal plants because of the Iran War). It's not happening here even when the free market indicates it's the best play because it undercuts oil and gas and they own the politicians as the masses mostly don't bother to vote. What is your plan that works in reality as opposed to the Aldous Huxley semi-dystopia the west has become? I know, I know, getting the job done by any means is wrong think, demanding perfection is right think.
The best thing I see is that economic pressure is mounting: even with Trump breaking so many laws on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, people want to deploy solar or wind power because that saves them money.
"The decarbonization of industrial hard-to-abate sectors through CCUS is critical, and that can be illustrated by looking at the target sources, such as the cement industry, accountable for 6–7% of global anthropogenic emissions [1]; or the steel manufacturing value chain, responsible for 7% of global energy-related emissions [2]. Given such dimensions, it can be concluded that carbon capture is critical to achieving CO2 restriction goals."
"In the cement industry it is worth highlighting that 60–70% of the total emissions of CO2 does not come from fuel combustion, but from the decomposition of the limestone into calcium oxide and CO2 "
So you can't get past 90% in the first place without carbon sequestration.
We have the same goal, but we see different paths to achieving it. I think if we do what it takes with carbon sequestration, the free market solves this for real as more and more profitable renewable power generation is stood up. But I do not believe that happens without the fossil fuel incumbents soft landing or finding bagholders to take the hit in the long run. And I won't count on Americans to demand better given all it took was the president to say he hates EVs and EV sales plummeted.
Personally, my house is more or less off the grid electrically already with a ton of solar panels and 75 kWH of battery backup. I voted with my wallet.
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...
This is another level of insanity, right there.
It's just Amazon ~ Fuck Yeah We're Evil