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Comment by synack | Hacker News Reader

Don't these things get more efficient as they scale up? One big plant is probably better than 30 small ones.

A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country?

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.

> Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery?

It's more capital intensive, and interest rates are 8%, because our elected officials are completely incompetent.

8% interest rates don’t seem to be a problem for financing all the data centers and AI hardware.

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 am curious how renewables + battery compare here, if at all feasible.

I thought there was a gas turbine shortage?

They’re absolutely not that incompetent. They’re on the pockets of people who profit directly from this.

Follow the money, and all that.

I don’t think business really wants interest rates that high. Without conspiracy theories, a simpler explanation is that this is simply democracy in action. People don’t want the spending reigned in, and they don’t want their taxes raised.

I think in this thread it’s worth posting out that interest rates aren’t actually high historically. They’re pretty normal. They were just wildly low for around a decade or so.

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.

I'm absoltutely not defending the environmental decision, but these datacenter projects seem to be funded mostly by free cash flow (not borrowed money), from the hyperscaler profit margins.

If I understand correctly, for speed of deployment they're building a less-efficient simple-cycle plant (instead of the typical combined-cycle). Even though it's larger, the efficiency is worse than a typical natural gas plant.

Natural gas is basically a waste product that gets flared off in many oil-producing parts of Texas. If this private power plant can use that gas for something productive then I guess at least we're no worse off. But it's not clear that is what is happening.

efficient in money, nothing is said about other metrics

it's quite possible to have more product made, thus more pollution (or less materials consumed, thus less)

but concentration definitely will rise

sometime in the energy sector once told me "the solution to pollution is dilution"

Which is nonsense. There's plenty of pollution that's been diluted as much as it possibly can be and is still problematic. CO2 is an obvious example. Or consider leaded gasoline or mercury. You have to be careful not to eat too much fish or you'll have trouble with the mercury in it. That's been diluted by the entire ocean and that didn't solve it.

uh, that’s nonsense.

co2 is problematic because of concentration - the sheer volume.

leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration.

dilution still helps!

Of course it helps, but where are you going to dilute more co2 these days?

that is exactly the issue. still worse 6” from the tailpipe.

bulk volume is a different problem from concentration

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)

The quip doesn't say "dilution helps." It says "the solution to pollution is dilution." Dilution solves the problem. And not only that, but it's the solution, not merely a solution.

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.

They meant "to not get caught, we just dilute".

*someone in the energy sector

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.

If we all just get a little cancer instead of some people getting a LOT of cancer then Amazon will be able to power its robot factories!

A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere.

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