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Comment by strangeloops85 | Hacker News Reader

Gotta love how all the companies' platitudes about sustainability become ludicrous as they begin burning natural gas at prodigious scales. But don't worry, "AI will solve climate change" so we can just pump extra CO2 now, right guys?

I am deeply, deeply cynical and honestly angry about these companies and their self-righteous protestations of being ethical, or public benefit corporations or whatever. Anthropic is benefiting from xAI's Memphis data center that is violating (previous, not anymore!) EPA standards, causing disproportionate impacts to nearby African-American communities. All the while, Ants appear to be floating on some higher effective altruist / B-corp plane. The little people and their petty concerns are just bumps on the road to RSI and ASI after all.

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I think your anger would be better placed with the institutional barriers to building clean energy in America that prevent these infrastructure companies from doing the right thing

transmission via HVDC is extremely difficult to build due to land permitting and right of way laws

grid interconnections take 5+ years just to get approved, let alone built

only 2 nuclear power plants have been built since 1978, each taking over 10 years

Well, there's an admin killing clean energy so I think we know where that anger belongs. Dems suck too, but what can you do. One is worse, clearly.

As much as I wish it were different I think this would be the outcome under any administration. Natural gas in the USA is just stupidly cheap inflation adjusted, is energy dense, power plants require few land resources, pipeline infrastructure exists, robust and deep supply chain, etc. I don't hold much hope of the USA kicking the habit as it is such a competitive advantage. If we don't burn it locally it will be exported at a huge margin for geopolitical advantage. 1/3 of the CO2 reductions in the US power sector are due to renewables, 2/3 are from natural gas. Renewables would need to be backed up by additional gas capacity, although the average capacity factor would be reduced with a more robust renewable build out.

Biden was not paying companies to NOT build windplants.

No, the result would not be the same. Provably so.

Also, in fact, companies turned to Trump because democrats started to be serious about anti trust actions.

Billions of OUR dollars. Dumped into the MIC for Iran, wasting billions more of our dollars by surging energy prices. Then spending billions more to kill wind projects. Adding at least a billion to his own wallet.

How many billions of dollars will we allow this clown and his cronies to steal from us?

During the Biden administration almost 40 trillion ft^3 of natural gas was produced annually breaking all records. I do agree the policies of energy were more all the above during Biden and renewable build outs were incentivized additional to record gas production.

I think the biggest material factor between the two administrations is coal capacity factors on the grid are increasing again which would not happen under an alternative admin. We were on a good path towards phasing out coal completely with natural gas and an increasingly significant amount of renewable energy.

How did the natural gas growth change from before? How did the solar/wind change from before?

The data you’ve presented indicates you think only reducing the natural gas number to 0 with no context about trend lines or alternates is an acceptable solution which is obviously nonsensical.

The whole idea that a solar panel needs to be backed up by gas is absolutely asinine. We live in a capitalist society if there is so much excess power in the day and little power during the night then that means there is money to be made by storing that energy then doing arbitrage with daytime vs nighttime rates.

Build the solar panels and the battery will come because there is serious money to be made as the differential increases.

I agree I don't think it will always be the case but in the 1-5 year term the economics dictate that is what you get, full battery backup to run something like a data center is expensive even if technically feasible. It is not 1:1 backup but significant additional marginal gas production is going to come online with battery and solar build outs, that is what you see in grid queues across the US.

You are ignoring the fact that batteries like many other flex grid assets have diminishing marginal returns to arbitrage power. That is why you see them in composition with other flexible base load resources in a market system. We could reform the system to have other objectives.

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/australia-home-batteries

Recently posted on HN today. A very good example of the argumentation I was making Because these batteries are grid tied home battery there isn't a need to have a huge land monolith in an area for massive storage. It just feeds back into the millions of kilometers of powerlines already existing

People like Zuckerberg, Brin, Page and Musk have majority voting control of these companies.

They have amassed incredible power and vast fortunes in a time and era when doing so could only be done with great damage to the environment. Despite years of talk and superficial motions towards climate efforts these people have completely pivoted that signalling and have doubled down on endeavours that cause even more ecological destruction.

They have the power and means to do the right thing.

They chose not to.

since 2016 ish, big tech has measured infrastructure efficiency in watts, not dollars. that's because they made multiple long term deals for power that came up short

they want to build more power of any kind, ideally renewables. but the past decade has shown time and again that they can't build enough by any means

Are these companies expending any of their lobbying efforts or funds on this problem? Or are they just going to the easiest option? I'm not shedding any tears for the AI companies and their infra challenges. They're the ones driving a huge delta increase in energy use and emissions this coming decade, so their actions merit scrutiny and they are responsible for their actions and the resulting emissions that we will all suffer from. If I had my way, we'd stack an enormous carbon tax on all of them to force their hand.

Look, these companies are the ones selling a story of being benevolent (notwithstanding AI killing us all or putting everyone out of a job). And Anthropic is explicitly a B-corp. How does any of that square with taking any compute they can at any environmental cost?

The Memphis case to me is very illuminating: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260811-memphis-ai-da...

But it's ok, they're EAs and gave $1M to a Memphis nonprofit on 'AI education', while spending a $1B/ month renting Colossus:

https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/anthropic-gifts-memphis-no...

yes, they are. they are hugely concerned that China has loads of power, and the US is incapable of keeping up

the biggest limiting factors for AI labs scaling are silicon, then electricity. they are acutely aware of this

> transmission via HVDC is extremely difficult to build due to land permitting and right of way laws

It’s also really expensive due to the equipment that needs to be in place at either end of the HVDC link. Switching HVDC current is challenging and expensive, the stations at each end are hundreds of millions of dollars and around an order of magnitude more expensive than AC transmission stations. If you’re operating on the same grid frequency, it’s almost invariably more economic to run AC transmission lines. Voltage drop can be dealt with by transformers stepping up the dropped voltage periodically.

Ah yes, institutional barriers like the federal government paying companies to cancel their existing renewable projects that are fully funded and investing in fossil fuels instead…

Even the Chinese take several years to put up a nuclear plant. Nuclear is simply financially unsustainable especially in this era of high interest rates when solar, wind and natural gas plants can be brought up in a matter of months.

Their SWEs will all have Repetitive Strain Injuries long before they hit Recursive Self Improvement, I'm sure.

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