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Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

> The latest proposal applies to permits for a "minor source" of air pollution ... [the Vantage data center was estimated to contribute] between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest estimate for any single facility ever.

'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'

'Minor source.'

I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those terms forever. It will take significant work to not refer to these as 'minor sources' when debating if they are a minor source.

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https://www.pecva.org/wp-content/uploads/Health-Impacts-Vant... the report

> Based on Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ) air permit No. 74242, the facility is authorized to operate eight natural-gas simple-cycle turbines and more than fifty diesel generators, including emergency and black-start units

So it is a low efficiency power station with some servers attached to it.

People complain when you hook them up to the high efficiency generators that power the grid, so this is what they get.

People complain when you violate the rules and externalize harms, yes. They should be made to turn off the generators and pay enough for the electricity so as not to impact everyone else's prices.

Gee, I wonder why people were complaining about that?

It's very simple: just take some of the existing capital and invest it towards the grid, then build the datacenter. The problem with the grid isn't electricity stealing. It's that the grid literally cannot support the amount of datacenters being built. It's not a matter of opinion, just numbers.

So why won't AI companies do just that, invest in the grid? Well they want the datacenters now, not 10 years from now. I think they're all terrified investor capital will dry up at any moment, so they have to expend as much capital as possible, as fast as possible. That's stupid of course, but that's how they operate.

That's how it works already. You pay the power company and that money is invested into the grid. Somehow this has worked in Ashburn VA for their massive data center build out so I don't see why it can't work in other places too.

Obviously nobody wants to wait 10 years and it has nothing to do with stupidity or fear.

Okay that’s very obviously not the same thing I’m proposing, and you know that. Paying for electricity is normal. But that doesn’t magically increase the capacity. It does, in time. A lot of time.

Which is why we’re using diesel generators and not building data centers. We don’t have the power, we just don’t.

I am well aware that's not what you are proposing. What you are proposing includes "wait 10 years" which absolutely no reasonable person is going to accept.

Well that's actually the same thing as you're proposing.

And "no reasonable person is going to accept" okay... sometimes you have to accept reality. I don't know what to tell you, or venture capitalists.

We don't have the power, and we won't for a while. Using polluting dirty fossil fuel generators is not a solution, and plainly should not be allowed. Of course the current US administration is incredibly pro-pollution, so they don't care. But we should. It's you and I who will be consuming these pollutants and its you and I's health on the line. Donald Trump will be dead any day now, of course he doesn't care.

It does not take a decade to build a new power plant. Yes, if grid operators drag their feet companies will try to end-run them, but the solution isn't banning data centers it's making it easier to add proper capacity to the grid and requiring builders to add power in a place where it can be useful for everyone.

I'm not a fan of watching gas turbines sprout across the country but I'm also not a fan of seeing a bunch of NIMBYs waste the opportunity to tax hundreds of billions of dollars of investments. This isn't some pie-in-the-sky idea, VA is great at speeding up and taxing data center construction.

Good luck with that. Order books for gas turbines are full for decades. Diesels will probably get used and pollute everything with their stink and noise.

FTA: 'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'

From the researcher: 'We estimated between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from associated air pollution — among the largest health-damage estimates produced for a single facility to date.' [0]

Still enormous, but there is a significant difference between being 'THE X of all time, and being 'among the X of all time'.

Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.

[0]: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/analyzing-air-pollution-health...

[1]: https://www.pecva.org/wp-content/uploads/Health-Impacts-Vant...

[2]: https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/identifying-sources...

Health costs don't matter, because someone else is paying them. We handwave them with "well only 3-4 additional people die after paying that cost.

The air pollution does not matter, because global warming already exists and air is already polluted. And making all that worst also does not matter, because who cares about anything but what AI companies want.

> Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.

I just love the irony of being absurdly callous and dismissive of human life while also getting the basic math wrong.

Nevermind that the 100,000 figure is across the nation of 300 million and includes things like automotive exhaust, while the other number is likely to be borne by that one specific community. Indeed, if you look at the study[0] your article cites -- which is looking at what we should be working on reducing -- industrial deaths are under 30,000, and electrical are around 10,000. So below half of your figure.

[0]: https://pubs.acs.org/estlcu/article/7/9/639/504911/Reducing-...

Apparently when there's value to be extracted, everything else can be dismissed.

Reading these kinds of things make my blood boil, and I'm not someone who gets angry.

And this reasoning is exactly how we got here in the first place.

“It’s not that bad, just a little bad, so it’s okay”

We’re talking about air pollution and death rates, not financial risk.

I’m not suggesting it is OK or not OK, just that ‘minor source’ of air pollution is probably the right term to use in context for this single site.

On a scale of billions of years, what's an extra death or two?

60 people over a decade dying is not minor. If a school killed two entire classes of kids over their k-12 education, that'd be a shocking amount of death. If a sports team lost 6 players every year we'd shut down the team instantly. Treating 6 deaths as minor is absurd and callous.

It only feels ok because it's so abstractly connected to pollution.

If this data center killed 6 people every year on site due to industrial accidents, we'd almost certainly close it. What Amazon warehouse kills half a dozen people on site every year?

But that’s already the framing.

A minor source should never lead to deaths or to put it otherwise No deaths = minor source

deaths = major source

Many deaths = majormost source

Now we just need define many but we already know its a major source of pollution that kills people

Some of these residents will die, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?

There is already very little to make these projects pay the externality costs; at this point paying enough remediation costs to reduce additional deaths should be the minimum.

> How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?

That’s a good question. It seems in this case that 3 to 6 deaths a year qualifies as ‘minor’ for the government. I don’t know where the line should be but, based on the number of people that suffer and die from air pollution related causes in the US each year, I thought that 6 additional deaths probably meant it qualified as minor. I’d be just as interested as you to know what the answer is.

Edit to add: ‘minor’ in this case doesn’t mean people deserve to die or that we should be happy they are suffering, just that compared to some other even worse projects, this one is less important.

It's a price you are willing top pay for other people? What price are they willing to pay?

It's not your price to pay. It's their lives.

You should see the Shrek movie.

Its a reference to the first Shrek movie, where Lord Farquaad (yes, word play on fuckwad) says "Some of you may die... but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"

I think you're getting a lot of unfair pushback on this, when you're making some excellent points. Just to clarify, I think you're making these points:

- Existing air pollution causes a ton of harm.

- Realistically, the optimal amount of air pollution is probably not zero.

- Logically, we should treat the cost/benefit of adding this "new" air pollution the same as the cost/benefit of removing existing air pollution.

- As an absolute number, the harm caused by this facility is very large, but as a percentage it is tiny.

People seem to be interpreting your conclusion as, "therefore it's completely fine to build this facility because only percentages matter, not absolute numbers." But I think your conclusion is more like, "our society has a complex relationship with air pollution and our existing choices reveal that we are willing to accept some air pollution sometimes, so you have to do a cost/benefit analysis, not just look at costs."

For context, a US coal plant on average causes 3 deaths per year due to air quality. If we're not calling a coal plant a major source, wtf would we refer to as a major source?

It doesn't matter that the aggregate air pollution of the entire country far exceeds any individual source, the point of the major/minor distinction is to compare individual sources.

This is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446879

Most of this administration contradicts themselves within a few minutes within a single speech, so this isn't unexpected.

I'm seeing a lot of these sorts of articles talking about things like air pollution, but something seems a bit off, given that, to my knowledge, computers do not produce any emissions at all.

The article lumps data centers in with landfills, laundromats, and steel mills. But landfills, laundromats, and steel mills all involve physical waste products that can have chemical or biological effects on the surrounding environment. What waste products do data centers output?

The article talks about expanding a fossil fuel plant as the source of the pollution question in the Virginia example. This seems only tangentially related to data centers, which don't care what specific technologies are used to generate fungible electricity.

Are these disingenuous attempts to attribute pollution originating from power plants to one specific, cherry-picked application of electrical power (despite the increasing prevalence of clean generation technologies over polluting ones, and despite lots of other, unrelated drivers of increased demand for electrical power)? Or is there something more to these arguments that I'm missing?

Behind the meter power generation is being included on site with the data centers.

The specific issue is that because it's a data center, from a company with unlimited money and therefore political power, it's being allowed to skip all the rules about clean generation. The ones in question are building on-side dirty power.

Oh add in the Texas railroad commission just voted to end public participation... they are the regulators that permit natural gas pipelines.

So ya, add that to the corruption.

The data centers described incorporate dedicated power generation into their design. The power generation is fossil fuel based and high-pollution, and is being deployed at scale.

If building a data center essentially necessitates building more fossil fuel plants (and/or indeed comes with its own gas and diesel generators because the grid could not handle the extra load, plus generating their own dirty electricity is cheaper for the megacorp because a corrupt govt allows them to externalize costs), the extra emissions are obviously caused by the data center. No matter whether it could maybe in the future run on renewables instead.

There's a surge in data centre building - a massive surge of power hungry hungry hyper scaled hippos.

Many local grids are currently unable to meet that demand, therefore various "solutions" so far include:

* buying up jet engines from COVID era bankrupted / downsized air fleets and running them continuously in banks along side data centres to spin generators.

You'll note these aren't the cleanest solution, are a bit noisy, and not renewable.

* building a data centre AND and onsite LNG gas extraction facility to directly on site gas supply and derived electrical power.

This one is expected to be the single largest CO2 source in mainland USofA (or some similar stat, it was recent news).

So these are fossil fuel polluting sources that are directly attached to specific data centres and not being used for non data centre purposes.

So it seems like confirmation that this really is a case of disingenuous conflation of power-generation concerns with data centers per se.

I don't think it's reasonable to regard concerns about emissions from banks of continuously running jet engines as "opposition to data centers" any more than concerns about, using the same jet engines to power charging stations in remote areas would, for example, amount to "opposition to EVs".

> I don't think it's reasonable to regard concerns about emissions from banks of continuously running jet engines as "opposition to data centers"

Clearly you don't.

For others, it's opposition to power hungry, polluting, noisy, developments that are concentrating digital power in the hands of a few, raising local heat levels (if topology domes heat), consuming memory and GPU resources to the detriment of the commons.

> Clearly you don't.

Obviously, since I'm the one discussing it here. The broader question is whether the people who are conflating them together are doing so out of honest confusion or out of ulterior motives.

> For others, it's opposition to power hungry, polluting, noisy, developments that are concentrating digital power in the hands of a few, raising local heat levels (if topology domes heat), consuming memory and GPU resources to the detriment of the commons.

This seems like a hodgepodge of concerns that are all quite distinct from each other. None of them is necessarily invalid in its own right, but lumping them all together and treating them as irresolvable problems in order to oppose data centers per se -- rather than issues that can and should be mitigated independently of anything related to AI -- seems to be disingenuous.

The people presenting these different concerns are all individuals with their own agendas. You're the person lumping them all into one confusing mass so you don't have to deal with each viewpoint.

When people are assholes across multiple domains they get pushback from each of them. This isn't emergent behavior, it's emergent consequences.

> You're the person lumping them all into one confusing mass so you don't have to deal with each viewpoint.

Rather, I was responding to the comment that did explicitly lump all of these concerns together in a single sentence that was trying to explain and/or justify opposition to AI per se, in a thread that originated from merely discussing how it makes sense to attribute pollution to data centers, without bringing up those other concerns.

> When people are assholes across multiple domains they get pushback from each of them. This isn't emergent behavior, it's emergent consequences.

That's true. But the issues are about neither about people being assholes, nor people giving pushback, but rather addressing legitimate concerns, each within its own domain. The fact that some of the people involved are assholes makes it more likely, not less so, that opposition is originating from emotional rather than objective factors, and makes it more necessary to disentangle the issues from each other and deal with them each appropriately.

Ask the people living near them what their agenda is regarding the different issues they're dealing with.

Which ones? The people living near the thousands of data centers that have already been running for decades, the people living near the sites of proposed data centers that include plans for repurposed jet engines to run continuously to power them, or the people living near the sites of proposed data centers that plan to be powered normally in ways that don't generating any localized pollution?

I'd expect the different issues involved in each of these distinct scenarios to be, well, different. And it doesn't quite make sense that someone living near the proposed site of a normal data center would oppose that project on account of some other project proposal, from someplace else, including something outlandish.

> What waste products do data centers output?

Energy production consequences aside, they produce tons of e-waste

There is also the giant "Tax Incentives" being given to these projects under the guise of them being "job creators". Unfortunately, data center's only need a bunch of jobs at the initial construction + installation of hardware. Once it's operational, it'd need about a dozen staff to maintain round-the-clock on premise supervision.

>to my knowledge, computers do not produce any emissions at all.

>is there something more to these arguments that I'm missing?

Yes.

You can't be expected to know everything that comes into play, each person rarely has a very good grasp of the big picture.

Have you ever smelled the type of acids and toxic gases that need to be handled before you even get computer chips to build computers with?

Where do people think the toxic wastes from these processes end up?

Plus the emissions from the freight across different modalities which scales linearly with massiveness of the tonnage.

And that's before you even consider the power needs of development when it exceeds the clean energy available at any one time.

> Have you ever smelled the type of acids and toxic gases that need to be handled before you even get computer chips to build computers with?

Yes. These are waste products generated by chip manufacturing, not by using computers that include chips that have already been manufactured elsewhere.

> Where do people think the toxic wastes from these processes end up?

Hopefully, they end up neutralized at the site of their production. In the worst case, they may end up creating pollution around the locations where the chips are being manufactured, in which case the chip manufacturers should definitely be held responsible for the externalities they create.

Could you elaborate on how this relates to data centers?

> Plus the emissions from the freight across different modalities which scales linearly with massiveness of the tonnage.

And scales not at all in relation to what categories of products are included in that tonnage. This seems to be another instance of cherry-picking a single use case to blame for the externalities of a services that's used by essentially everything else too -- the solution here is to find cleaner ways of fueling cargo ships, just as we need to find cleaner ways of fueling power plants, since it is not reasonable to expect any net reduction in demand for either cargo shipping or for electricity.

> And that's before you even consider the power needs of development when it exceeds the clean energy available at any one time.

This should be a strong impetus for expanding clean energy production. There's little point in complaining about any specific application of electricity if it's not meant to advocate for generating more power with less pollution.

- 'How many fingers, Winston?'

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