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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Most generators not connected to the grid are for emergency backup purposes. Granted, this carve out is now clearly being abused, but the original intent is quite rational.

If we enforced strict regulations on all generators without any exceptions at all, your sewage lift station might not have a backup source anymore.

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It isn't just emergency generators.

Many non-emergency generators are used because there is no grid to connect to and/or the power requirements are not anticipated to be permanent. The cost of a grid connection can greatly exceed anything justified by the use case.

There are entire industries that live off of large portable generators for non-emergency purposes because it is the only way to get power where you need it.

If that is the original intent, why did that not get added into the law? Explicitly specififying that the exception only applies to emergency backup situations would have solved this, right?

Clearly codifying intent in a string of bytes is hard, especially if an alternative makes a nice sound folding into a pocket.

Because congress passed the law in 1970 and did not expect we'd lose the ability to pass legislation that fixes minor problems with the original laws.

Since congress can't do that anymore, to maintain a functional civilization we have to turn minor loopholes in the original law into load-bearing aspects of an industrial society.

"Emergency" is a spectrum.

Would you be OK with one specific generation station temporarily emitting 3x more than legal limit (e.g., from the hours of 2pm to 6pm) if the alternative is a 5% increase in absolute probability of a multi-day regional blackout? What about a 10% increase? Where is your red line?

Isn't the US in a perpetual state of emergency?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...

My reasonable guess is that they did not want to make those case that need off-grid generation too hard to build. And never considered that anyone would build any actually significant amount of off-grid capacity. At certain threshold grid just makes economic sense. So rational actors would never do that.

Sadly AI companies are entirely irrational actors so this really was rather hard to foresee...

Yep. The loophole is not hard to close, they could restrict the exemption to standby generators which only operate (1) in the event of a grid outage, and (2) for testing purposes.

For a genuine off-grid use case (eg: very rural locations), they could add a new exemption which allows installations up to X kW capacity per site where local grid connections do not exist. Set X large enough that it won't negatively impact applications like cabins or nature retreats, but small enough that it's not useful to a large operator like a datacentre.

Of course, this all requires a functional Congress... so good luck.

The law is not a set of hard coded rules. It is an agreement between humans, tied up in unspoken conventions. The principle one being, don't be a dick. The law always breaks down when it is treated as a hard and fast set of instructions that can be "hacked" by slavish adherence to precise language.

> If we enforced strict regulations on all generators without any exceptions at all, your sewage lift station might not have a backup source anymore.

No need for the FUD.

It would just mean the backup generator connected to the sewage lift station must meet emissions regulations, like in every developed country on earth.

If you’re trying to say there are simply some generators that can’t meet emissions standards, I’m going to say you just aren’t trying.

Yes, that's what we're saying. A small generator cannot meet the emissions standards of a large generator.

Some of the most effective emissions control equipment scales down very poorly. The bigger you can make the plant, the more viable these technologies become.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_scrubber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_catalytic_reduction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_emissions_monitorin...

(et. al.)

You’re just not trying.

There’s no reason at all that “generator” can’t be batteries rated for x hours, or a small generator that IS emissions certified.

I.e. https://www.reddit.com/r/Generator/comments/1hydy6j/recommen...

that's a very different standard.

And now we will have to add more bureaucracy and regulations to the process because of the tech bro's abuses of reasonable carveouts. More bureaucracy that future tech bros/right wingers will complain about existing even though they chose to force the matter to the point of regulation.

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