Those in power seem to think that a compute advantage is necessary to maintain economic advantage. Despite this, the voters universally hate data centers, so much so that both NY and TX have data center construction moratoriums.
Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketing purposes to get social permission to build DCs. Despite this, companies are “forced” to build their own “dirty” power sources since political power is disrupting green energy build out. Despite this, demand is still high so that compute costs are continuing to rise. Despite this, our economy is increasingly predicated on a few companies using more compute than geopolitical rivals with cheaper electricity. Despite this, those in power are, again, unwilling to create a compromising policy (aka clean energy) that voters actually would demand before tolerating more DCs.
What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?
The overall American economy is going to pay the price in the long term. And current foreign policy is reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner, which will make things even worse.
If Canada was a US state it would rank around 4th or 5th in terms of economic size and power. There's a lot of doomerism, but I seriously doubt the US is going to lose its top 4 or 5 economies in the next 50 years.
If you want to go really doomer, then I think it's actually more likely that Canada would become a US state instead of the US economy shrinking to the size of Canada.
Speaking as a European, current foreign policy is not "reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner". It has already reduced trust to rock bottom.
It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Just this week, amongst other news:
* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.
* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.
* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.
* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.
Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.
There is a lot of that with the population but I don't see it at the leadership level yet. The top politicians are all still desperate to go back to the good old days of euro-atlanticism (and all the cushy positions it gets their friends & family), there's also the problem of all of their capital happily sitting and growing in fortune 500 companies.
I feel it is hard to grasp for an American how much perception of US shifted in eu. This is just anedoctal of course, but a famous Italian singer famous for having written a song about American and sexual liberation decades ago, wrote an updated version. The former is "America", the latter is "America INC." You can guess which one depicts America in a bad light.
I wouldn't have expected a famous singer to make such a song, given that America was always portrayed in italian pop music with a positive image, and negative views were relegated to mostly political groups or singers with political themes
I find Europe's obsession with America fatally pathological. If I were a European with a family (so a stake on the future) my worries would be like:
1. Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
2. What's it going to be like when Europe is so squeezed by China that the likes of Volkswagen are going out of business (happening now.)
I would find these two things literally existential. But I think these are hard questions to tackle or even ponder it's easier to shit on America instead as a feel-good distraction.
The environment's already lost. We've passed the 1.5ºC deviation mark from the pre-industrial global average, and we're on track to hit 3ºC in a few more decades.
The excess deaths and human misery (both that which is increasingly clearly ongoing, and we have to look forward to) are going to be tragic.
Look to Australia if you want to see how these energy policies work out in the long run.
Energy is big money. Anything that disrupts the status quo is immediately vilified. It got to the point that our major party at the time lead a “gas fired” green energy policy.
They got voted out, the new guys implemented a subsidised home battery policy. In the space of a year it has destroyed the economics of a carbon fuelled grid. All the economics pointing to renewables being the way forward were proven correct.
Everyone gets their back scratched. If you’re a consumer and you invested, you have a massively discounted personal power station that generates you money. If you operate the grid, your transmission costs and peak transmission costs went down. General consumer prices went down because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs. Everyone in won.
Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story. Don’t let rhetoric become your reality.
> Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story.
If only.
Chevron’s Gorgon project will be ongoing for decades and making money hand over fist flogging LNG out of Australia to overseas customers.
It'll be a massive source of previously sequestered CO2 and claimed to be "the largest CO2 sequestration project on the planet* .. with the minor catch of (re-) stashing away a very very tiny portion of the CO2 released. Something, something, not let it out in the first place?
Still, could be worse, at least they're not planning on fracking the Kimberley.
Modern data centers can be designed with near-zero direct water consumption. It isn’t fundamentally necessary to consume huge amounts of water to cool computers. What’s the story with those new data centers? Do they actually choose to do evaporative cooling that people are complaining about or people are complaining about problem that doesn’t exist?
This is not true. It banned foreign (edit) made equipment because it’s known for cybersecurity issues. It was the FCC that restricted new foreign-made connected inverters over grid cybersecurity concerns. [1]
> This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms.
The $1.2B is real, but it wasn’t payment to stop construction. RWE agreed to surrender three offshore wind leases and settle related claims. Anyways, RWE’s three leases were in very early development and weren’t expected online until the 2030s. [2]
That’s true. China dominates globally but I found that the US installed European and Japanese models. There is a big supply chain concern and set of reviews happening all across the entire government sector. Energy is a national security concern. [1]
> Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?
They’re network-connected and remotely controllable. The concern is compromise of the vendor/cloud infrastructure allowing large numbers of inverters to be manipulated simultaneously.
Or even Trojan horse style malware is a possibility I suppose (Stuxnet).
That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at
This is just pure histrionics, you have no understanding whatsoever of the scale of data center water consumption, electricity consumption, new capacity coming online, etc.
Not much. 0.04% of US water production. For context, that's about 3% of the water consumption of our golf courses, and less than 1% of what we use to water our lawns.
> Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy.
Can you tell me how much water a data center uses? If you have strong opinion on the construction of data centers I hope you can answer this basic question about data centers. (Many opposed to them cannot)
So even when xAI (which is now Tesla? Or SpaceX maybe?) was "operating dozens of unregulated gas turbines that worsen the air quality in one of the most polluted parts of the country"[0] this didn't place them above this new Amazon not-even-built-yet data center? Are they competing who can destroy the earth the fastest or what's going on?
It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
> It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Who gives a shit who started it? The ones who continue engaging in it, should clearly be punished as they're working against humanity's best interest of keeping this planet survivable.
If you're one of the largest companies in the world, constantly brag about how environmental friendly you are and how much you care about "sustainability" or what the trendy word is today, and you end up building a data center that sets a record in pollution (either directly or indirectly), you're doing something massively fucked up and are misaligned with the rest of the people on this planet.
> Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
I guess this is what late-stage capitalism gives you ultimately, companies who feel like it's fine doing whatever because competitors are also doing whatever. No one I know have been cheering for anything like that, I suggest if you have people cheering about stuff like that near you, get far away.
So where is the police? They're running turbines they haven't been granted permits to run, if Average Joe did so the police would show up and literally grab the hardware from him, one way or another, or disable it at least. What the fuck are they waiting for?
All this AI doomerism is hiding the obvious and immediate harm that will cause a mass extinction event. Funnily enough people at Anthropic are predicting the end of the Anthropocene, completely absolving themselves from any responsibility for the actual reality that the Anthropocene is defined by human made geologically noticeable changes. Like causing a global climate catastrophe.
The existential risk people are worried about a much shorter timeline - like the next 5-10 years. Climate change is serious but very unlikely to lead to anything like ending the Anthropocene in the next 5 years.
On this map I can't see _any_ nuclear under construction in the US yet the rest of the world seems to be building many.
When a man has a hammer everything is a gas turbine. GEV stock has treated me well but I'd much rather nuclear was winning.
It's a catch22 problem because nuclear is much slower to build than a data center so there is no demand from the data centers. And the nuclear plant doesn't know the demand will be there in 5 years once with gas soaking up demand. So the build it and they will come strategy is risky. Building infrastructure is like a muscle that gets stronger with repetitions. The cost will only come down once some are built but nobody wants to build at the current high prices. Govt help is needed to kick start it.
Aren't coal power plants waaaay more polluting than natural gas? Not just in terms of C02, but also really nasty stuff like particulates, sulphur, and metals?
It's very trendy right now to get mad at datacenters, but I'd much rather energy come from natural gas than from an existing coal power plant. (Obviously, renewables would be better than either.)
Zero data on Greenhouse gas CO2-equivalent per kWh. A combined-cycle gas power plant is going to have lower impact per kWh than the 200+ coal plants in the US.
Note that this is about absolute pollution, not relative to power output. Pollution is high, because power output is high. Relatively, for what it's worth, it's just a fairly normal gas plant.
So the most interesting thing to take away from this: There is a lot of demand for more power and in this instance it's satisfied by gas. Which is still much better than coal. Which is still much worse than renewables.
Ok. A serious question.
I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. Then why are they using gas turbines? Is it because they can generate more power with a smaller real estate footprint?
Texas specifically has heavily politicized and demonized wind power, in spite of having massive successes with it prior to 2016 and being a leading producer of it. Solar isn't as bad, but is still seen as "leftist." The political landscape in TX is vastly more friendly to natural gas.
In other words, they are using gas turbines because the politicians are stupid.
They are using gas because it's more reliable during peak usage. Wind generation in Texas isn't optimal throughout the entire state and conditions aren't optimal all the time. They still use wind, but from a pure numbers perspective, gas infra already exists, the gas is there, and gas is more reliable, so wind isn't always the cheapest form of energy. There are also diminishing returns on just adding more wind turbines.
This is a far from the truth as a I can imagine. There are still a large number of wind and solar projects in progress and I don’t believe the cadence has changed.
The reason here is it makes no sense for what they are trying to do. They want to power a DC, the sun sets and wind comes and goes. You would need overcapacity on both and then batteries. Probably something in there with not wanting to connect to the grid.
Wind and solar would require lots of land next to the DC to guarantee power.
Your statements are borderline lies. Texas gets a lot wrong but it is still building out lots of solar and wind but neither of those power and onsite DC very well.
Why are all the Reddit style posts out in force here? First the reason they are building a gas turbine has little to do with a “national grid”. It would never be efficient to transport electricity at that distance.
This is about not having to connect to the grid and to guarantee the dc can get running soon.
Eh you are posting hyperbole that has nothing to do with this thread. I made a single quip while furthering my position. Posting rules like you are doing are even worse. You have a downvote.
Replace Reddit with hyperbolic statements that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. There was a wave of high points less than 1 year old accounts posting highly hyperbolic statements that had nothing to do with the topic or were so far off from how physics works that it’s a bit silly.
Going back to the original rule the point is to not have endless meta discussions. I am skirting it imo but I included rationale for my argument.
And what does that have to do with what I said? Absolutely nothing. I don’t agree with the administrations stance at all but equally I don’t like comments like yours that make no sense.
Texas is not at all against renewables. Maybe, just maybe, whatever axes the people building data centers are optimizing on rule out solar/wind over factors other than "renewables are for leftists, so fuck that we're gonna burn gas even if it's more expensive."
Did you miss the 1st utility part? It can be quite hard for nonresidential users to retrofit for solar. Not impossible but sometimes not an easy solve.
Avoid it to the tune of being in the top third (for now, they're projected to keep growing), behind only blue states that are known for aggressive rollout and/or climates that are overall more favorable (i.e., Texas gets its fair share of sun but not quite like CA and NV, for example)? Is that your idea of avoiding it because politicians want to own the libs?
Under current administration, I'm not even sure its possible to build out green energy for this sort of thing at scale - this article[1] was on the front page just yesterday
Renewables require storage because they are bursty - sun goes down, wind stops blowing. This is more expensive than just burning as much nat gas as you need.
For a DC it's probably reliability. You need wind to be spread over a large area to even out random changes in power availability. And, obviously, solar power works during the day.
You know, we don't actually have to do this. The people could block the gates and prevent the delivery of the turbines. The local fire department could fail their inspection and prevent the gas from being turned on. The UPS could "mysteriously" go up in smoke during it's commissioning.
None of this is preordained. We, the phyical persons, can choose how we want to live, and what constraints the corporate persons must accept.
All this at the very low cost of: your job.
You can't have an unbreachable blockade 24/7 in front of there, very soon they'd send police to disperse. Fire dept has to justify the failing, if everything up to code and the inspector make it fail it will delay for at most a week and the guy will lose his credibility. The guys delivering and installing the UPS are just trying to make a living too, destroying the thing will get them fired while only delaying a little the time getting another delivered. You are replaceable.
A lot of new data centres have been announced in Alberta, Canada. Which is a weird location given that Alberta has a derelict power grid that can barely serve the current load, and runs almost entirely on fossil fuels.
Meta, for instance, plans a $13B data centre in Sturgeon County.
They all plan on powering them by building massive natural gas generating stations with each. In a free for all race to destroy the environment and doom humanity (aside from your plutocrats who'll live in their bunkers). Until a week or so ago Meta still had a clean energy pledge, but finally they just abandoned that silly greenwashing lie: https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-e...
We are basically in the end game now, and despite that weird guy running through these comments telling everyone how great everything is going to be in a hundred years, things are looking utterly grim.
I think I get your point; that the inverse of corrupt (I call it fake) capitalism is not necessarily communism, or something reactive. It might just be a system that works better, even if we have not named it yet...
Climate catastrophe itself is ideology driven. The mainstream view isn't that if we increase emissions, it will lead to a literal catastrophe. Our lives will become better in 100 years with emissions or without.
I would urge you to stop spreading misinformation about imminent catastrophe unless we reduce emissions. Catastrophe meaning our lives would be even worse in the future than now.
Europe is burning, rivers are at all time lows, new temperature records ar being set every year, oceans are rising and you have the gall to demand we ignore the obvious?
Please share numbers on the predictions instead of anecdotes. You are doing the thing where you focus on specifics instead of focusing on the whole. Please share sources that show that things are overall going to get worse instead of specific cases.
This is actually a very good example to prove my point. Nowhere does it say that things get worse overall. It doesn't talk about overall increasing GDP / Life expectancy or anything sociologically.
It simply repeats the claim that sea level rises, things get hotter and so on. Its a good rhetorical move because it doesn't quantify the impact it has on us (deaths or economic).
An example,
>widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people
Ok. How many deaths? What impact? Any metric? Couldn't they have simply said something like "X number of people are going to die.."? Or something like "people are going to become X poorer"?
They don't because other studies did it and came to the conclusion that GDP still rises.
Since you seem to be able to easily quantify it, would you be able to bet on the fact that our life expectancy reduce and we would get poorer if emissions don't reduce? And would you bet that this (above) is the mainstream idea? And would you be able to show some sources? Here's mine:
>Why would you measure the goodness of the future in GDP?
This my problem with y'all. What pray tell me is the objective measure? Life expectancy? HDI? Literacy? All are going to go up. The main issue is that you will never accept an objective measure and dance to the tunes of anyone who says what you want because ultimately it is unfalsifiable.
Come up with few metrics. Convince yourself that these metrics are important. And then show me that it will get worse. I hope you agree that life expectancy is a fundamental one.
Oh maaan. Notice how this document doesn't show aggregate numbers? Its the exact failure mode I was criticising. They only show the climate related deaths. But what about the climate related lives saved? What about general prosperity increasing in the world?
It would be easy to dismantle my argument by showing that aggregate life expectancy is reducing and that people are getting poorer and people are more unhealthy. But you can't do that. Because that's not the truth.
What do you mean, "nowhere does it say that things get worse overall"? Do you need to get it explicitly spelled out for you to realize that the environment and ecosystems everywhere are under extreme stress (to say it mildly) and failing!?
Do you really believe, that the way humans are using resources and polluting everything, doesn't have any negative impact?
And why the hell would the GDP be ANY good measurement, since it does not include any environmental costs (if I don't need to correctly dispose of my trash and can burn it cheaper, I have an economic advantage in the way of less costs)?
And your OECD study: doesn't it specifically talk about economic impact if climate change measures ARE being implemented (especially emission reductions)? This of course makes sense, as this would imply massive investments in technologies and sectors. This source specifically does not make a case for climate change being not as bad as predicted or that it doesn't take place.
Looking at the current state of the world (especially ecosystems, which are extremely important for us), I really wonder how someone can make an argument, that it isn't as bad as it is made out to be. It is often way worse, as many things aren't really talked about in the open.
A couple of excerpts from the front page, without even registering to access the full report:
1.1.5 Heat-related mortality
Failure to curb the warming effects of climate change has seen the rate of heat-related deaths surge 23% since the 1990s, to 546,000 a year.
1.2.1 Wildfires
The risk of wildfires is growing: 2024 saw a record-high 154,000 estimated deaths from wildfire smoke-derived small particulate matter air pollution (PM2.5)
One could argue that heat related deaths could be due to the fact that there are more old people alive right now compared to any point in time in human history due to high life expectancy and they are the most vulnerable to heatwaves. Had the percentage of younger population been higher, the numbers would have been different. Also in a way it’s Karma, that older population is the one that lived their lives like there’s no future and thought that climate change is a problem for younger generations and now they would be the first to die like flies
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Spain and France this year, Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
Rivers in Europe are at an all-time low [5], nuclear power plants need to shut down because they can't be cooled anymore. [6]
It takes deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the obvious.
Why is HN so absolutely terrible at understanding the scale of pollution, water consumption, etc? It is quite minuscule in real terms, but everyone here is losing their mind. Ridiculous.
Bitcoin received a lot of backslash due to its power usage and ecological footprint. It's obvious that HN users don't have the same criticisms towards AI data centers. Maybe someone with a short position will coordinate that communication soon..
Those in power seem to think that a compute advantage is necessary to maintain economic advantage. Despite this, the voters universally hate data centers, so much so that both NY and TX have data center construction moratoriums.
Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketing purposes to get social permission to build DCs. Despite this, companies are “forced” to build their own “dirty” power sources since political power is disrupting green energy build out. Despite this, demand is still high so that compute costs are continuing to rise. Despite this, our economy is increasingly predicated on a few companies using more compute than geopolitical rivals with cheaper electricity. Despite this, those in power are, again, unwilling to create a compromising policy (aka clean energy) that voters actually would demand before tolerating more DCs.
What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?
The overall American economy is going to pay the price in the long term. And current foreign policy is reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner, which will make things even worse.
Well yeah, it's basically locked in now that in 50 years America won't be a world power any more. It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best.
> It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best.
If Canada was a US state it would rank around 4th or 5th in terms of economic size and power. There's a lot of doomerism, but I seriously doubt the US is going to lose its top 4 or 5 economies in the next 50 years.
If you want to go really doomer, then I think it's actually more likely that Canada would become a US state instead of the US economy shrinking to the size of Canada.
But this is all nonsense talk anyway.
Speaking as a European, current foreign policy is not "reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner". It has already reduced trust to rock bottom.
It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Just this week, amongst other news:
* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.
* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.
* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.
* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.
Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.
There is a lot of that with the population but I don't see it at the leadership level yet. The top politicians are all still desperate to go back to the good old days of euro-atlanticism (and all the cushy positions it gets their friends & family), there's also the problem of all of their capital happily sitting and growing in fortune 500 companies.
I feel it is hard to grasp for an American how much perception of US shifted in eu. This is just anedoctal of course, but a famous Italian singer famous for having written a song about American and sexual liberation decades ago, wrote an updated version. The former is "America", the latter is "America INC." You can guess which one depicts America in a bad light.
I wouldn't have expected a famous singer to make such a song, given that America was always portrayed in italian pop music with a positive image, and negative views were relegated to mostly political groups or singers with political themes
I find Europe's obsession with America fatally pathological. If I were a European with a family (so a stake on the future) my worries would be like:
1. Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them? 2. What's it going to be like when Europe is so squeezed by China that the likes of Volkswagen are going out of business (happening now.)
I would find these two things literally existential. But I think these are hard questions to tackle or even ponder it's easier to shit on America instead as a feel-good distraction.
The environment's already lost. We've passed the 1.5ºC deviation mark from the pre-industrial global average, and we're on track to hit 3ºC in a few more decades.
The excess deaths and human misery (both that which is increasingly clearly ongoing, and we have to look forward to) are going to be tragic.
Look to Australia if you want to see how these energy policies work out in the long run.
Energy is big money. Anything that disrupts the status quo is immediately vilified. It got to the point that our major party at the time lead a “gas fired” green energy policy.
They got voted out, the new guys implemented a subsidised home battery policy. In the space of a year it has destroyed the economics of a carbon fuelled grid. All the economics pointing to renewables being the way forward were proven correct.
Everyone gets their back scratched. If you’re a consumer and you invested, you have a massively discounted personal power station that generates you money. If you operate the grid, your transmission costs and peak transmission costs went down. General consumer prices went down because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs. Everyone in won.
Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story. Don’t let rhetoric become your reality.
> Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story.
If only.
Chevron’s Gorgon project will be ongoing for decades and making money hand over fist flogging LNG out of Australia to overseas customers.
It'll be a massive source of previously sequestered CO2 and claimed to be "the largest CO2 sequestration project on the planet* .. with the minor catch of (re-) stashing away a very very tiny portion of the CO2 released. Something, something, not let it out in the first place?
Still, could be worse, at least they're not planning on fracking the Kimberley.
Oh, wait: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh9IkUUgaww
Modern data centers can be designed with near-zero direct water consumption. It isn’t fundamentally necessary to consume huge amounts of water to cool computers. What’s the story with those new data centers? Do they actually choose to do evaporative cooling that people are complaining about or people are complaining about problem that doesn’t exist?
A country is but the sum of its people - and this american people have gotten what they voted for.
Nice opportunity for the rest of the world, though.
This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms. It also made solar inverters illegal last week.
> It also made solar inverters illegal last week.
This is not true. It banned foreign (edit) made equipment because it’s known for cybersecurity issues. It was the FCC that restricted new foreign-made connected inverters over grid cybersecurity concerns. [1]
1. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adds-foreign-produced-power...
> This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms.
The $1.2B is real, but it wasn’t payment to stop construction. RWE agreed to surrender three offshore wind leases and settle related claims. Anyways, RWE’s three leases were in very early development and weren’t expected online until the 2030s. [2]
2. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/rwe-says-reached-12...
It banned all foreign made solar inverters i.e. all solar inverters.
That’s true. China dominates globally but I found that the US installed European and Japanese models. There is a big supply chain concern and set of reviews happening all across the entire government sector. Energy is a national security concern. [1]
1. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaics-supp...
Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?
> Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?
They’re network-connected and remotely controllable. The concern is compromise of the vendor/cloud infrastructure allowing large numbers of inverters to be manipulated simultaneously.
Or even Trojan horse style malware is a possibility I suppose (Stuxnet).
That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at
Do people really believe this stuff? Wow
The entire planet will lose as ecosystems die out, food and water supplies run low, refugee crises and global conflicts ramp up.
But hey, line go up!
Don't worry; republicans are way ahead of that refugee crises by generation fervent far right ethnic nationalism globally, independently of course.
This is just pure histrionics, you have no understanding whatsoever of the scale of data center water consumption, electricity consumption, new capacity coming online, etc.
How much water does a DC use?
Not much. 0.04% of US water production. For context, that's about 3% of the water consumption of our golf courses, and less than 1% of what we use to water our lawns.
Get off my lawn.
> Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy.
Can you tell me how much water a data center uses? If you have strong opinion on the construction of data centers I hope you can answer this basic question about data centers. (Many opposed to them cannot)
Depends on the cooling system, but around 1 to 9L per kwh. [1]
A lot, but not all, of these datacenters are using evaporative cooling, which is what kicks their water usage so high.
So a 40MW datacenter will consume around 4 million liters of water per day if it is evaporatively cooled.
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
Assuming that it's surprisingly little and without pollution concerns, then an acceptable and enforceable policy should be a very simple request, no?
Yes I agree.
So even when xAI (which is now Tesla? Or SpaceX maybe?) was "operating dozens of unregulated gas turbines that worsen the air quality in one of the most polluted parts of the country"[0] this didn't place them above this new Amazon not-even-built-yet data center? Are they competing who can destroy the earth the fastest or what's going on?
- [0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/musks-xai-is-being-sued-ov...
It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
> It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Who gives a shit who started it? The ones who continue engaging in it, should clearly be punished as they're working against humanity's best interest of keeping this planet survivable.
If you're one of the largest companies in the world, constantly brag about how environmental friendly you are and how much you care about "sustainability" or what the trendy word is today, and you end up building a data center that sets a record in pollution (either directly or indirectly), you're doing something massively fucked up and are misaligned with the rest of the people on this planet.
> Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
I guess this is what late-stage capitalism gives you ultimately, companies who feel like it's fine doing whatever because competitors are also doing whatever. No one I know have been cheering for anything like that, I suggest if you have people cheering about stuff like that near you, get far away.
Pretty sure it’s “is”, they were operating gas turbines for power and continue to do so
So where is the police? They're running turbines they haven't been granted permits to run, if Average Joe did so the police would show up and literally grab the hardware from him, one way or another, or disable it at least. What the fuck are they waiting for?
All this AI doomerism is hiding the obvious and immediate harm that will cause a mass extinction event. Funnily enough people at Anthropic are predicting the end of the Anthropocene, completely absolving themselves from any responsibility for the actual reality that the Anthropocene is defined by human made geologically noticeable changes. Like causing a global climate catastrophe.
The existential risk people are worried about a much shorter timeline - like the next 5-10 years. Climate change is serious but very unlikely to lead to anything like ending the Anthropocene in the next 5 years.
Mass extinction event already happened though. Most known species became extinct because of humans.
Most polluting power plant so far
This race to the bottom will have plenty more to give us in the coming years.
On this map I can't see _any_ nuclear under construction in the US yet the rest of the world seems to be building many. When a man has a hammer everything is a gas turbine. GEV stock has treated me well but I'd much rather nuclear was winning.
It's a catch22 problem because nuclear is much slower to build than a data center so there is no demand from the data centers. And the nuclear plant doesn't know the demand will be there in 5 years once with gas soaking up demand. So the build it and they will come strategy is risky. Building infrastructure is like a muscle that gets stronger with repetitions. The cost will only come down once some are built but nobody wants to build at the current high prices. Govt help is needed to kick start it.
Aren't coal power plants waaaay more polluting than natural gas? Not just in terms of C02, but also really nasty stuff like particulates, sulphur, and metals?
It's very trendy right now to get mad at datacenters, but I'd much rather energy come from natural gas than from an existing coal power plant. (Obviously, renewables would be better than either.)
Zero data on Greenhouse gas CO2-equivalent per kWh. A combined-cycle gas power plant is going to have lower impact per kWh than the 200+ coal plants in the US.
Who could have predicted that Microsoft building their own nuclear reactor would be the lesser evil.
Until they apply what that did to Github's uptime
Note that this is about absolute pollution, not relative to power output. Pollution is high, because power output is high. Relatively, for what it's worth, it's just a fairly normal gas plant.
So the most interesting thing to take away from this: There is a lot of demand for more power and in this instance it's satisfied by gas. Which is still much better than coal. Which is still much worse than renewables.
Luckily the Trump administration has just paid over a billion dollars for the second time to stop a renewable energy project...
Ok. A serious question. I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. Then why are they using gas turbines? Is it because they can generate more power with a smaller real estate footprint?
Texas specifically has heavily politicized and demonized wind power, in spite of having massive successes with it prior to 2016 and being a leading producer of it. Solar isn't as bad, but is still seen as "leftist." The political landscape in TX is vastly more friendly to natural gas.
In other words, they are using gas turbines because the politicians are stupid.
They are using gas because it's more reliable during peak usage. Wind generation in Texas isn't optimal throughout the entire state and conditions aren't optimal all the time. They still use wind, but from a pure numbers perspective, gas infra already exists, the gas is there, and gas is more reliable, so wind isn't always the cheapest form of energy. There are also diminishing returns on just adding more wind turbines.
This is a far from the truth as a I can imagine. There are still a large number of wind and solar projects in progress and I don’t believe the cadence has changed.
The reason here is it makes no sense for what they are trying to do. They want to power a DC, the sun sets and wind comes and goes. You would need overcapacity on both and then batteries. Probably something in there with not wanting to connect to the grid.
Wind and solar would require lots of land next to the DC to guarantee power.
Your statements are borderline lies. Texas gets a lot wrong but it is still building out lots of solar and wind but neither of those power and onsite DC very well.
What if..... the USA had a national grid and what if.... they connected solar and wind across the country and for kicks, invested in storage.
Why are all the Reddit style posts out in force here? First the reason they are building a gas turbine has little to do with a “national grid”. It would never be efficient to transport electricity at that distance.
This is about not having to connect to the grid and to guarantee the dc can get running soon.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit.
Eh you are posting hyperbole that has nothing to do with this thread. I made a single quip while furthering my position. Posting rules like you are doing are even worse. You have a downvote.
The person you are replying to is not the person that made "the Reddit style posts".
Replace Reddit with hyperbolic statements that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. There was a wave of high points less than 1 year old accounts posting highly hyperbolic statements that had nothing to do with the topic or were so far off from how physics works that it’s a bit silly.
Going back to the original rule the point is to not have endless meta discussions. I am skirting it imo but I included rationale for my argument.
Trump paid a wind farm company $1,200,000,000 of taxpayer money to stop building a wind farm
And what does that have to do with what I said? Absolutely nothing. I don’t agree with the administrations stance at all but equally I don’t like comments like yours that make no sense.
I think you might want to download new anti-Texas talking points. Texas is number two in the nation in solar power: https://seia.org/media/16020/texas.pdf/
Texas is not at all against renewables. Maybe, just maybe, whatever axes the people building data centers are optimizing on rule out solar/wind over factors other than "renewables are for leftists, so fuck that we're gonna burn gas even if it's more expensive."
> I think you might want to download new anti-Texas talking points.
No need—the current ones are uploaded directly into my mailbox regularly by Randy Weber, my district rep.
15th for non-residential? Sounds like people overwhelmingly put it on their roofs, and politicians avoid it.
Did you miss the 1st utility part? It can be quite hard for nonresidential users to retrofit for solar. Not impossible but sometimes not an easy solve.
Avoid it to the tune of being in the top third (for now, they're projected to keep growing), behind only blue states that are known for aggressive rollout and/or climates that are overall more favorable (i.e., Texas gets its fair share of sun but not quite like CA and NV, for example)? Is that your idea of avoiding it because politicians want to own the libs?
Under current administration, I'm not even sure its possible to build out green energy for this sort of thing at scale - this article[1] was on the front page just yesterday
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314
It's because the permits are easier to get. It's very hard to get people to organize to make renewable energy permitting easier.
In some cases, aren’t the permits not even being sought?
Eg https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
Renewables require storage because they are bursty - sun goes down, wind stops blowing. This is more expensive than just burning as much nat gas as you need.
How is it more expensive? Any links? Once built out yeah there is maintainance but no need to drill baby drill anymore.
For a DC it's probably reliability. You need wind to be spread over a large area to even out random changes in power availability. And, obviously, solar power works during the day.
You need a ton of land for solar and no renewable is as reliable as fossil fuels.
gas turbines are not intermittent
> I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity
presumably they put zero value on stable production or count subsidies as income
A recent discussion
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208686
You know, we don't actually have to do this. The people could block the gates and prevent the delivery of the turbines. The local fire department could fail their inspection and prevent the gas from being turned on. The UPS could "mysteriously" go up in smoke during it's commissioning.
None of this is preordained. We, the phyical persons, can choose how we want to live, and what constraints the corporate persons must accept.
All this at the very low cost of: your job. You can't have an unbreachable blockade 24/7 in front of there, very soon they'd send police to disperse. Fire dept has to justify the failing, if everything up to code and the inspector make it fail it will delay for at most a week and the guy will lose his credibility. The guys delivering and installing the UPS are just trying to make a living too, destroying the thing will get them fired while only delaying a little the time getting another delivered. You are replaceable.
Do you think the rest of your life will be of very high quality in any scenario?
Now no one talks about global warming and climate change.
A lot of new data centres have been announced in Alberta, Canada. Which is a weird location given that Alberta has a derelict power grid that can barely serve the current load, and runs almost entirely on fossil fuels.
Meta, for instance, plans a $13B data centre in Sturgeon County.
https://www.vozpopuli.com/indux/en/alberta-approved-a-932-me...
They all plan on powering them by building massive natural gas generating stations with each. In a free for all race to destroy the environment and doom humanity (aside from your plutocrats who'll live in their bunkers). Until a week or so ago Meta still had a clean energy pledge, but finally they just abandoned that silly greenwashing lie: https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-e...
We are basically in the end game now, and despite that weird guy running through these comments telling everyone how great everything is going to be in a hundred years, things are looking utterly grim.
Oh, Alberta. That makes sense. Land of pissed off coal miners, isn't it?
If we reach AGI at some point, it will wonder why we are so dumb
If we ever reach it, it will tell us "you destroyed any chance of survival in your quest to get to me first, dipshits."
It is insane how we're accelerating the climate catastrophe in an ideology-driven race to be king of the ashes.
Capitalism is a death cult, AI capitalism doubly so.
Communism dried up the third largest lake in the world just for irrigation (while starving tens of millions in the meantime).
The irrigation plan was in response to the famine, and it worked, it was the last famine in the soviet union.
also the soviet union was totalitarian, not communist
No one mentioned communism?
I think I get your point; that the inverse of corrupt (I call it fake) capitalism is not necessarily communism, or something reactive. It might just be a system that works better, even if we have not named it yet...
We only have two options.
Climate catastrophe itself is ideology driven. The mainstream view isn't that if we increase emissions, it will lead to a literal catastrophe. Our lives will become better in 100 years with emissions or without.
I would urge you to stop spreading misinformation about imminent catastrophe unless we reduce emissions. Catastrophe meaning our lives would be even worse in the future than now.
Europe is burning, rivers are at all time lows, new temperature records ar being set every year, oceans are rising and you have the gall to demand we ignore the obvious?
Please share numbers on the predictions instead of anecdotes. You are doing the thing where you focus on specifics instead of focusing on the whole. Please share sources that show that things are overall going to get worse instead of specific cases.
You can find latest ipcc report (short version) here: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
Please share your sources saying it's not getting worse.
This is actually a very good example to prove my point. Nowhere does it say that things get worse overall. It doesn't talk about overall increasing GDP / Life expectancy or anything sociologically.
It simply repeats the claim that sea level rises, things get hotter and so on. Its a good rhetorical move because it doesn't quantify the impact it has on us (deaths or economic).
An example,
>widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people
Ok. How many deaths? What impact? Any metric? Couldn't they have simply said something like "X number of people are going to die.."? Or something like "people are going to become X poorer"?
They don't because other studies did it and came to the conclusion that GDP still rises.
Since you seem to be able to easily quantify it, would you be able to bet on the fact that our life expectancy reduce and we would get poorer if emissions don't reduce? And would you bet that this (above) is the mainstream idea? And would you be able to show some sources? Here's mine:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/investing-in-climate-fo...
Edit, can't reply
>Why would you measure the goodness of the future in GDP?
This my problem with y'all. What pray tell me is the objective measure? Life expectancy? HDI? Literacy? All are going to go up. The main issue is that you will never accept an objective measure and dance to the tunes of anyone who says what you want because ultimately it is unfalsifiable.
Come up with few metrics. Convince yourself that these metrics are important. And then show me that it will get worse. I hope you agree that life expectancy is a fundamental one.
> https://lancetcountdown.org/2025-report/
Oh maaan. Notice how this document doesn't show aggregate numbers? Its the exact failure mode I was criticising. They only show the climate related deaths. But what about the climate related lives saved? What about general prosperity increasing in the world?
It would be easy to dismantle my argument by showing that aggregate life expectancy is reducing and that people are getting poorer and people are more unhealthy. But you can't do that. Because that's not the truth.
What do you mean, "nowhere does it say that things get worse overall"? Do you need to get it explicitly spelled out for you to realize that the environment and ecosystems everywhere are under extreme stress (to say it mildly) and failing!?
Do you really believe, that the way humans are using resources and polluting everything, doesn't have any negative impact?
And why the hell would the GDP be ANY good measurement, since it does not include any environmental costs (if I don't need to correctly dispose of my trash and can burn it cheaper, I have an economic advantage in the way of less costs)?
And your OECD study: doesn't it specifically talk about economic impact if climate change measures ARE being implemented (especially emission reductions)? This of course makes sense, as this would imply massive investments in technologies and sectors. This source specifically does not make a case for climate change being not as bad as predicted or that it doesn't take place.
Looking at the current state of the world (especially ecosystems, which are extremely important for us), I really wonder how someone can make an argument, that it isn't as bad as it is made out to be. It is often way worse, as many things aren't really talked about in the open.
Have you tried to satisfy your open-minded curiosity on this question?
A simple Google search brings up: https://lancetcountdown.org/2025-report/
A couple of excerpts from the front page, without even registering to access the full report:
1.1.5 Heat-related mortality
Failure to curb the warming effects of climate change has seen the rate of heat-related deaths surge 23% since the 1990s, to 546,000 a year.
1.2.1 Wildfires
The risk of wildfires is growing: 2024 saw a record-high 154,000 estimated deaths from wildfire smoke-derived small particulate matter air pollution (PM2.5)
One could argue that heat related deaths could be due to the fact that there are more old people alive right now compared to any point in time in human history due to high life expectancy and they are the most vulnerable to heatwaves. Had the percentage of younger population been higher, the numbers would have been different. Also in a way it’s Karma, that older population is the one that lived their lives like there’s no future and thought that climate change is a problem for younger generations and now they would be the first to die like flies
Why would you measure the goodness of the future in GDP?
The whole is nothing but the sum of specifics.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Spain and France this year, Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
Rivers in Europe are at an all-time low [5], nuclear power plants need to shut down because they can't be cooled anymore. [6]
It takes deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the obvious.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...
[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
[5] https://eu-space.europa.eu/components/earth-observation-cope...
[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0nqv05g0do
Why is HN so absolutely terrible at understanding the scale of pollution, water consumption, etc? It is quite minuscule in real terms, but everyone here is losing their mind. Ridiculous.
Bitcoin received a lot of backslash due to its power usage and ecological footprint. It's obvious that HN users don't have the same criticisms towards AI data centers. Maybe someone with a short position will coordinate that communication soon..
Bitcoin was just purely wasting power for a token only used for crime and speculation.