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.<p>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.<p>What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?
Look to Australia if you want to see how these energy policies work out in the long run.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If only.<p>Chevron’s Gorgon project will be ongoing for decades and making money hand over fist flogging LNG out of Australia to overseas customers.<p>It'll be a massive source of previously sequestered CO2 <i>and</i> 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?<p>Still, could be worse, at least they're not planning on fracking the Kimberley.<p>Oh, wait: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh9IkUUgaww" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh9IkUUgaww</a>
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.
>in 50 years America won't be a world power any more. It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best.<p>What's going to replace it? Rapidly aging China?<p><a href="https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80,format=auto/media-assets/image/20230610_WOC449.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...</a><p><a href="https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80,format=auto/media-assets/image/20230610_WOF447.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...</a><p><a href="https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=100,format=auto/content-assets/images/20260808_FBC715.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...</a>
> What's going to replace it? Rapidly aging China?<p>Using the age profile of a country with over a billion people to dismiss its geopolitical power has no credibility.<p>More appropriate to point out their (our) lack of domestic chip production and outsourcing of critical technologies.
lol… you don’t know anything about the Chinese government if you think they aren’t already preparing for this. And the difference between them and us is that when they prepare for something, they actually prepare for it with real state capacity and planning. You know they are building armies of industrial and humanoid robots for exactly this reason?<p>Also, sorry but the economist hates China with a passion, you really shouldn’t believe a thing they say on the topic.
Isn't the US also approaching a peak?<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-POPULATION/AGING/gdpzaomqyvw/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-POPULATION/AGING/gdpzao...</a><p>There's so many ways to slice the data, I'm not sure there's an apples-to-apples comparison between US and China. However, it's fair to say both economies face demographic headwinds.
> It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.<p>Just this week, amongst other news:<p>* 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.<p>* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.<p>* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.<p>* 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.<p>Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.
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.<p>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
Why do you think Americans don't grasp it? There are really two groups here:<p>- MAGA who doesn't care what Europe thinks
- not-MAGA who are just as shocked and disappointed as everyone else on the planet
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:<p>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?<p>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.)<p>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.
> 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?<p>What about this is an essential concern for you? Like, what are the potential harms?
The US has been the foundation of European security since the beginning of NATO. Now Europe has good reason to think that American security guarantees are no longer reliable, and the US president keeps threatening to invade a European country, while Russia fights a war of aggression nearby. If I were European then I guess I'd find this rather more worrying than brown people moving in, or the struggles of car companies.
Only if you're some kind of lunatic, propaganda-believing racist.
I live in Europe, and I have a family.<p>If you are not a moronic racist, #1 is a non-issue.<p>As for #2, Volkswagen is far from going out of business. In any case, trade with China can be adjusted with adequate policy, EU as a trade block can handle it just fine.<p>As an European, I see the US as an actual existential threat to Europe. China is just a trade partner with some clashing trade interests.
> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation<p>I didn’t expect having to read great replacement bullshit on Hacker News. JFC do some napkin math, it’s utter nonsense.
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.
That is an indisputably rough list, and I'm sorry that's your conclusion.<p>It's tough being here and feeling powerless to stop it. Beyond voting, campaign donations, judicious choice of employment, etc.<p>Anyhow, you're welcome back should you change your mind. In my book, anyway.
> feeling powerless to stop it<p>You guys are the meekest sheep to ever been led astray by a howling, undisguised wolf.<p>What more does this regime have to do to warrant massive, historic, disruptive, non-peaceful protests in the USA?<p>Have you seen protests in France? Bringing the country to a halt is the least you have to do in order for us to ever have faith in the USA again.<p>Until then, nothing any US citizen can say online will do anything to restore trust. If you're not rioting, you're complicit. It's as simple as that.
The sense of urgency is strange and feels extremely forced. There’s no way this is all so important that all other concerns automatically go out the window so projects can complete construction yesterday.<p>It really wouldn’t hurt if the developers involved tried even a little bit to be good neighbors and to select sites where they’re not going to be a nuisance and net negative to adjacent communities at minimum.<p>The blatantly extractive, externalizing mindset of this all reminds me of the attitude that mining companies have taken towards Appalachian states for over a century at this point.
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.<p>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.
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 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.<p>That’s overstating it. A couple clarifications.<p>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]<p>1. <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adds-foreign-produced-power-inverters-and-robots-covered-list-0" rel="nofollow">https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adds-foreign-produced-power...</a><p>> This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms.<p>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]<p>You can still think both policies are bad. But those are different claims.<p>2. <a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/rwe-says-reached-122-bln-deal-cancel-us-offshore-wind-leases-invest-gas-2026-08-06/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/rwe-says-reached-12...</a>
It banned <i>all foreign made solar inverters</i> i.e. all solar inverters.
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?<p>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.<p>Or even Trojan horse style malware is a possibility I suppose (Stuxnet).<p>That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at
AC power needs it's sine wave aligned or it's very bad. If a huge chunk of inverters all start dumping power onto the grid that isn't synced, things break.
Do people really believe this stuff? Wow
A country is but the sum of its people - and this american people have gotten what they voted for.<p>Nice opportunity for the rest of the world, though.
> Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy.<p>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]<p>A lot, but not all, of these datacenters are using evaporative cooling, which is what kicks their water usage so high.<p>So a 40MW datacenter will consume around 4 million liters of water per day if it is evaporatively cooled.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961" rel="nofollow">https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...</a>
As a comparison, one acre of alfalfa growing year round in California uses about 5*325000=1,625,000 gallons of water a year for four harvests, 4400 gallons of water per day per acre.<p>There’s around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California for a total water usage of 1,625,000*1,000,000=1.625×10¹² gallons (or 5 million acre-feet) per year.<p>365 million gallons of water per year for one data center is 1000 acre feet of water. California’s alfalfa crop uses as much water as 5,000 of these data centers.
That the only nation which sent man on the moon uses acre-feet as a unit of volume blows my mind
Do Alfalfa growers traditionally use limited (and funded at large expense by the local community) municipal water hookups to grow their crops? Are alfalfa growers asking for new water hookup permits to access these resources?<p>Because DCs are, and that is the concern local communities have. Not random comparative statistics.
Assuming that it's surprisingly little and without pollution concerns, then an acceptable and enforceable policy should be a very simple request, no?
The entire planet will lose as ecosystems die out, food and water supplies run low, refugee crises and global conflicts ramp up.<p>But hey, line go up!
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.
Don't worry; republicans are way ahead of that refugee crises by generation fervent far right ethnic nationalism globally, independently of course.
[flagged]
Do you have any source? The global scientific community and more specifically the GIEC have been saying the opposite for years...
I have been trying to look for sources myself and I feel like this whole sector is rampant with "noble lies".<p>If you dig into the sources you will find<p>Economic predictions:<p>The most serious mainstream institutions[1] will dress it up us an imminent catastrophe as if humanity itself will collapse if we don't do anything. But once you read the real predictions, you will realise that that it they just say things would be better if you had reduced emissions compared to if we did not, but not compared to today (crucially)<p>Tail risks and irreversible damage:<p>I have read on tail risks, ecological collapse, species death and all of these models are strange and not supported by the mainstream generally. For example [2] article says that 5% of our species will go extinct by 2100 or so. That means more than 200k species! And in the last 50 years fewer than 1500 or so went extinct and it is not some abnormal number.<p>I would encourage you to actually read the studies and see what people believe and the models used.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/investing-in-climate-for-growth-and-development_16b7cbc7-en/full-report/accelerated-climate-action-can-deliver-strong-economic-benefits_bee34dd7.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/investing-in-climate-fo...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp4461" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp4461</a><p>Edit, can't reply:<p>> Your argument is just linking to credible sources that make the opposite argument as you, and then stating "I disagree" afterwards?<p>Dude, read the first document and then tell me whether they say things will get worse than now or not. They explicitly compare the counterfactual against with or without emissions not against today. This is my issue with this kind of misinformation.
Both you and the person you replied to are making claims about the future. Neither of them are true.
[flagged]
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?<p>- [0] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/musks-xai-is-being-sued-over-its-data-center-generators-now-its-buying-2-8b-more/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/musks-xai-is-being-sued-ov...</a>
It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>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.
It's possible to have more than one existential risk at a time. We even have a third, since nuclear war doesn't seem completely impossible these days. We probably shouldn't ignore any of them.
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 <i>so far</i><p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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?<p>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.
really time for these companies to have to switch to options like Nuclear SMR from providers like Rolls Royce who already have the megawatt solutions ready in the market, which don't release giant volumes of CO2 which we cannot afford.
Who could have predicted that Microsoft building their own nuclear reactor would be the lesser evil.
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?
Because the US has some policies that make those currently more expensive than they should be while. A combination of tariffs, removal of incentives for local producers, etc. has caused prices to be higher than they could be. All of this is because of fossil fuel lobby funded campaigns for exactly this to happen.<p>The flip side of course is that gas turbines are in short supply and manufacturers are in no hurry to build out production capacity for what is effectively obsolete technology with a very uncertain future. A lot of the projects being announced may never get delivered for the simple reason that there are long waiting lists for these things.<p>And there is the notion that related investments might end up under water when the few plants that do get built start struggling economically in ten years or so. These are not very attractive long term investments. The short term interest in securing any capacity at all is overriding this. Of the well over a hundred GW of data centers planned until 2035, probably only less than a 30-40% will actually get built; if not less. Michael Liebreich is predicting only about 35GW will be realized. His estimate is that there simply is no more production capacity that can be committed than that.<p>It will be interesting to see if this Amazon plant actually gets built. For now Amazon can afford to gamble on this and just write it off if it doesn't work out.<p>If policy changes in a few years, I expect a lot of these projects to get unceremoniously cancelled when it turns out that they are a combination of under water financially and behind on schedule because of component shortages anyway. Also, it only takes a few failed projects for everyone to get cold feet. Premature closures of new gas plants could happen if renewables get cheap enough. Those are already happening in some places.
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.<p>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 <i>all</i> 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.
I often wonder why conservatives have such a problem with renewable energy.<p>I can certainly believe that oil and gas pay better bribes, and that this incentivises a certain kind of politician who seem to be over-represented among conservatives in the US. But that doesn't explain the widespread dislike among the conservative end of the general population. Is it just groupthink of Iverton Window -nudging using social media? Or is there something more psychological going on? Some kind of disgust reaction?
I think you might want to download new anti-Texas talking points. Texas is number two in the nation in solar power: <a href="https://seia.org/media/16020/texas.pdf/" rel="nofollow">https://seia.org/media/16020/texas.pdf/</a><p>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.<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>Wind and solar would require lots of land next to the DC to guarantee power.<p>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.
Trump paid a wind farm company $1,200,000,000 of taxpayer money to stop building a wind farm
[flagged]
The personal jab was unnecessary. If it’s because I called out your hyperbole it might have been better to try to educate me instead of trying to name call or be rude in every sentence. Hard to even read your response it starts so low. Sorry!<p>You’re also mixing up Texas energy policy with the engineering requirements of an AI data center. Those are different discussions.<p>The claim that Texas wind generation is “back to 2017 levels” isn’t supported by the data. Texas continues to add large amounts of wind and especially solar. Solar has been dominating though as a percentage of generation and wind has fallen behind. Wind input costs are up quite a bit since 2017-2021 era. I am sure some of this might have political motivations but if the economics are in solar companies are going to build solar farms.<p>The original point still stands: if you need guaranteed 24/7 on site power for a massive data center, gas turbines are a much more practical solution than trying to achieve the same reliability with wind, solar, and batteries. Your post is just a political derailment that does not hit why Amazon did what they did.
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<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314</a>
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?<p>Eg <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unpermitted-xai-power-project-hits-hardest-black-communities-2026-07-14/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...</a>
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.
Presumably, the data center usage could also be bursty, right?<p>More people will be using AI during the (work)day, than at midnight. Then they could do half solar, half gas.<p>Also "more expensive" when it comes to solar isn't meaningful until you also consider timeframe. Solar panels pay themselves off in a few years, and after that they basically generate "free" electricity. Gas never becomes cheaper or free, every year it will cost money.
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<p>> I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity<p>presumably they put zero value on stable production or count subsidies as income
A recent discussion<p>The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208686">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208686</a>
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.<p>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.
Now no one talks about global warming and climate change.
If we reach AGI at some point, it will wonder why we are so dumb
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.<p>Meta, for instance, plans a $13B data centre in Sturgeon County.<p><a href="https://www.vozpopuli.com/indux/en/alberta-approved-a-932-megawatt-gas-plant-whose-only-customer-is-meta-powering-its-first-canadian-data-center-behind-the-meter/7932/" rel="nofollow">https://www.vozpopuli.com/indux/en/alberta-approved-a-932-me...</a><p>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: <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-energy-pledge-002139627.html" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-e...</a><p>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 <i>grim</i>.
It is insane how we're accelerating the climate catastrophe in an ideology-driven race to be king of the ashes.<p>Capitalism is a death cult, AI capitalism doubly so.
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.<p>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?
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.
We only have two options.
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...
Downvote me all you want. China is doing something right. Nuclear, renewables, whatever the mix, they're not parking gas turbines next to a data center and calling it a power strategy. That US tech companies reached for that first tells you everything. Speed over consequences, every time. And shut up about that China still fires a lot of coal. They are phasing it out... the right way.
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..