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- Hacker News
- And in the mean time, western europe is having its second heat wave even before summer starts.by julosflb
- Mhm... meteorological summer starts 1st of June. Solstice was yesterday as well.
- If Europe was as willing to drill for gas as the US is, they'd probably be able to run more ACs and save thousands of lives every year.by nba456_
- Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders
- A Microsoft employee 2080
by happosai - The planet go destroyed millions of times during its 4 billion history. I'm pretty sure it will survive this time as well.
- I think one of the highest-leverage U.S. economic strategies right now is to maximize the upside from the AI data-center boom.
That means reducing any bottlenecks around not just data-center construction, but also adjacent industries like power generation and transmission.
If the U.S. can scale the infrastructure around AI faster than other countries, it can gain a decisive economies of scale advantage in numerous industries that could lead to export boom.
by ETH_start - When you say "it", I suspect it will pan out to American Elites, as opposed to America the nation, or Americans the people.by foo42
- I had to go read the article to check because other operators have been entering into PPAs with oil companies, but for photovoltaic power. E.g. Google and TotalEnergies.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/09/totalenergies-signs-1...
Also Google and itself. I guess there's a difference between Google and Microsoft after all.
https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/doc...
by jeffbee - Chevron and Microsoft agree to keep smoking crack and buy it for each other when needed and not tell anyone.by jackbucks
- I guess that whole carbon negative by 2030 goal got shuffled down the priority listby mixdup
- Another illustration that corporations do not have morals or ideologies. Do not anthropomorphize the lawnmower.by tencentshill
- With all the fracking in the USA, literally exponential growth, one of the things they do is gas burn off for months, sometimes years at all the sites
Why not use all that wasted heat energy to power all these datacenters?
(and why not build the datacenters at the Bakken formation)
You can see the burnoff from SPACE and it's for months at a time at each location, tell me that does nothing to global temperatures?
(look at the date on these photos, two decades of burnoff wasted energy)
* https://www.cnbc.com/2013/01/28/shale-gas-boom-now-visible-f...
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/at-night-giant-fie...
by ck2 - > Why not use all that wasted heat energy to power all these datacenters?
Probably not profitable enough to set up the infrastructure to capture, store, transport, and sell that as a product. Profit potential is the only factor that matters to decision makers.
by iAMkenough - We're getting a data center just north of Fargo, on the other side of the state from all the oil. I agree with you, not sure why they don't build out west instead.
Pretty sure the flares aren't anything like that anymore because some regulations changed where they can't flare so much, but yeah that was a crazy time period.
by NDlurker - > A majority of the generation will come from large GE Vernova (NYSE: GEV) turbines and associated electrical infrastructure, with additional capacity provided by Solar Turbines, a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT).
When they say "large GE Verona", they mean the 7HA. This is an actual power plant with proper emissions controls. Not the aeroderivatives in parking lots we've seen so far.
> Their plan includes the use of seven U.S.-made GE Vernova Inc. GEV 7HA natural gas turbines to deliver the plant's initial capacity.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/chevron-mi...
by bob1029 - I love how they are using a company named 'Solar Turbines'. Such an obviously misleading name. (From their website)[1]:
Powering the future through innovative, sustainable energy solutions.
Solar Turbines Incorporated, headquartered in San Diego, California, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc. Solar manufactures the world’s most widely used family of mid-sized industrial gas turbines, ranging from 1 to 39 megawatts. More than 17,000 Solar units are installed in more than 100 countries with more than 3 billion operating hours. Solar is a leading provider of energy solutions, featuring an extensive line of gas turbine-powered compressor sets, mechanical drive packages, and generator sets.
by jmward01 - To be fair, solar turbines has had the name since 1929 (they were then called solar aircraft company). It’s not like they’re being intentionally misleading.by mlsu
- Microsoft says [1] they're going to be carbon negative by 2030. Hard to see them doing that while deploying gigawatts of new fossil fuels.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sus...
by advisedwang - it's easy ... they'll just change the definition of "carbon negative"!by ray_v
- Its easy, they are going to use fancy accounting to make it come true. Produce a ton of carbon, then buy a cheap, under-priced carbon credit to make it be a zero.by ecshafer
- Fascinating they're going this direction when solar and batteries are so cheap in Texas...
Nearly all new additions to the grid are solar, wind, and storage right now on Texas' grid. Not because of Texas regulations, but because Texas' grid is one of the few grids where generation decisions are all made by independent investors trying to make money.
Especially with the shortage in gas turbine manufacturing, very surprising! Not sure if this says more about Microsoft or datacenters.
by epistasis - Mostly it says that the oil business runs the show here in Texas, and in Washington.by dtagames
- But they are using wind:
> A majority of the generation will come from large GE Vernova (NYSE: GEV) turbines.
by credit_guy - Yet here in California, people keep making fun of Texas's power grid. California of all places.by frollogaston
- While the US stays oil rich, we should expect the US to be a laggard in ending use of fossil fuels. China and EU are not oil rich, they’ll make a faster transition.
Of course it’s idiotic to actively hobble clean energy. Or to put your finger on the scale for one source of energy, like the current administration does.
But it’s not crazy to argue for “energy abundance” where the market just picks the cheapest energy on the market in the US and that just gradually moves cleaner over time.
by softwaredoug - West Texas is like Costco for natural gas.
There are cases where the fields can produce more than the pipelines can carry away. If you put your gigantic gas turbines right next to the fields you can obtain access to some extremely cheap fuel. They might even pay you to burn it sometimes. Negative gas prices are a thing.
by bob1029 - The current natural gas price in West Texas (the WaHa hub, north of Coyanosa, TX) is negative. And has been for a while. The price peaked (dipped?) to -$9/MCF a couple months ago. That means gas producers had to pay $9 per MCF for it to be taken away. Oil in the Permian comes with gas, a lot of it, so to produce oil, you need to get rid of gas. Wells I'm familiar with have 4000-5000 cubic feet of gas per barrel of oil. Recall in oilfield M = thousand, so that's 4-5 MCF per bbl of oil.
There is no free gas pipeline capacity to get gas out of West Texas. Any time new pipelines are built, they are filled within months.
This makes a ton of sense for oil producers (which are also gas producers) who can sell their gas for less of a loss (potentially a profit!) and also for MSFT who can lock in long term contracts for minimal cost. I'd guess these contracts are for $1-2/MCF which is win/win for the oil companies in the area and MSFT.
by auspiv - Is all natural gas the same or are there grades? Like is the gas that comes out of oil pumping the same kind I pay for to heat my house?by supertroop
- Even corporate ESG policies bend the knee to cheap Texas energy!
- Gas and petrol are technically by products of oil refineries that produce all sorts of chemicals. Before cars took off, refineries used to dump petrol in rivers as it was worthless. Petrol is still in demand but facing world wide double digit percentage declines as a quarter of the vehicles being sold is now electric. These vehicles don't require any petrol/diesel. That is closer to 50% in China and the rest of the world is buying lots of these things. By the mid 2030s, most vehicles sold will be electric world wide. That means a lot of refineries that are currently subsidizing chemical production with petrol and gas sales, are going to face some serious demand issues for these by products over the next decades.
Texas is going to be somewhat shielded from this because of US policy on this front. But probably only for a few short years. Mostly LNG exports are currently very lucrative. But LNG production is bottlenecked on expensive infrastructure and shipping. And of course lots of importers of LNG are looking for more affordable alternatives as well because it is expensive. Doubly so since the recent Gulf conflict. A lot of planned infrastructure expansion just got cancelled.
So, there's probably a bit of gas overproduction happening in Texas currently and that's going to cause predictable issues when demand is going to be structurally lower. And the double whammy of petrol/diesel also going into structural decline is going to leave Texas with a lot of over production.