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- Hacker News
- 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.
by llm_nerd - Oh, Alberta. That makes sense. Land of pissed off coal miners, isn't it?by inigyou
- 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.by dbcooper
- A recent discussion
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208686
- 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?by mocana
- 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
by matkoniecz - 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.by DGAP
- 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.by inigyou
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- It's because the permits are easier to get. It's very hard to get people to organize to make renewable energy permitting easier.by Schiendelman
- 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 yesterdayby swiftcoder
- 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.
by lee_ars - Who could have predicted that Microsoft building their own nuclear reactor would be the lesser evil.by RobotToaster
- Until they apply what that did to Github's uptimeby IsTom
- Nuclear reactors are a notoriously clean and safe method of electricity generation.by andrepd
- 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.)
by xnx - Different. Burn enough natural gas in enough gas turbines, and significant quantities of formaldehyde and NOx will be created.
- The nasty stuff, yes. Regarding greenhouse gases, natural gas has turned out to be about as bad as coal once you account for methane leaks, and the industry has strenuously resisted any decent mitigation for that.by DennisP
- Most polluting power plant so far
This race to the bottom will have plenty more to give us in the coming years.
by progbits - 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.
by brikym - The world isn’t building nuclear power. It’s simply too slow to build and expensive to be relevant.
- Forgot to post the link -> https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figu...by brikym
- DOE is investing heavily in SMRs right now. There's 4 which have reached criticality so far. Chris Wright the DOE head is a o&g political appointee hack, but the career employees at DOE are working on pushing clean energy forward.by burger_moon
- 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.
by jstummbillig - Mostly because coal is more expensive and slower to buildby lokar
- Luckily the Trump administration has just paid over a billion dollars for the second time to stop a renewable energy project...by t0mas88
- 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.by orbifold
- 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.by ianm218
- It is the paperclip AI scenario: The AI is cheating humans to produce only one thing - but in reality today, its not paperclibs, but datacenters as "the most important product": So the scenario still holds :-D
- Mass extinction event already happened though. Most known species became extinct because of humans.by inigyou