91–100 of 168 posts
I’m confused by the article mentioning West Virginia as a prime location for data centers along side Ohio - I am not aware of a large concentration of data centers in WV? (Unlike VA, of course) https://westvirginiawatch.com/2025/01/16/west-virginia-isnt-...
Maybe the author thought West Virginia was the western part of Virginia? I know it sounds preposterous, but I think it’s commensurate with the quality of the headline and article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
90% of new electricity generation in the US is solar or wind. Coal generation has generally trended downward since the mid 2000s. We don't need nuclear to replace coal.
We certainly do need nuclear to replace coal. Coal and nuclear are both reliable sources of energy, unlike solar or wind. I'm sure you're about to go into some battery related hand waving, but that doesn't help in two ways. First, there will be intervals where the lull in production exceeds storage capacity, which means fatalities in many cases. Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the co…
Relying on fusion power to clean up electricity generation is highly irresponsible, because in every remotely credible scenario, rollout is MUCH too slow to meaningfully affect climate change.
But I'm interested in trying to understand your view, and also which fusion power approach you put your faith in (and generally discussing this).
I strongly believe that nuclear power has no future, because it performs very poorly in an energy market where the marginal cost of producing is very frequently near-zero (thanks to renewables). Nuclear power is already quite expensive-- only running the plants half the time ruins cost competitiveness completely. You can see this happening already in countries like France and China, where nuclear and coal power plants are increasingly operating in load-following mode (i.e. not 100% all-the-time), which makes them even less cost competitive than in the past.
> I'm sure you're about to go into some battery related hand waving, but that doesn't help in two ways. First, there will be intervals where the lull in production exceeds storage capacity, which means fatalities in many cases. Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering).
Tow points here: Intermittency is a problem that actually shrinks at scale: The more spread out your wind parks/panels are, the smaller the periods where they provide unexpectedly little power (=> you need less buffering than you would naively assume).
Second point: a 100kWh battery is already affordable for a single household right now (thats basically big electric car battery). Price trends only go one direction there...
> Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering).
From this I assume you believe that nuclear reactors are not cost competitive mainly because of safety regulations, and "simply" fixing those regulations would make them able to compete on cost? This is likely incorrect. Consider:
Coal power plants are basically a minimally regulated, built-at-scale, super-simplified variant of a thermal power plant. They are the "ideal" that hyper-optimized nuclear reactor designs will never be able to reach (disregarding fuel costs here!). Even so: They struggle to compete with renewable on price already (disregarding fuel costs!). What are your thoughts on this?
My personal favorite: Tax carbon emission, use gas turbines as peaker plants, store energy long term via synthetic hydrogen, which is needed for carbon-free steel production anyway (and can also be used by gas peaker plants).
Then just let the market find out which fraction of batteries, wind, solar, carbon-taxed gas/coal, nuclear etc. works best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. It reminds me of the article about how self-driving cars, by being safer, would worsen the organ waitlist.[1] Like, in what other context would you raise this concern about saving lives? It's the same kind of dishonesty, picking out one hot-button source of pollution, apportioning out its health impact, and complaining about it alone. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2016/12/self-driving-cars-will-...
From the article you linked > We’re all for saving lives—we aren’t saying that we should stop self-driving cars so we can preserve a source of organ donation. But we also need to start thinking now about how to address this coming problem.
I mean, why not just say the organ shortage is bad, without pointing the finger at the latest hip, hot button issue, out of all the possible life-savers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. It reminds me of the article about how self-driving cars, by being safer, would worsen the organ waitlist.[1] Like, in what other context would you raise this concern about saving lives? It's the same kind of dishonesty, picking out one hot-button source of pollution, apportioning out its health impact, and complaining about it alone. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2016/12/self-driving-cars-will-...
As someone who got from an organ transplant, I'd still push for self-driving car and safer cars. My hope is pig organ transplants make it through trials soon. That could push a 7 year wait for kidney transplant down to a year which is a big deal because the long time on dialysis can have a lasting impact.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone needs a pollution tax, hardly anyone wants one
Mancur Olson's work "The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups" would suggest that lots of people want one, but only a little (they'd gain billions spread over half a billion people) while a few actors who it would financially affect directly really don't want one and the latter wins.
There’s nothing specific to data centers here, just electricity use. The electricity use generates a shit load of GDP and soft power for the U.S., way more than $5.4B over 5 years. So what do these degrowth people want exactly? Cant have resource extraction. Can’t have manufacturing, pollution. Can’t have tech, pollution. Just twiddling thumbs and money will come? Or keep all the benefits while offloading all the dow…
It feels like you're arguing against a strawman.
I can only speak for myself, but I would like CO2 emissions to be taxed appropriately, so that fossil fuel producers and consumers actually pay a somewhat proper price for the damage that they cause (negative externalities).
Sure, that might slow growth, but I see so evidence that this difference in growth has much of a negative effect on US citizens:
How much GDP growth do you think we actually need as a nation to stay satisfied? Double our GDP every 20 years? More? Less?
Because I know that I would trade a good fraction of my "growth boosted" past and present wage in exchange for climate change already being solved (and be happier as a result).
PS: I would also like to point out that any significant constant rate of growth is inherently unsustainable by definition; as a species, we need to arrange ourself with the fact that we'll be unable to continue growing our energy consumption exponentially-- the sooner, the better.
This reads as less than useful research to me. E.g.: "The analysis does not account for the purchase of market-based instruments that are meant to represent investments in new renewable energy in the US and that tech companies buy to offset the pollution from their electricity consumption. ... 'Unlike carbon emissions, the health impacts caused by a data centre in one region cannot be offset by cleaner air elsewhere,…
I'm a fan of the general concept of credit-based market systems and for carbon or carbon equivalents it is basically fungible by location. That's not true for other pollutants though, which is one of the reasons that e.g EVs shifting emissions to powerplants is good because cars are used in dense urban environments where the pollution affects more people. I've seen the work that big tech has published to justify the…
Why do people keep adding "ality" to words? "Addition" works fine here:
"I've seen the work that big tech has published to justify the addition of their clean energy purchases and offsets"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why not? If your house had a carbon monoxide leak but your neighbor’s house did not, would you consider your carbon monoxide leak to be “offset” by that fact?
If a mitigating action had decreased CO in my neighbor's house by at least as much as it increased in mine, then potentially yes, a neutral researcher should consider that as an offset at the population health level. Not sure why we need an analogy, though. How about sticking to standard air pollution, which has direct impact of its own? CO poisoning seems a bit extreme as a comparison.