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New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

nytimes.com

131–140 of 294 posts

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Where are you getting the information that it's unauthorized (or needs to be authorized)?

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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? What about this is an essential concern for you? Like, what are the potential harms?

He knows how white Americans treat minorities

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Only if you're some kind of lunatic, propaganda-believing racist.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Russ…

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…

Why do you think Americans don't grasp it? There are really two groups here:

- MAGA who doesn't care what Europe thinks - not-MAGA who are just as shocked and disappointed as everyone else on the planet

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#135
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[flagged]

[dead]

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#136
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The question is does DC building bring added costs to local communities. My small town has a backlog of home builders waiting for permits because of constrained municipal water capacity. We are still paying off the bonds for the last capacity we added. Golf courses/etc are already factored into current costs. Additional new use brings significant cost (bonds to build new capacity), funded by increasing expenses on the entire community, not funded by those who financially benefit from the new build outs.

The issue isn't comparative usage to existing hookups, it's new cost burden on the local community where a data center is built. Which is why DC propogandists switched to the golf course measurement, it confuses the original concern, the cost to the community of new DC hookups to municipal water or the very limited amount (of expensive to the community) available hookups that were intended/funded by the community for other purposes.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#137
post #11

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.

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.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Where are you getting the information that it's unauthorized (or needs to be authorized)?

> Where are you getting the information that it's unauthorized (or needs to be authorized)?

https://www.selc.org/press-release/naacp-asks-court-for-emer... and the previous link I referenced.

One would think if there is even a suspicion (even if it hasn't been ruled in court yet) about large-scale harmful toxic emissions, the police and relevant authorities would at least quickly do some samples or what not, to figure out if they need to put an immediate stop to it until the courts ruled either way.

But seemingly it's still ongoing and no harm no foul?

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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. 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. 365 million gallons of water per year for one data center is 1000 acre fee…

That the only nation which sent man on the moon uses acre-feet as a unit of volume blows my mind

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#140

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.
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