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US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

theguardian.com

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Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#101

Post by dathinab »

nDRDY wrote: post #79
adrianN wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.

Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown. When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.

the only crazy thing here is your comment

completely ignoring all existing technologies related to that topic to spout obvious nonsense about "cutting down trees and burying them" (which would bind active bio mass which isn't a grate idea, also that won't produce oil anyway not that this is relevant for the discussion)

various ways to reduce the carbon in the air do exist (and without trees)

and the carbon can be both recycled for other usage and literally placed in the earth, too

it is not rally a solution for climate change as it's very expensive to do. But this also makes it a good idea to "make companies pay for it" (at least if their carbon-equivalent output goes above a certain threshold). Because if they have the choice between very expensive carbon removal or reducing carbon output for a much cheaper price they will do the later; But in emergency/outlier situations they still can do the former, just at a very high price.).

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#102

Post by jmyeet »

This is really a state law issue and there's really no solution for spiralling energy costs other than nationalizing utilities or otherwise making them into state or municipal entities, much like municipal broadband.

Take the case of Duke Energy in North Carolina, which illegally raised rates too much. Utilities prices are supposedly regulated but utilities work around this by simply moving costs to things they can charge whatever for (eg transmission costs vs energy costs).

The NC Court of Appeals ruled that Duke Energy's actions were illegal BUT there would be no refunds for customers [1], in part because lawmakers passed a law to allow them to do this retroactively [2]. Also, if Duke Energy had to repay customers they can simply raise prices to recoup those costs even though the money was improperly charged in the first place.

So consumers will keep paying for the infrastructure to connect up these data centers and will keep subsidizing the ongoing energy costs.

[1]: https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/no-refunds-for-duke-...

[2]: https://sustaincharlotte.org/press-release-nc-lawmakers-over...

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#104

Post by simianwords »

tomrod wrote: post #99
simianwords wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with this?

Grid overload if they produce too much base load. Interconnection expenses. Same issues as with mining and large industrial clients generally.

so no companies should build anything even if they attempt to pay for the externalities. this is just nimbyism.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#105

Post by dathinab »

harimau777 wrote: post #83
nDRDY wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown. When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.

I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.

it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details

trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition

and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues

(Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.)

but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap

hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#106

Post by jfengel »

thegreatpeter wrote: post #94
throwaw12 wrote: post #88

> The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last…

So what’s the solution? No data center? Let the current landscape of power companies operate as is?

Put some company stock in escrow. If they fulfill the promises, they get it back. If not the government keeps it, and uses it to build whatever needs to be built.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#107

Post by jfengel »

simianwords wrote: post #104
tomrod wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grid overload if they produce too much base load. Interconnection expenses. Same issues as with mining and large industrial clients generally.

so no companies should build anything even if they attempt to pay for the externalities. this is just nimbyism.

"Attempt" is doing a lot of work there. Companies are driven by a profit motive, and are practically required to renege on promises that are not legally enforced.

In a different world they would have earned trust and deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is not that world.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#108

Post by dathinab »

thegreatpeter wrote: post #95
warkdarrior wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no such things as CO2 emissions in this administration. Your AI chatbots will be powered by clean coal and you'll enjoy it!

So you believe Microsoft will start opening up coal plants again and not nuclear?

Nuclear power is a pain to build and maintain and un-build once it gets to old to reliable run it (the later part is commonly overlooked in cost calculations).

It is also a ~50 year investment.

This makes it not very attractive for companies and is why most nuclear power is state sub-ventioned.

Theoretically the US had something similar to a state bank to help companies to finance exactly such projects, but Trump/DOGE defounded it for publicity reasons which makes it even less likely for private nuclear power plants.

Many "we will use nuclear power" statements do rely on mini reactors. But AFIK pretty much all mini reactor projects have ended in dead ends so far. With promised at best working out on paper (and quite often not even there).

So my guess is: They will claim they want to use Nuclear and might even intend to do so. But in the end look at their balance sheets and risk calculation and go "nah, lets do coal/gas/oil". There probably will be some single public co-investment into a nuclear power plant which "happens" to also be government sponsored to keep up the pretense.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#109

Post by nDRDY »

harimau777 wrote: post #83
nDRDY wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown. When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.

I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.

It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and their sacrifices.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#110

Post by cucumber3732842 »

dathinab wrote: post #96

which means nothing because no one believes there are legal consequences if they don't and there are a lot of ways to doge it even if there where a reliable government in place like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dogeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increa…

>like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dodgeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).

And it's not just data centers, it's all sorts of industry. My local gravel and concrete plants run their "big stuff" off generators because the cost of the utility drop for their amperage doesn't make sense. And nobody will connect the dots between these choices and the requirements we've saddled utilities with. They're spinning up generator not because it's cheaper per watt, but because they're not operating on the 40yr timeline you need to be in order for the red tape you have to go through to put in permanent infrastructure to pencil out.

I'm an abutter for a utility project and I've gone to the meetings for and it's an absolute massive boondoggle. My energy bill is going to reflect god knows how many hundreds of billable hours it takes for these hired lawyers and engineers to prove to the system that they're not gonna fuck over any endangered frogs by widening the cut to meet some industry standard that changed over the past N year and dumping culverts and fill in some places where streams criss cross it.

Literally nobody involved cares. The abutters don't care. The town wants it to go forward because it's all trivial and it's not like it won't be their ass if they block an upgrade to industry standards and something happens. The system is just going through the motions. The city engineer grills them about petty bullshit because it's literally his job. They know he will and they have the answers but he makes a show out of the subjective things. Ditto for the conservation commissioner. It's like the Israel missiles meme. One side is my tax dollars and the other side is my energy bill. We're all doing this because some slimy politicians wanted to pander to some shortsighted big picture ignoring environmentalists 50yr ago and beurocacy has perpetuated and grown itself since. No public interest is served by this.

And the cherry on top is that at the margin, we get shit like generators that don't need to exist because the cost of the alternative is driven up to the point the fuel inefficient (and also dirty) solution makes sense.

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