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Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

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Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#101

Post by sensanaty »

noosphr wrote: post #92
deepsun wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't understand why. AI training can be run during the sunny days. Could be a good PR opportunity for Musk, I'm surprised he doesn't take it. Especially if he buys from his own company.

Hospitals can also just run on the sunny days. Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.

Or we can turn off the net negative data centers in order to keep our Hospitals running smoothly, rather than taking the entire grid down so some psychopaths in Silicon Valley can LARP at creating their silicon God.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#102

Post by defrost »

casey2 wrote: post #10

[flagged]

I'd love to hear how this will actually, really, pragmatically work.

Currently the largest Carbon capture and sequestration project on the planet is operated by Chevron as part of it's Gorgon Basin Natural Gas extraction project.

It's not working properly yet, when it is up and working as designed CO2 will be captured from the extracted natural gas and pumped back into the gas basin.

The total amount of CO2 captured and stashed will be a tiny tiny portion of the amount extracted and released.

That is very much not "Net Zero" no matter how much PR spin is applied.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#103

Post by rgmerk »

Some thoughts:

* you can run data centres on grid electricity, which can come from mostly-renewable sources (in short, you need gas mainly as as an occasional backup).

* running things off-grid is dumb, and they’re only doing it because they’re desperate to get their data centres up and running yesterday so that they’re the ones who get to the singularity first (or some approximation thereof).

* the US electricity grid is f**d, mostly for the same reasons you can’t build any linear infrastructure in the United States - too many bodies hold veto powers and use any such infrastructure as an extortion opportunity.

* The spike in gas-powered generation for data centres is essentially a US phenomenon. Globally, the vast majority of new electricity supply is coming from renewables.

* in a sane world, Amazon and new large-scale data centre providers would face punitive carbon charges to incentivise them to switch to mostly renewables as soon as possible.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#104

Post by cthalupa »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #89
cbmuser wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, America should finally build more nuclear power plants. China is currently building 37 reactors simultaneously [1]. > [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-c...

Have you seen the nuclear plant disasters that need a thousand years to clean up? Two of them so far and it hasn’t even been a century

Making this argument is a strong indicator that you are extremely under-educated on this subject or motivated to make dishonest arguments.

There are a variety of commercial reactor design families that CANNOT melt down. Literally impossible for have a Chernobyl or Fukushima from the designs. These are not new. There is no reason anyone feeling like they know enough to contribute to this sort of discussion should be unaware. HTGRs, MSRs, SMRs, LMRs, SFRs...

"Sometimes nuclear plants melt down and cause widespread problems for very long timescales" is a nonsense argument to use against "We should build new reactors" when the new reactor designs we would be building can't melt down.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#105

Post by noosphr »

skrause wrote: post #95
noosphr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitals can also just run on the sunny days. Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.

In modern times you combine solar energy with wind power and batteries and you already have 90% of the load covered. Then combine that with cheap, easily adjustable gas power plants to complete the picture for cloudy, windless winter days. There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.

If you run a washing machine sure.

If you need to run an industrial process, not so much.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#107

Post by 8note »

jiggawatts wrote: post #83
deepsun wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't understand why. AI training can be run during the sunny days. Could be a good PR opportunity for Musk, I'm surprised he doesn't take it. Especially if he buys from his own company.

The reasons are: - Running billions of dollars worth of GPUs only 30-50% of the time insanely wasteful. Everyone else is running them at 99% duty cycle or close to it. - Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are. Transmission is already a bottleneck in many states. Adding tens of gigawatts requires non-trivial large scale infrastructure investment by… the utility companies, not Sp…

> Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are.

these data centers dont care that much about network throughput - you can sneakernet the training set into place and inference on the text isnt that taxing on the network

there's a reason the ai datacenters are being built wherever the power is cheapest and theres the lowest regulations. there's no real physical location requirement, so you could actually put them close to the solar power generation

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#108

Post by locusofself »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #20
Grombobulous wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country? Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the cl…

> Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? It's more capital intensive, and interest rates are 8%, because our elected officials are completely incompetent.

I'm absoltutely not defending the environmental decision, but these datacenter projects seem to be funded mostly by free cash flow (not borrowed money), from the hyperscaler profit margins.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#110

Post by sylos »

legulere wrote: post #42
deepsun wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't understand why. AI training can be run during the sunny days. Could be a good PR opportunity for Musk, I'm surprised he doesn't take it. Especially if he buys from his own company.

The problem is that the grid can’t get built out fast enough. You’ll probably see most AI data centers switch to grid power in the coming years using mostly wind and solar because it’s simply cheaper as well

Remember when they said they couldnzt electrify the grid for ev's so they opted to just not do anything with ev's. Now datacenters are getting rushed in so fast and breaking the grids so hard they can illegally running generators
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