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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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in energy and ran the numbers. Renewables only make sense for a pre industrial or deindustrializing society. When you need power to make shit they are useless. Which is why the industrial revolution moved from water to coal in the first place.

Oh you ran the numbers!? If only you had led with that. Even China has seen a stark reduction in the percentage of electricity generated from coal plants over the past decade. Are they deindustrializing? Everyone knows coal is a dead end. Maybe you should run the numbers again.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources...

That's a funny statistic to focus on when the actual use of coal for electricity has increased by 50% over the same period.

It's almost like they are using it to cover baseload or something.

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

#142

Alternatives exist but they aren't free... https://www.aga.org/decarbonizing-through-carbon-capture/ https://www.energyindepth.org/study-finds-carbon-capture-and... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277265682... TIL mentioning a viable technology that would reduce emissions here but delay a forced transition to renewables is an instant downvote.

Carbon capture gets downvotes because it’s not working anywhere at scale. The fossil fuel industry loves it because it’s saying they get paid now and maybe someone else gets paid later, and their industry doesn’t have profits cut, but anyone planning to continue living on earth would prefer we stop polluting now because that is proven to actually work at scale.

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

#143
post #96
post #27

Let's add as well "SpaceX’s Terafab will rely on natural gas power plants, not Tesla solar panels" to the mix :o( https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/spacexs-terafab-will-rely-...

Also an important part that keeps getting left out for some reason: they're doing so illegally . They are running unpermitted turbines. They claimed the turbines were off and journalists had to use thermal cameras mounted on drones to prove that they are indeed running. Then a non-profit had to sue them to get them to agree to turn off the turbines by 2027... That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to…

White collar crime is the only crime that should be eligible for the death penalty.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh you ran the numbers!? If only you had led with that. Even China has seen a stark reduction in the percentage of electricity generated from coal plants over the past decade. Are they deindustrializing? Everyone knows coal is a dead end. Maybe you should run the numbers again.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources... That's a funny statistic to focus on when the actual use of coal for electricity has increased by 50% over the same period. It's almost like they are using it to cover baseload or something.

You realize that link shows the exact opposite of what you're saying it shows, right?

It shows that the percentage share of electricity generated from coal in China peaked at ~80% in 2007 and was at ~54% last year.

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

#145
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also an important part that keeps getting left out for some reason: they're doing so illegally . They are running unpermitted turbines. They claimed the turbines were off and journalists had to use thermal cameras mounted on drones to prove that they are indeed running. Then a non-profit had to sue them to get them to agree to turn off the turbines by 2027... That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to…

and they (and many other AI data centers) run on some of the environmental/health hazard worst kinds of gas turbines available (i.e. cheap portable ones) A well build gas power plane can be one of the cleanest fossile fuel power plants with neither huge issues of air nor sound pollution (compared to other fossile fuel, it still isn't perfect by far) Same btw. for data center cooling, my office was for 3 years above a…

They probably take portable ones so they can claim it's not a permanent installation and they can skip a lot of planning permission that way.

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

#146

Alternatives exist but they aren't free... https://www.aga.org/decarbonizing-through-carbon-capture/ https://www.energyindepth.org/study-finds-carbon-capture-and... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277265682... TIL mentioning a viable technology that would reduce emissions here but delay a forced transition to renewables is an instant downvote.

Viable?

Currently the largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) project on the planet has failed to meet it's goals. Had it actually met the design goals it would be part of an LNG power source that manages to reclaim only 80% of the CO2 it releases.

That's not net zero, it falls short, and that's a good attempt but hardly viable.

The desired goal is to eliminate further emissions and also go further and claw back some of those gigatonnes of previously sequestered CO2 released by humans over the past century.

* A climate solution or distraction? - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-18/chevron-gorgon-fails-...

* ‘A shocking failure’: Chevron criticised for missing carbon capture target - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/20/a-shocki...

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been confidently wrong a couple times now - or maybe intentionally misrepresenting the facts? In the US there are several states where hydro is the majority source of baseload electricity: Washington, Idaho, Vermont, Oregon, etc. Outside of the US there are several countries that source more than 90% of their electricity from hydro - at higher percentages than Norway even: Paraguay, Albania, Democratic Republi…

I've worked in energy and ran the numbers. Renewables only make sense for a pre industrial or deindustrializing society. When you need power to make shit they are useless. Which is why the industrial revolution moved from water to coal in the first place.

The above listed Washington, Idaho, Vermont, and Oregon are all industrialized societies.

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

#148
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for that largest polluter in the country part. Our children and their children’s children and so on will curse our generation for what we did to them.

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...

Nuclear is good for the last 10% (and very contextually - it maybe makes a lot of sense in Alaska but far less sense in Arizona, for example), but mostly we should be building more solar/wind/batteries, as they can be built both faster and increasingly cheaper over time (the cost of batteries has dropped ~97% in the last 20 years IIRC, solar and wind have similarly been dropping in price).

The main argument for nuclear besides "baseload" is that nuclear plants can potentially last for a century and will thus amortise its capex quite easily and afterwards become relatively cheap for most of its life. Except, given just how quickly solar is dropping right now, it's unreasonable to assume that 50+ years from now (so, in ~2076) already-built nuclear will be cheaper than contemporary solar tech (I.e. solar panels built in 2075). In fact, it's unreasonable to assume that nuclear plants will necessarily be longer-lasting than future solar panels, given current research into self-healing solar panels (which clearly isn't commercially ready, but very likely will be within 50 years). Even if they can only self-heal 3 times, that's 4x the lifetime for 120 years total, and much longer if the base lifetime of the panel is more than 30 years. And frankly nuclear will never beat solar panels on operational costs - nuclear has a 24/7 guard, a nuclear reactor and a turbine, whereas the closest thing PV has to moving parts is the de-dusting machines.

Similar logic for solar also applies to wind and batteries, of course - their price has been dropping like a rock for decades. And that compounds - if both solar and batteries get twice as cheap and their lifetime lasts twice as long, then the whole package becomes 4x cheaper. And the cheaper wind turbines get, the fewer batteries solar needs to plug the holes in intermittent generation.

A quick aside: a lot of focus on solar lifetimes assumes the minimum will be the average, but e.g. 1980s solar panels are still in operation with only 10-20% performance degradation IIRC so the popular assumption that solar panels last only 30 years seems a bit ridiculous.

China's nuclear stats should be kept in perspective by the way: IIRC ~90% of the generation they're building is non-nuclear renewables. They're also building more of basically everything than the rest of the world combined, so an absolute stat like "they're building 37 of X" isn't particularly useful except for conveying that China is building a lot of stuff.

To repeat, though: the US should still build nuclear plants (unless/until they get financially blitzed by renewables). My point here is to keep it in perspective.

And I don't mean to insinuate you said otherwise, I'm just kind of pre-emptively responding to a stereotype/common set of associated arguments, I guess.

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

#149
post #92
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.

Unplug a ventilator for five minutes and a patient dies.

If unplugging a data center for five minutes can have a similar effect, then every AWS or cloudflare outage would have been a mass extinction event.

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

#150
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Solar works as well as it does only because we’ve spread it out and connected it to a grid. When it is overcast in one spot it is sunny elsewhere.

That “elsewhere” has to be far enough away to get different weather.

This means a grid capable of transferring 100% of the needed power.

So even if you plopped a new DC in the middle of a field of panels you’d still need a ~1 GA grid connection… or a battery array many times the size as you’d otherwise need just to cover night time usage.

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