Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

newrepublic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 78 posts

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

#41

Post by seizethecheese »

malvim wrote: post #39
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They’re absolutely not that incompetent. They’re on the pockets of people who profit directly from this. Follow the money, and all that.

I don’t think business really wants interest rates that high. Without conspiracy theories, a simpler explanation is that this is simply democracy in action. People don’t want the spending reigned in, and they don’t want their taxes raised.

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

#42

Post by legulere »

deepsun wrote: post #34
zepearl wrote: 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-...

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

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

#45

Post by chaos_emergent »

deepsun wrote: post #34
zepearl wrote: 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-...

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.

It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar. The race dynamics make the discount rate on GPU deployments very high.

Solar is preferable when you have a ton of unproductive land and longer timelines to set it up - it’s certainly going to be cheaper than gas when everyone goes sets up NG plants as option 1 for new energy capacity.

The other confound is that China is the primary supplier of battery and solar tech, I’m sure that supply chain risk becomes part of the calculus when setting up so much infrastructure.

For scale, the current DC is about 8k acres, and the solar to run 7.6GW is almost 40k acres.

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

#46

Post by chaos_emergent »

coralreef wrote: post #44

Carbon tax would shift the economics in favor of renewables.

I don’t think it would - tokens are so profitable and the race dynamics make the deployment timelines for most renewables untenable.

Throughput for solar projects is very high and increasing, latency is unfortunately also very high.

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

#47

Post by conception »

raincole wrote: post #43

It sounds... pretty good? It's not going to put pressure to the existing grid. Nor it will use freshwater. Near to the data centers themselves so the waste from power transmission is minimalized.

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.

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

#48

Post by smallerize »

chaos_emergent wrote: post #45
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.

It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar. The race dynamics make the discount rate on GPU deployments very high. Solar is preferable when you have a ton of unproductive land and longer timelines to set it up - it’s certainly going to be cheaper than gas when everyone goes sets up NG plants as option…

Natural gas generators are also a supply bottleneck. https://www.naturalgasintel.com/news/turbine-shortage-threat...

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

#49

Post by bensyverson »

deepsun wrote: post #34
zepearl wrote: 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-...

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.

I would assume that training pales in comparison to inference when it comes to energy use, taking into account the number of inference users

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

#50

Post by LogicFailsMe »

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.

Post reply on HN