Data Centers are Being Powered By Giant Gas Plants, Possibly Increasing Carbon Pollution for Decades (msn.com) 102
Rather than racing toward their net-zero targets, Amazon and other AI/cloud computing companies "are driving emissions sharply higher," reports the Washington Post:
To support their data centers, tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-fired power plants that could lock in hundreds of millions of tons of climate pollution for decades to come, according to corporate disclosures and an analysis conducted for The Post by a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Industry estimates show these projects have put the tech sector on course to grow from a modest driver of industrial carbon pollution into one of the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. Some anticipate that its share of global carbon emissions will increase as much as fivefold from 2020 to 2030. That would leave the tech industry churning out more than half the climate pollution created by global aviation or shipping — sectors long associated with driving warming...
Already, Amazon's carbon footprint reached 80.85 million metric tons last year — 58% larger than when [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos pledged to shrink it. The company has veered far from the path laid out in the Paris agreement, which would have emissions falling steeply by now and dropping to 43% below 2019 levels by 2030. The tech companies say in corporate disclosures and public statements that they remain committed to their net zero targets, and they suggest the emissions surge is temporary — to be mitigated down the road, when new energy technologies enable the data centers to run cleaner and more efficiently. They also stress that they continue to invest in clean energy and rank as some of the world's biggest consumers of it. With some complicated accounting maneuvers and carbon credit purchases, their solar, wind and geothermal installations partly cancel out their gas emissions, according to corporate disclosures.
A June report from international insurance/asset management Allianz found the world's data center emissions are on track to double to 643 million tons of CO2 annually between 2020 and 2030, the article points out. And they cite American data centers contributing to the problem:
Already, Amazon's carbon footprint reached 80.85 million metric tons last year — 58% larger than when [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos pledged to shrink it. The company has veered far from the path laid out in the Paris agreement, which would have emissions falling steeply by now and dropping to 43% below 2019 levels by 2030. The tech companies say in corporate disclosures and public statements that they remain committed to their net zero targets, and they suggest the emissions surge is temporary — to be mitigated down the road, when new energy technologies enable the data centers to run cleaner and more efficiently. They also stress that they continue to invest in clean energy and rank as some of the world's biggest consumers of it. With some complicated accounting maneuvers and carbon credit purchases, their solar, wind and geothermal installations partly cancel out their gas emissions, according to corporate disclosures.
A June report from international insurance/asset management Allianz found the world's data center emissions are on track to double to 643 million tons of CO2 annually between 2020 and 2030, the article points out. And they cite American data centers contributing to the problem:
- Just two gas projects Amazon signed on to for data centers planned in Texas and Pennsylvania "would produce more carbon pollution than the dirtiest facility in the country," an Alabama coal plant powering 1 million homes.
- Meta is building a nearly six-square-mile campus in Louisiana "that will consume as much electricity as three cities the size of New Orleans."
- "A sprawling Microsoft project in West Texas involving a giant gas plant built by Chevron and a Google project in Wyoming that would consume five times as much electricity as every household in that state would vastly expand the emissions associated with those companies."
- "A data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, that will support OpenAI's artificial intelligence operations will consume significantly more gas power, and, therefore, emit more carbon pollution, than the Microsoft and Google projects combined."
We decided we don't want nuclear (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We decided we don't want nuclear (Score:4, Funny)
and be like the FRENCH?
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That makes no sense. The United States stopped building nuclear reactors after Three Mile Island (for the most part) due to onerous regulatory costs and fearmongering:
https://www.instituteforenergy... [institutef...search.org]
Re: (Score:2)
why wasn't it done elsewhere?
also "the Greens"? they didn't have that kind of power in the USA.
it took decades to get even a handful of the dirtiest coal plants shuttered
Re: We decided we don't want nuclear (Score:2)
You couldn't possibly be more wrong. Yet somehow, you always manage to outdo yourself.
Re: (Score:2)
It’s simply too expensive. Look at costs and timelines for the latest plants that came online.
Re:We decided we don't want nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
The latest one is Vogtle's units 3 and 4, which are Westinghouse AP1000 units, which cost $36.8 billion USD for around 2.2 gigawatts of capacity.
However, recent and upcoming Canadian plants are relevant, because the US and Canada operate a shared electrical grid (excepting Quebec and Texas, and Quebec still has connections to the US and Canada). OPG is currently building GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Canada (what a mouthfull) BWRX-300 SMR reactors, with four of them expected to provide 1.2 gigawatts of capacity for $20.9 billion CAD (or $14.8 billion USD), and if we were to predict future costs by assuming future reactors cost the same as reactors 2-4 (as serial production) rather than reactor 1 (the first ever of its type), a similar project, four reactors plus shared infrastructure, would cost $19.2 billion CAD (or $13.6 billion USD). That is roughly two thirds the cost of the latest US reactor, per gigawatt.
Of course, the Darlington project is still fairly early on, and it's possible that costs will be over budget. However OPG does have a good track record in this regard, they recently completed a $12.8 billion nuclear refurbishment project that completed $150 million under budget and four months ahead of schedule.
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That still puts construction cost around $0.10/kWh. If we are optimistic, operation andmaintenanc add another $0.10/kWh. Then you have the inherently high transmission and distribution cost for centralized generation. Oh, and some allowance for decomposing should be made as well, and a reasonable set-aside is about 25% of construction cost, or another $0.025.
PV in comparison is around $0.12 for capital plus operational costs. When stored it gets close to the cost of nuclear, but still slightly lower and wit
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The hope is that SMR will drive costs down farther in the future, these are the costs for the first one. The reason why Darlington's unit 1 (well, it's an existing nuclear plant, so the first of the SMR) is a bunch more expensive than units 2-4 is *because* it's the first, and then they've got a bunch of orders for elsewhere in Canada, and quite a few orders internationally. The hope is that serial production will drive the costs down a bunch, which will make them more attractive to buyers, which will help
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The problem is still time. These people want power now, not in a few years. The other problem is still there is so much money to be made burning fossil fuels that a very well financed sector will try its hardest to sabotage nuclear. Then there are governments like Alberta"s that also want to burn all the hydrocarbons possible and damn the people who voted them in.
Just reading about the waste heat in some of these data centres planned for Alberta is scary, and nukes aren't going to help much with that as wel
Re: We decided we don't want nuclear (Score:3)
That's primarily due to overregulation, and it's very far removed from the way nuclear is done in most countries. It came about after a panic over TMI coinciding with the China Syndrome.
See also: Building a house here in California. Permitting alone will set you back no less than $30,000 and two (up to four) years before you even break ground. That's also before every local NIMBY sues to block it under state environmental regulations, where if they're determined enough, they'll win every single time. This a
Re: We decided we don't want nuclear (Score:3)
Building a house with not enough regulation, anf fucking it up, impacts a family or two. Possibly has some (mildly) nehative effect on groind water quality for a limited area (e.g. by improper discarding of feces).
Fucking up a nuclear power plant makes a mesium-sized country unlivable for millenia, and half a continent problematic.
You DON'T want to leave quality of nuclear power plants to ethical considerations of profit-oriented corporations.
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It's not a matter of "enough" or "not enough". There are many considerations that go well beyond what the letter of the law says. Even if you think you have everything covered, you've probably missed something. Take measurements, make observations, adjust accordingly. We have over a century of data telling us exactly what is safe and what isn't, so what the fuck do we need ALARA for?
You DON'T want to leave quality of nuclear power plants to ethical considerations of profit-oriented corporations.
Or pundits with an ideological bent. Consider, for example, how SpaceX has a better safety and reliability record than NASA.
Sp
Re: We decided we don't want nuclear (Score:2)
You seem to not understand the purpose of regulation.
It isn't to tell us what's safe -- it's to help us enforce doing what's safe even if it happens to be detrimental to "shareholder.value".
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No, they're about much more than safety, and "shareholder value" doesn't (and shouldn't) factor into it. At all. Yet again, this is your ideological bent. Some regulations may have that effect, but it shouldn't matter one way or another. ALARA for example can and does get interpreted as "even though we're already well, well within a safe boundary, spend an extra 2 billion to do even better." It doesn't matter if you're a government entity, a nonprofit, a co-op, or whatever the hell it is your ideology tells
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Re: We decided we don't want nuclear (Score:2)
What specific regulations should be removed from nuclear reactors and why are they ineffective or unnecessary?
False choice (Score:2)
...posted by an AC
Re:We decided we don't want nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
So here we are.
Do you think Amazon is going to wait 20 years to start their datacentre? WTF is wrong with you. These guys can't even wait for conventional powerplants to be built.
No one of the "we" decided anything in this case. We have no deciding power. Governments don't even seem to have deciding power where. Amazon decided, unilaterally, to do whatever is fastest, and nuclear power is the exact opposite of that.
Even the biggest of nuclear proponents would have to recognise how dumb your comment is in this context.
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Capitalists who used their oil profits to sabotage nuclear. Financing Greenpeace and more regulations has resulted in a good return on that investment.
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I've been posting on here on my actual account for 15 YEARS
Welcome! There's free source, but please stay off the lawn. And don't feed Cowboy Neal, I hear there's complaints about giant gas killing the plants.
What was my crime? 10 years ago, I simply stated that the only way to netzero and carbon free was nuclear. That's it.
The whole first page of your comment history is climate change denialism with blatant lies, even really stupid ones like claiming that we're not losing glaciers. You're a fucking idiot, in addition to being an asshole. You're not even a clever idiot. Just a knuckledragger with a compulsive lying problem.
Re: We decided we don't want nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
The Europeans are currently scrounging around for 500 million - half a billion - to repair a hole in the Chernobyl sarcophagus made by single 50K drone. If I have my zeros correct, that's a 10,000x attack/repair cost ratio. So yes, some societies decided we don't want nuclear.
Re: (Score:3)
The US military-industrial complex spent 15 years building a special bomb designed to do one job: Smash through a weakness at a ventilation shaft in Iran's most important nuclear facility, Luke Skywalker style.
And Bungledingus the Orange spent three days bragging that we were going to strike it before the facility was attacked, giving them time to move all the material and rendering the otherwise-successful strike into a worthless failure. Billions of dollars wasted, just so he could pre-brag before it happ
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And what's a few measly billions of dollars to prevent Iran nuking America's allies?
Yeah what's a few measly billions on an unsubstantiated fantasy that literally no one in the intelligence community agrees with. But yeah I'm sure you did your own research, probably reading TRUTHS while masturbating to a picture of Trump.
"possibly" - WTAF? (Score:2)
WTF do you mean "possibly"?
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It means they are postulating something that's extremely biased in its findings and they've got no way to substantiate it, and it's likely easily refuted, but they're doing it anyway because they have an agenda.
Better look at the coal-powered Chinese monies that were used to fund the article.
Re:"possibly" - WTAF? (Score:5, Informative)
Look at TFS again.
"tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-fired power plants that could lock in hundreds of millions of tons of climate pollution for decades to come [...] these projects have put the tech sector on course to grow from a modest driver of industrial carbon pollution into one of the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. Some anticipate that its share of global carbon emissions will increase as much as fivefold from 2020 to 2030. That would leave the tech industry churning out more than half the climate pollution created by global aviation or shipping"
You claim it's "easily refuted" that such large-scale construction of gas-fired power plants will affect carbon concentration in the atmosphere. Please feel free to do so.
Oh and while you're at it, please share your intel on the source of funding for the article being "coal-powered Chinese monies."
Externalizing the cost of their CO2 emissions to t (Score:3, Informative)
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Those costs are nebulous, at best.
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Seems fitting (Score:2)
Data Centers are Being Powered By Giant Gas Plants, ...
They're owned by giant gas bags.
A bit surprising.. (Score:2)
These companies do realize the cost of petrol/gas is only going to continue to rise over time, right?
And govt's can also tax gases even more too, right?
It's surprising they're being this short-sighted on what this will cost them. And of course that means using the LLMs from those data centers will also cost more..
Not sure what their end game is here?
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They're not using gasoline. They're using natural gas. Natural gas in places like Wyoming is cheap and generally getting cheaper because it's basically a waste product from oil production.
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Tech has become the new CO2 champion.
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https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hi... [eia.gov]
They need regulation (Score:5, Interesting)
If ever there was an industry crying out for regulation, it's the AI industry. I say that not because I'm against them, but because they would actually do better in the long run if they were regulated, instead of goading other into this insane game of chicken where everybody loses when the bubble bursts.
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What exactly would you regulate?
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SMRs will be better overall than solar/wind, especially given the massive land footprint that would be required to run some of these facilities. And quite frankly, so long as other businesses continue to use natgas for some or all of their power, there wouldn't be any legal standing to require datacentres to use something else. That's an instant lawsuit waiting to happen.
Asthma (Score:2)
If a data center moves in you're basically cooked. Noise, air pollution will mess you up. And they're lying about how much water they use.
The Climate Pledges were a Lie (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is the Microsoft 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report [microsoft.com]. The environmental reports for other companies like Amazon, Facebook and Apple likely look similar. In this day and age, it has become clear that these reports and pledges are just ploys to get people to turn the other way. Another popular ploy is to use a recycling program to avoid adding repair-ability to a device.
Big tech since the iPhone and AWS has been going on a progressively anti-human. The money of Wallstreet and the business heads have taken over an industry that used to be filled with people wanting to do something fun and make something useful.
The stupid amount of money that investors are putting into AI is causing idiots to run at the money at the expense of the world like a Mr Beast YouTube video. What would you do for a million dollars? During this time, Europe is leading the US in ethics and tech. They have appropriate laws. The US does not. It just has a bunch of Sutter Cane style zombies running at the money while forgetting their humanity.
Re:The Climate Pledges were a Lie (Score:4, Insightful)
Rather than racing toward their net-zero targets .......
"Net zero" is bullshit. Always has been. Always will be.
Just like companies who make billions in profits and then deduct "expenses" that leave them with no taxable income, this approach is now be applied to the environment.
We don't need "net zero" emissions. We need real, actual *REDUCTION* of emissions. Net Zero simply means that you are still putting the same amount of pollution into the air and just trying to cover it up with accounting fuckery.
Re:The Climate Pledges were a Lie (Score:4, Informative)
They weren't a lie, they were just put aside when the AI race started. Back when companies had fairly stable operations, spending a token amount to "greenify" was absolutely what they were doing, and within certain operating sectors they were in fact driving emissions down. E.g. back when Amazon was largely a delivery company, their electrification of the fleet had a huge green impact.
Unfortunately then came the datacentre wars.
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Wasn't it obvious from the start?
As long as... (Score:2)
Giant Gas Plants (Score:4, Funny)
In my head, for a few seconds I (seriously) somehow read that headline as
"Data Centers are Being Powered by Gas Giant Planets"
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They keep talking about putting them in space... I suggest we all pitch in and move the data centers, along with their owners and operators, to space ASAP. (I humbly suggest Venus. I hear it's lovely.)
Gas Giant Planets (Score:2)
".. and I was really curious regarding what the heck they could possibly be talking about."
Presumably Jupiter and Saturn.
Uranus and Neptune are usually referred to as Ice Giants.
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".. and I was really curious regarding what the heck they could possibly be talking about."
Presumably Jupiter and Saturn.
Uranus and Neptune are usually referred to as Ice Giants.
"Data Centers are Being Powered by Uranus"
singularity (Score:2)
The AI crowd seems to be pretty sure that Super Intelligence is going to pop out of one of those datacenters any moment now, and second place is the first loser. Super Intelligence will immediately solve pollution, or at least your complaints about it, so we have that going for us.
Next up, Clean Coal.
Re:"Possibly" (Score:4, Informative)
"Solar or wind farms, which pollute just as much if not more due to the production pipeline to make those machines?"
LOL who do you think you're fooling? Do they cause all the smog too?
"The reality is that of the available fuel sources we have today, ..."
That is false, but why use ANY fuel source?
"I'm so tired of 'green' alarmists coming to the table with problems without solutions being allowed. If you want to solve the problem, don't oppose all of the workable solution."
Not a workable solution, and you're only tired because you think it takes a dollar out of your pocket.
Re:"Possibly" (Score:5, Informative)
Solar or wind farms, which pollute just as much if not more due to the production pipeline to make those machines?
Is someone paying you to post these ridiculous lies? The energy payback period for modern solar panels is about one year [solarmelon.com]. That's how long it takes for them to produce as much energy as was used in manufacturing them. Everything after that is free and totally non-polluting.
Another measure is how much CO2 is released for each unit of energy produced. From the same article, the numbers are 41 grams of CO2 per kWh for rooftop solar, 490 g/kWh for gas, and 820 g/kWh for coal.
Re: "Possibly" (Score:1)
Re: "Possibly" (Score:2)
Re:"Possibly" (Score:5, Informative)
It's funny the things you can claim when you're allergic to numbers, hey? The typical CO2 payback time for a wind project in Wyoming is six months or less on an operational life of 20 to 30 years. Solar seems to be a bit longer but still under a year.
Project Jupiter (Score:3)
Dependence on natural gas for power generation has already presented a problem for datacenter expansion in a relatively friendly regulatory environment, much less the one going forward given the recent political changes trending much more strongly against AI infrastructure expansion. Project Jupiter, a major Oracle datacenter project in New Mexico, had run into a potentially showstopping snag due to them depending upon powering the massive facilities with new natural gas based generators but being unable to secure regulatory approval to build a connecting pipeline to supply them with gas, which lead to Oracle attempting to declare force majeure [yahoo.com] on the contracts with the builders.
If your many billion dollar datacenter expansion plans depend upon local regulators rubber stamping your proposals for supporting infrastructure, I can see you potentially being in for a real bad time when even hardline pro-business politicians in what should be safe seats should be spooked about losing elections. If we are in an AI bubble, that sort of friction could contribute to popping it.
Well then (Score:1)
This isn't a 1980s cartoon.
We're talking about freakin' electricity. Come up with an actual better way to get it, reliably and affordably, and they'll gladly do that.
They aren't rubbing their hands together, chortling with glee about how much damage they will do, ready and willing to pay extra to do so.
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"We're talking about freakin' electricity. Come up with an actual better way to get it, reliably and affordably, and they'll gladly do that. "
Hydro, Wind, and Solar.
Probably need to add batteries to keep it running 24*7
As for affordably - well gas is more expensive than it was 9 months ago...
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"We're talking about freakin' electricity. Come up with an actual better way to get it, reliably and affordably, and they'll gladly do that. "
Hydro, Wind, and Solar.
Probably need to add batteries to keep it running 24*7
As for affordably - well gas is more expensive than it was 9 months ago...
So your theory is that these companies are deliberately doing things the more expensive way, just to be destructive?
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"We're talking about freakin' electricity. Come up with an actual better way to get it, reliably and affordably, and they'll gladly do that."
Right, someone else do the work, then they'll exploit it. Except only if it's profitable for them, and remember that part of the benefit of pollution is that it disproportionately harms black people. Gotta replace that value.
"They aren't rubbing their hands together, chortling with glee about how much damage they will do, ready and willing to pay extra to do so."
Elon
Re: Well then (Score:1)
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"We're talking about freakin' electricity. Come up with an actual better way to get it, reliably and affordably, and they'll gladly do that." Right, someone else do the work, then they'll exploit it. Except only if it's profitable for them, and remember that part of the benefit of pollution is that it disproportionately harms black people. Gotta replace that value.
"They aren't rubbing their hands together, chortling with glee about how much damage they will do, ready and willing to pay extra to do so." Elon Musk is. As if we should take the word of a Trump supporter when we all know how sociopaths work. You can remain ignorant, that doesn't obligate any of us.
So you actually do believe that these companies are deliberately doing things in a more expensive way, just to be mean. Wow.
You know that sounds crazy, right?
Here's what you can do about it (Score:3)
Don't use AI.
Seriously. All this data center construction is only happening because people use AI, or at least the companies believe people will use it. So do your part and don't use it.
Here's something else you can do: try to convince other people not to use it (as I'm doing right now).
Before you post and tell me that's not realistic, remember that our current path leads to ecological collapse and the extinction of most species on earth. If you aren't doing everything you can to prevent that, who do you think is going to do it for you?
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Do you have solar panels on your roof? Because that goes about 1000x further than "not using AI". By the way, so would not driving a car, not flying, not eating beef, and on and on.
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Are you asking me personally? I put solar panels on my roof years ago. I drive as little as possible and fly as little as possible. I almost never eat beef.
How about you?
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Same. But I never drive or fly.
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If you aren't doing everything you can to prevent that, who do you think is going to do it for you?
Everything you can might get you some serious negative attention.
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I grow a lot of our food and waste very little of whatever food we buy from the stores. If you look at how many resources are used to grow food that ends up being wasted it is a huge destructive force for ecological diversity, adds to poorer water and air quality, etc.
I recycle as much as possible.
I do eat some beef once in a while.
I drive 30-100 miles a month.
I don't fly.
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The alternative, presumably, would be to use human brainpower. Ironically, the carbon footprint for humans to do the tasks they assign to AI, is greater, not less, if the same tasks are done by humans. https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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Are you suggesting the solution is to kill all the humans? I'm assuming we'll still have humans either way, and the humans aren't going to spend their lives trying to minimize energy use by sitting still and thinking as little as possible. If your plan is to truly replace humans with AI, as in killing the humans so they don't use any energy, then you probably can reduce energy use a lot.
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Well, your solution would indeed curb pollution!
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It's your solution, not mine! But unless you're going to go all the way and truly eliminate humans, it isn't actually very effective. I mean, cutting the world population in half would only cut our pollution in half. It would slow things down, but not fix the problem. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables would achieve far more. In addition to being ethically preferrable!
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Don't use AI.
That's a great idea. I'm going to quickly look up how to do that on a Google Search:
Here's a fun fact at the top of something as benign as a google search:
"AI Overview
Google does not offer a permanent, official toggle to completely disable AI Overviews or built-in Gemini features."
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And before anyone says "Well don't use Google search." How much would you invest in not using AI? I mean for me it would be spending 65k on a new car since my car had Gemini rolled out to it too taking over my voice feature. Got and iPhone? Better never use Siri again. Also throw away your Echo. What about your home thermostat? Hope you didn't buy a Tado smart thermostat, that one now has cloud AI features thanks to a recent firmware update.
which releases more carbon (Score:2)
1. A data center running for 10 years on gas and coal.
2. A data center burning to the ground by ecoterrorists.
3. A data center shuttered or turned into warehousing due to immense public pressure and political toxicity of the billionaire class plopping their AI fap in everywhere.
Gas generators have their place... (Score:2)
Power companies—including those in Finland utilizing heavy-duty Wärtsilä engines—use gas generators to perform a "black start" on biomass plants, providing the massive electrical load required to power up the facility's auxiliary equipment from a cold state. Nuclear plants also maintain massive on-site backup generators, but these are never used to restart a reactor; instead, they automatically kick on after a scram to power the emergency cooling pumps that safely remove residual decay
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The unlicensed gas turbines are jet engines (Score:2)
The AI bosses did say it would kill us all. (Score:2)
Well, the AI bosses did tell us that there was a chance that AI would kill us all. They just did not say how. I guess CO2 and toxic emissions and global warming are AI's first attempt.
Eh Eye doesnt need to breath (Score:1)
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