Huge increases in greenhouse gases from Texas' data center boom

The frenzied rush to build massive new AI data centers is being led by projects in the Lone Star State. The mind-bogglingly big facilities will need similarly vast amounts of electricity (and water, but that’s another story), and the companies racing against each other in this arms race for AI dominance are clearly unconcerned about the impacts on our ever-more-quickly-warming world. Inside Climate News has the details: Data Center Developers in Texas Plan Massive New Gas Power Projects.

Permitting documents show that just a handful of mega-projects in Texas could emit over 100 million tons per year of greenhouse gases, an enormous amount roughly equal to the annual emissions of a mid-sized industrialized country. These projects are also expected to discharge tens of thousands of tons of other pollutants.

Right at the time that could well be a tipping-point (in a bad way) for global warming – just wait and see how this year’s “supersized” El Niño treats us – here are these companies dashing headlong toward massively worsening and prolonging the crisis.

Even if these projects could produce some unimaginable benefit, like, say, a broad-spectrum cancer cure that would be free for everyone, I still don’t know that this buildout would be worth it. The climate crisis is already killing and displacing so many, and costing so much, and it’s just getting warmed up (sorry). To knowingly worsen it so drastically, and extend by years the time when we could possibly bring greenhouse gasses under control, should be an incredibly high bar to clear.

But of course these projects aren’t in pursuit of anything anywhere near as noble as trying to cure cancer. (Spare me the sci-fi fantasies of, ‘well, maybe AI will cure it someday, if we advance it far enough!' Sure, and if a frog had wings it wouldn’t bump its ass a-hoppin’.) This scramble to build as fast as humanly possible is one-hundred-percent in the pursuit of profit (for those that are already the richest) and for AI technology that’s meeting increasing skepticism, to say the least.

It’s not just that these data centers are being built to run on fossil fuels. They’re generating power in some of the worst, least efficient, and most polluting ways available:

Faced with a global backlog of combined-cycle turbine supplies, developers have turned to smaller and dirtier units that can be quickly deployed, the [Global Energy Monitor] report said, including simple-cycle turbines and gas-powered engines.

“Gas turbines and engines are less efficient than combined-cycle plants and carry higher emissions per unit of electricity generated,” the report said.

According to GEM data, engines and simple-cycle gas turbines make up nearly half the generating technology for gas power proposals tied to data centers nationwide.

Letting these projects go ahead like this is madness. Having occasional help drafting an email or saving a little time on internet searches isn’t worth it. Politicians are figuring out how unpopular data center construction is, largely from their constituents' NIMBY reactions. (Fair enough, though as a proponent of building clean energy infrastructure I’m wary of NIMBYism. The opposition should be from everyone, because air pollution and the climate crisis are in everyone’s “backyard”.)

Beware the politicians who are faking their concern and trying to placate voters for now. A prime example is Greg Abbott, governor of my own home state, who claims to be worried and has ordered a “review” of all the data center projects. Conveniently, that review will be done just after the election this November. Will it find that most of the projects – or at least the projects of companies who have poured enough cash into Republican campaign coffers – are okay to advance, after all? Will you be surprised if it does?