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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?
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Rebuilding with resilience in rural North Carolina
Resilience centers and disaster recovery are such perfect areas for solar to grow extra quickly in. Nobody wants a hurricane or floods or even war, but they do all continue to happen. And if people have to rebuild anyway, then at least they can build back better (to coin a phrase). A case in point from Canary Media: Post–Hurricane Helene, this community is getting creative with solar.
In Emma, a diverse, mostly immigrant neighborhood just northwest of downtown [Asheville, NC], solar energy is playing a key role in that work, offering not only a backstop for the next grid outage but also lower utility bills year-round.
Earlier this month, residents, clean energy workers, and organizers gathered to celebrate the latest addition to Emma’s growing solar capacity: a 46-kilowatt array on the rooftop of the community and cultural center owned by La Esperanza (“the hope” in Spanish), a neighborhood real estate co-op formed in 2019.
In addition to clean, distributed, and resilient power, they’ve created a mobile version as well:
They instead have a trailer outfitted with 900 watts of solar panels and a smaller battery to help do the job. The box on wheels, another Footprint donation, is able to plug into the community center and function as a mini generator for crucial services, including the internet, refrigeration, and the pump for a drinking-water well the collective drilled on-site the winter after Helene destroyed an Asheville water main. The damage left most of the city without clean tap water for nearly two months.
That organization mentioned there is Footprint Project, which is dedicated to doing this kind of wonderful recovery work across the US.
Later in that same article is another clever innovation from that area of the country. Mobile homes apparently aren’t well-suited to having solar panels installed on them, so instead they’ve built out custom-made porches next to the unit. What a great upgrade that would be: extra shaded living space, in addition to the electricity generated.
A custom-built front porch enables solar on a mobile home in Asheville, North Carolina. (Sugar Hollow Solar, via Canary Media) This is the kind of work that deserves every penny of funding it can get.
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DeSantis' Florida is anti-tree-planting, for some jackass reason
Dear Florida voters, please remember the more expensive electricity, the dirtier air, the warmer climate, and the rising seawaters next election, and how your MAGA government made all of that worse just to score a few culture war points and prop up the fossil fuel industry.
Here’s the perfect example: DeSantis signs bill on Earth Day reversing local climate change action.
[offsetting air pollution] can be achieved through cleaner energy or efforts like planting trees that absorb carbon. The new law prevents local governments from passing any “resolution, ordinance, rule, code or policy” that promotes net-zero goals.
That’s Trump’s Republican party for you: heavy-handed government regulation that prohibits local efforts in the name of stopping the unacceptable blight of… [checks notes] clean energy and tree-planting.
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In case someone else says this dumb thing to you: Trump says the big US winter storm is proof of climate hoax – here’s why he’s wrong
scientists point out that a single winter storm… tells us very little about longer-term, global climate trends. …The world [is] undeniably heating up
