| ▲ | mullingitover 3 days ago |
| Meanwhile China is on track to install as much solar power in the past year as the US has in its entire history. The US has maintained steep tariffs on solar panels. Clean energy isn't even some virtuous thing, it's just no-brainer smart energy policy. The only reason for Google to be backpedaling on its pledge is political. It's in a backsliding petrostate and it has to play the political game. |
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| ▲ | ActorNightly 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Not so much political as strategic. If nobody else has to make efforts for sustainability, its a "pointless" investment (in the sense that the current shareholders don't really care that much about future over returns within their lifespans) |
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| ▲ | worik 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > If nobody else has to make efforts for sustainability, its a "pointless" investment No. That is not true * Unless you are evil using school yard excuses is off brand. You do the right thing * Carbon free energy is cheaper to produce these days, so the premis is wrong This politics. Burn the planet, it is what Trump would do | | |
| ▲ | murderfs 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > * Carbon free energy is cheaper to produce these days, so the premis is wrong If it's cheaper to produce, then there's no point in doing anything special, because it'll just take over via market forces. The "problem" with renewables is that the economics are fantastic in the marginal case, but if you need it to take over baseload when the sun is down, wind isn't blowing, etc., it's much more expensive because you need to build energy storage, which fossil fuel generators get for free. Going from 50% of power generation to 100% is going to be many multiples more expensive than 0% to 50%. Until things like flow batteries become economical, in places without rivers you can dam for generation/pumped storage, it's probably not going to be feasible to go 0% carbon unless you just replace all of your baseload generation with nuclear or something. | | |
| ▲ | mullingitover 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > If it's cheaper to produce, then there's no point in doing anything special, because it'll just take over via market forces. It is taking over via market forces. New utility-scale solar+battery capacity is already cheaper than building a new coal plant. The only reason it's not doing it more quickly is because of government intervention in the markets in the US to nerf it. |
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| ▲ | photochemsyn 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Another very real reason is that GOOGL's top five major institutional shareholders are the same as Exxon's (XOM). Now, what happens to American fossil fuel corporate value if this AI data center boom is built on the back of solar/wind/storage upgrades to the US electrical grid? That would reduce natural gas demand, not increase it. Another option for powering data centers is small modular nuclear - but again, China is far ahead on that with the helium-cooled pebble-bed model, although it really seems optimized for high-temp industrial process steam generation over electricity at present - so no, cheap safe nuclear power is not coming to the USA anytime soon. Certainly, Trump's vitriol on wind power and solar power could mean a loss of government contract opportunities for AI-centric firms that promote such energy source - but still, the tariffs on China's monoocrystalline PV panels go back a decade and are just as supported by both political parties, because the major donors to both parties see renewable energy as a threat to their profit margins, be they on the executive or the shareholders side of the equation. The kerosene lamp manufacturers don't want to be replaced with electric lightbulbs. This kind of monopolistic investor capitalism always stifles innovation and progress - all they see is the losses from collapsing demand for fossil fuels, and if the raw inputs are solar and wind instead of oil and gas, it's harder to collect rents. |
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| ▲ | yieldcrv 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > The US has maintained steep tariffs on solar panels. Because the US should be doing it domestically, just like China is. The incentive to do is partially based on tariffs, but the incentive hasn't spurred the private sector and supply chain maintainers into action, and a more comprehensive strategy would need to be done. There is no consensus for further subsidies from the national government to spur this production either. |
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| ▲ | mullingitover 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The argument for tariffs on China's panels is that they're dumping. However, really the answer to dumping is to exploit the dumper viciously, buy as much below market rate product of theirs as you can while they bleed money (especially a capital good like solar panels). The US could be driving down the cost of energy nationwide with the dumped power generation equipment. Lower cost energy could then be turbocharging (nearly) every other industry in the country. The only industry this harms is fossil fuels, and solar is being hamstrung to protect this legacy industry at the cost of all potential future industries. | | |
| ▲ | ajross 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is absolutely true. The strategic goal of "dumping" is to drive competitors (the example here being the US solar panel industry) out of a market, with the implied goal of raising prices at the end of the process. But it almost never works that way in practice. Pretty much by definition, products that can be dumped are ones that can be manufactured with easily scaled production equipment at low margin and high volume. If you can dump your competitors out of business, so can someone else, to you. And that's the way it generally happens (c.f. DRAM in the 80's). The "dumping" phase of a technology curve is succeeded not by a cartel with a tight grip on the previously competitive market, but by an extremely competitive market of producers all undercutting each other. Almost everyone wins, except the original high-margin producers. But they (c.f. Intel in the 90's) tend to move on to other products anyway. No one wants to make junk for a living. | | |
| ▲ | duskwuff 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > The strategic goal of "dumping" is to drive competitors (the example here being the US solar panel industry) out of a market Which makes very little sense, because the US solar panel industry is practically nonexistent. There are some companies that do last-stage assembly of solar panels in the US - probably to meet "made in USA" requirements - but the solar cells themselves are almost all made overseas. In short, there's nothing there for China to dump on - the US is not a competitive threat to China in this sector. All indications are that Chinese solar panels are cheap because they're being manufactured in immense volumes to help meet China's own energy demands. The international sales are a bonus, not the primary goal. |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you’re really smart, you exploit the cheap solar panels to provide energy for your own solar panel factories. | |
| ▲ | thrance 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > at the cost of all potential future industries. And at the cost of the future, period. Climate change promises to be extremely onerous to future generations, from a purely economical POV. | |
| ▲ | Spivak 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Thank you, jesus. Finally someone who understands the dynamics involved here. If you want to build up / protect your domestic industry then there are way to do that, but methods which don't involve also snapping goods sold well below market are crazy to not do so. |
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| ▲ | micromacrofoot 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | they should, but they aren't... it would easily take a decade to get manufacturing ramped up to China's level, and the work isn't even being planned this is just a massive self-own at this point | |
| ▲ | amanaplanacanal 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If China wants to subsidize solar panels for me, I'm all for it. | |
| ▲ | triceratops 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Because the US should be doing it domestically And it would be a lot cheaper to run those factories if solar power were cheap. | |
| ▲ | lostlogin 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The incentive to do is partially based on tariffs, but the incentive hasn't spurred the private sector and supply chain maintainers into action, and a more comprehensive strategy would need to be done. There is no consensus for further subsidies from the national government to spur this production either. Tariffs leading to expanded US solar panel production might be one of the few things that would lead Trump to cancel tariffs. Solar is somehow offensive to him. | |
| ▲ | dotnet00 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just saying that the US should be doing it domestically and companies aren't interested isn't useful. It's kind of like saying "young people just don't want to work hard anymore!". | | |
| ▲ | yieldcrv 3 days ago | parent [-] | | okay. I thought it was insightful enough. I've worked in many economic unions where that mismatch existed and needed further investigation to steer organizations towards the desired outcome. pointing out that the current efforts don't do that is all that needed to be said. your criticism of that comment, to me, proved that you understood the comment enough that one needs to look further into the motivations. | | |
| ▲ | dotnet00 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I've noticed that a lot of the "die-hard MAGA" discourse around tariffs has been "we need to do this within the US and if we can't, we simply don't need to do it at all". I'm not suggesting that you're one of those types, but it reminded me of that ludicrous line of reasoning. Understanding that the mismatch exists, why it exists and what can be done to steer things in the desired direction is something I can get behind though! |
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| ▲ | nsoonhui 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >> The only reason for Google to be backpedaling on its pledge is political. It's in a backsliding petrostate and it has to play the political game. What evidence you have to justify your accusation? From another poster here Now, in their 2025 Environmental Report at https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2025-environmen...:
"We aim to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030." and "We aim to reduce absolute, combined scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 emissions by 50% from a 2019 base year by 2030." (They also restate the thing about "to neutralize our remaining emissions" a bit later in the document.)
So I would say you need to backup your claim _really_ well instead of just interpreting things in the worst way possible according to your imagination. |
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| ▲ | mullingitover 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, we all read the article and nobody's disputing that Google hasn't removed the pledge, just made it less visible. I'm just giving my interpretation. We also all saw Sundar being paraded around like a prisoner of war at the inauguration (to be generous, another interpretation being that he is an enthusiastic collaborator in a despotic regime). He's clearly involved politically in this regime, and they have made their stance on clean energy clear. To be willfully blind to that reality is simply a choice I'm not making. |
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| ▲ | dfxm12 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is there evidence that they are doing this to appease Trump? What if they wanted to do this anyway and recognize that at this time, they can use appeasement as a weaselly way to justify it. |
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| ▲ | wcunning 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There has been a move to get the FTC to start labeling these net carbon numbers as misleading advertising because it always includes a bunch of purchased offsets unrelated to the company. Further, there have been some real and complicated situations where carbon credits were sold more than the actual amount of offset carbon -- meaning for example BigCorpA and BigCorpB buy the same "green energy infra" credits from projects that are in construction and then never actually meet their listed goals, but both companies claim to be carbon neutral because of the claims for several years before that comes out. Matt Levine had a very interesting column on forestry in the US Southeast talking about places getting paid to not cut down trees far in excess of the number of trees that could realistically be harvested. Google might be frontrunning some of those arguments. Or might have done the real audit of the claims and realized that they had been less carbon offset than they thought, so safer to just pull the whole pledge at least in the short term. | | |
| ▲ | Muromec 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >There has been a move to get the FTC to start labeling these net carbon numbers as misleading advertising because it always includes a bunch of purchased offsets unrelated to the company Which is good, because carbon offset are a scam. | | |
| ▲ | mullingitover 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Cap and trade is a perfectly sound strategy for reducing carbon emissions, and carbon offsets are valid part of the 'trade.' There's the potential for fraud, but fraud can happen anywhere and there's nothing special about carbon offsets that makes them entirely fraudulent. The market and regulators have already been accounting for this through third party verification. Now, if you are a fossil fuel megacorp and want to burn the entire cap and trade system to the ground, creating a 'carbon offsets are a scam' meme and destroying the 'trade' side is a great way to manufacture consent to get rid of that pesky 'cap.' | | |
| ▲ | abdullahkhalids 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > there's nothing special about carbon offsets that makes them entirely fraudulent The problem is that what gets exchanged in the marked is a certificate but the purpose of the market is to create a positive externality. This means the buyers and sellers don't have an inventive to be honest. The buyer of the carbon credits doesn't actually need the carbon to be captured. They just want a certificate for X credits, so they can emit elsewhere or get some other benefit. The seller doesn't actually need to capture the carbon. As long as they can make a convincing enough case to the buyer that they did capture the carbon, the buyer is happy to buy. This is unlike a typical market where the seller does have an incentive to fool the buyers into a buying a subpar product, but the buyer has a lot of economic incentive to actually not be fooled. | | |
| ▲ | nostrademons 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There are 3rd-party enforcement mechanisms. It's not as simple as the seller saying "We don't pollute, trust us"; there are actual government inspectors and NGO delegates that go out, visit factories, and fine them if their actual emissions don't match the declared permits: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/mrr-enforcement The bigger issue, as mentioned above, is that there's often a time lag between when the seller receives the money and when the seller can actually put it to use to reduce carbon emissions. One of the biggest sellers of carbon credits, for instance, is CA high-speed rail, which is decades away from completion. If it doesn't actually complete, it's not going to take any cars off the road or planes out of the sky, and so all the carbon credits it sold would just allow fossil fuel emitters to maintain status-quo emissions. But as a way of diverting private resources from CO2 emitters to greener alternatives, cap & trade has been pretty effective. Over half the cars in my Bay Area city are now EVs; Tesla was kept afloat for many years by selling carbon credits. | |
| ▲ | Muromec 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This. Both parties in the market are in on the same scam to fool the end customer and shareholders |
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| ▲ | Muromec 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Its a scam as long as emitting CO2 and then buying credits doesnt result in capturing the emitted amount from the athmosphere, yet allows one to claim net neitrality in a market where customers are somewhat critical |
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| ▲ | Filligree 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Who would want to? Solar power is cheaper than any alternative, so long as you’re allowed to use it. | | |
| ▲ | HardCodedBias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Solar power is much more expensive if the power must adhere to some number of 9's of reliability. Often data centers need to run at three nines of availability (ie: 99.9) and at that level of availability the price of solar power is many multiples of conventional power due to the cost of batteries and over provisioning. | | |
| ▲ | adgjlsfhk1 3 days ago | parent [-] | | this is not true. solar+battery+natural gas backup is cheaper than any other form of power by a lot. | | |
| ▲ | nostrademons 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Hydro is cheaper, if you have access to it. That (and cooling) is why many data centers are built next to rivers like The Dalles. But your point otherwise stands; solar + battery is cheaper than any fossil fuel form of power. |
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| ▲ | dpkirchner 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm not sure we're going to find a smoking gun here -- like an executive saying this was removed because it made MAGAs irrationally angry, say. | | | |
| ▲ | lawlessone 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Probably both really. |
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| ▲ | boringg 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I mean lets not use China as the example here - they are doing it to reduce their air pollution and use the highly subsidized solar pv arrays. They are are the dominant users of coal in concert with solar. They need to ramp up their energy production to match demand and they front-loaded their solar production with massive subsidized capital from the government. In the case of geo-politics if the US wanted to install solar to cover its energy load it would essentially be a massive payment to China for the solar arrays since there isn't productive capacity in the US. It would also end up being a long term dependent on future purchases of solar from China when they would need to re-up every 30-40 years at end of asset life. |
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| ▲ | adgjlsfhk1 3 days ago | parent [-] | | reducing air pollution in the US is good too. 30-40 years of cheap, CO2 free energy sounds pretty good to me. |
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| ▲ | throw9394494i88 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Importing solar panels from China is a security risk. Like when Europe depended on Russian gas... Edit: US has no competitive way to manufacture panels, and with cheap imports, it never develops such industry! |
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| ▲ | unethical_ban 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Doubt. Considering the lifespan of solar panels and the ability to manufacture panels at a later date, totally different situations. We should look to non Chinese suppliers strategically, but they can't remote shutdown panels in an instant like Russia can stop a flow of gas. | |
| ▲ | cenamus 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Except when the panels stop nothing happens for 20 something years? | |
| ▲ | immibis 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, because you need a continual supply of gas to keep having factories, but once you have a solar field, you have it. Ther rated lifespan for a solar panel is on the order of 20-30 years, but they're still producing 70-80% of their output after that time. They last a very long time - if not destroyed from above. | |
| ▲ | genter 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One of the fascinating things about solar panels is that they continue to produce electricity for many years. Unlike a gallon of gas, once you burn it, it's gone. | | |
| ▲ | goku12 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Not just that either. Once the current installation has completed its life cycle, the replacement could come from any source - domestic, alternate or original. And since PVs generate DC supply, interfacing even significantly newer generation panels/equipment isn't going to be too hard. | |
| ▲ | cmcconomy 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | remarkable |
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| ▲ | physhster 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Better than not having solar panels at all... | |
| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | triceratops 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > with cheap imports, it never develops such industry! Unless war compels it. But there's no Nordstream of solar panels that can be shut down in the meanwhile. | |
| ▲ | koolala 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | please use a /s for sarcasm like this |
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