I'd rather see legislation banning crypto mining and AI data centers from the public grid entirely. No sense in forcing the broader public to subsidize them.

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MBCook 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The problem with that is one of the best things we have to control pollution at power plants is the rules that go into place when connecting to the US grid (I know TX is different).

I really don’t want to incentivize private power plants that aren’t on grid. Or just running tons of industrial sized generators instead.

If we’re going to allow enough of this stuff to be built that it can destabilize things why not require they behave and don’t stop off like that? Some sort of organized draw down?

And if they don’t? Mandatory cutoff for X amount of time. Weeks/months.

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toomuchtodo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Ban private fossil generators above a certain size without a license. You can just do things. They can build as much solar and batteries as they want.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-confirms-1...

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-announces-...

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dpark 6 hours ago | parent [-]

SpaceX is running a bunch of “portable”, high pollution gas generators in Memphis, TN specifically to get around the regulation you’re describing.

Elon definitely got the “you can just do things” memo.

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Dylan16807 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The proposed regulation they're describing doesn't have that loophole.

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MBCook 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s what I was thinking of when I said “lots of industrial generators” too, but I couldn’t remember where it was.

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toomuchtodo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right, that’s what I was thinking of when I wrote my comment. Regulate back. If there is no will to do so, well, that’s a choice. Write the law, pass the law, aggressively enforce civil and criminal penalties for violations. They haul gas generators in without a license? Confiscate and tear them down for scrap (which will be painful, as these turbines are in short supply and their manufacturers are backlogged years into the future), in accordance with law you pass. Hold the utility liable if they provide a fossil gas pipeline connection. Humans like Elon may not care, but utilities have something to lose. Find “one throat to choke” as the saying goes.

It is not politically easy, but it is logistically straightforward.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/one_throat_to_choke

	▲	AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The general problem with this approach is that it's not possible for the legislature to simultaneously be deliberative and fast-acting. If you pass a nuance-free emphatic rule that says no fossil fuel generators, does that include the backup generators at a hospital? If it does and then the hospital loses power, that's not just a political problem, that's a "people will die" problem. But if it doesn't then you're going to turn around and find that Elon Musk's data center is hosting some hospital's IT system and then running the generators (that happen to also power the rest of the entire facility) to keep it online. Time will pass before this loophole can be detected, more time until new rules can be promulgated, and then they'll find a different loophole and the process begins again. That process tends to make people frustrated and then they want to abandon the rule of law. Stop having rules that say what you can't do and just have rules that say you can't do anything and then selectively prosecute the people you don't like. The modern system has been evolving to work more like that, but that's how you enable people like Trump. Making the system work like that is a disaster. What you need to do is find a better way to solve the problem in general, like a carbon tax, rather than trying to play whack a mole with overly-specific rules until there is such a thicket of them that you're really playing "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" -- or setting things up for someone else to.

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rickydroll 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If they weren't on the public grid, they would just slap in a bunch of gas turbines and run one of the noisier, more polluting sources of electricity. I think it would be better if we required them to replace the power they used, but do so on the grid so that it benefits everyone.

	▲	doodlebugging 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The newest one that I know of will use gas turbines as generators and will connect to the grid. [0] It is sited conveniently to operating natural gas compressor stations out in the Barnett Shale field and near to a local lake for water. That lake is effectively a deep mud-hole that has an agreement with a larger regional lake to pipe water from the larger lake to the local lake to help meet local demand. If you ever visited the town and hit the restaurants during the summer you get a nice taste of the lake bottom when it flips. Pretty nasty yet few restaurants use water filtration to deliver fresh-tasting tea and water to their customers. That's OT though. The county will have a special meeting on data centers this Tuesday, June 9 where they are seeking public input. I expect that there will be plenty of people and hope they have time to give people an opportunity to speak. I visit this county regularly for grocery shopping, fuel, etc and if you go south one county there are already plenty of people who are sick and tired of the bitcoin operations and how they have disrupted life in that county. I hope we have a good turnout for this meeting so that this new operation gets canned before they build anything. [0]https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/article315770666.ht... Here is a quick overview of the proposed site. [1] You can see in yellow the 200 acre section where turbine generators will be sited. In the light blue area adjacent you can see a small part of the larger parcel where the data centers will be built. This is part of one of the last large ranches in this part of the county. The others are actively being developed for large (>50000 residents) developments that were supposed to be self-contained communities but which have evolved to be large residential areas that dump traffic onto undersized freeways which are currently under construction to handle the huge volume of new traffic and traffic from all the other losers who will live out there. The red polygon show existing grid substation intertie where high tension power lines converge or radiate out across the countryside. The light blue polygon is an active natural gas production and compressor station. There is more natural gas infrastructure just below the red polygon too. The lake is obvious in the lower left corner. The natural gas wells and compressor station date to early Barnett Shale production in the county, before 2008. The electrical substation is legacy and has been expanded more than once during the last 15 years. The black polygon is a small rural subdivision of 8 ~2.2 acre ranchettes around one original ~4.2 acre home site. Those people bought a small plot of ranchland for their own slice of rural Texas. That section was subdivided into lots about 9 years ago so every one of those people bought homes next to an operational gas compressor station. I wonder whether they will be at the meeting. [1]https://i.postimg.cc/0NVn0ch9/datacenter.png

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protocolture 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd rather see legislation banning everyone from the grid. Why have a common resource if its no longer common. Just get rid of it. Ban everyone from using the roads, who knows, they might be transporting evil computer hardware to an evil data centre using a road. Farms obviously have to go, they supply food to people who write code that gets run in datacentres. In fact, just ban all trade and commerce to be on the safe side*

*The US should implement this policy for real for my personal amusement.

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BobbyTables2 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Didn’t Texas pretty much do the exact opposite thing recently?