They do have a growing amount of Scope 1 emissions (emissions from their on site sources) which originally was primarily on site diesel but due to grid interconnect delays have been growing number of on site gas turbines.

This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.

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barnabee 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered cleanly and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power.

If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors, full scale nuclear plants, whatever).

Degrowth is bad but so is ignoring the planet, the environment, and people's health to get ahead faster in business.

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hdgvhicv 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Make all DCs provide their own power and suddenly they’d be large amounts of solar and battery in cheap scrubland

A typical US DC costs about $35b per GW. Solar and battery would increase that to about $45b.

Then during summer it would generate so much excess power that it would run all the domestic air conditioning you could need.

	▲	Muromec 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm actually fine with only having access to the AI shaitan when the sun is shining over the datacenter.
	▲	jauntywundrkind 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Alas I fear we are going to rapidly build a bunch of very hard to maintain and clean up inefficient small nuclear power systems, to power a lot of this. Not next year, no, but soon.

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vasco 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The need for memes knows no bounds. In short order the majority of power usage worldwide will be for compute and newer generations will wonder how it took so long.

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

Which is why things like nuclear power plants, grid upgrades, hydroelectric projects, and intelligently placed wind/solar (instead of placing it due to subdisies or political concerns) should have been done a long time ago.

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Muromec 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't understand why permits are given for new generation that is CO2 positive outside of exceptional cases or when it replaces even worse kind. It's insanity.