| ▲ | synack 5 hours ago |
| Don't these things get more efficient as they scale up? One big plant is probably better than 30 small ones. |
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| ▲ | Grombobulous 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country? Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the climate. A wind/solar/battery solution is not even really much more expensive than gas power and it’s far less dependent on fluctuating fuel prices. |
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| ▲ | onlyrealcuzzo 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? It's more capital intensive, and interest rates are 8%, because our elected officials are completely incompetent. | | |
| ▲ | Grombobulous 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 8% interest rates don’t seem to be a problem for financing all the data centers and AI hardware. Amazon can afford to power their data centers with clean energy. It’s not called “Climate Pledge But Only If It’s Less Capital Intensive Arena” | |
| ▲ | malvim 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They’re absolutely not that incompetent. They’re on the pockets of people who profit directly from this. Follow the money, and all that. | | |
| ▲ | seizethecheese 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don’t think business really wants interest rates that high. Without conspiracy theories, a simpler explanation is that this is simply democracy in action. People don’t want the spending reigned in, and they don’t want their taxes raised. |
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| ▲ | user43928 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I am curious how renewables + battery compare here, if at all feasible. I thought there was a gas turbine shortage? |
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| ▲ | NooneAtAll3 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| efficient in money, nothing is said about other metrics it's quite possible to have more product made, thus more pollution (or less materials consumed, thus less) but concentration definitely will rise |
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| ▲ | khimaros 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | sometime in the energy sector once told me "the solution to pollution is dilution" | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which is nonsense. There's plenty of pollution that's been diluted as much as it possibly can be and is still problematic. CO2 is an obvious example. Or consider leaded gasoline or mercury. You have to be careful not to eat too much fish or you'll have trouble with the mercury in it. That's been diluted by the entire ocean and that didn't solve it. | | |
| ▲ | deepsun 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They meant "to not get caught, we just dilute". | |
| ▲ | lazide 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | uh, that’s nonsense. co2 is problematic because of concentration - the sheer volume. leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration. dilution still helps! | | |
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| ▲ | neuronexmachina 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If I understand correctly, for speed of deployment they're building a less-efficient simple-cycle plant (instead of the typical combined-cycle). Even though it's larger, the efficiency is worse than a typical natural gas plant. |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Natural gas is basically a waste product that gets flared off in many oil-producing parts of Texas. If this private power plant can use that gas for something productive then I guess at least we're no worse off. But it's not clear that is what is happening. |
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| ▲ | wat10000 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere. |
