> truly cannot comprehend the mindset

The mindset is "if I could harvest your organs for profit I absolutely would, and I would make it illegal to protest against it"

I think you nailed the mindset with the "cartoon villain".

When it comes to laws, do you just look at the title of the law, or do you look at the actual statute and regulations to see what the law applies to and what it doesn’t? Does a “vehicle inspection program” meant for commercial trucks apply to your car just because the title fits?

In this case, there is a 25 year old regulation that specifies what this program applies to and what it doesn’t. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-C...

"Cartoon villainy" is the best possible way to describe this administration. I'm more than willing to accept lots of policy differences, but so many decisions just seem tailor made to fuck over 95%+ of the public. Like how could any sane person defend this?

It remains to be seen if the administration doesn't successfully steal future elections, but the vitriol against data centers is a rare thing that has huge bipartisan support. Texas of all places largely has a competitive governor's race because Republicans have stated they're willing to vote for the Democratic candidate because she has supported a moratorium on data centers while Abbott supports them.

The AI companies look at something called the "endless government bureaucracy" and they think to themselves "fuck that, I'm not waiting 10 years for all that bullshit, I'll just use the loophole." I truly cannot comprehend any other reaction because I would rather have my fingernails ripped out than deal with years of government bureaucracy.

It isn't just emergency generators.

Many non-emergency generators are used because there is no grid to connect to and/or the power requirements are not anticipated to be permanent. The cost of a grid connection can greatly exceed anything justified by the use case.

There are entire industries that live off of large portable generators for non-emergency purposes because it is the only way to get power where you need it.

If that is the original intent, why did that not get added into the law? Explicitly specififying that the exception only applies to emergency backup situations would have solved this, right?

> If we enforced strict regulations on all generators without any exceptions at all, your sewage lift station might not have a backup source anymore.

No need for the FUD.

It would just mean the backup generator connected to the sewage lift station must meet emissions regulations, like in every developed country on earth.

If you’re trying to say there are simply some generators that can’t meet emissions standards, I’m going to say you just aren’t trying.

And now we will have to add more bureaucracy and regulations to the process because of the tech bro's abuses of reasonable carveouts. More bureaucracy that future tech bros/right wingers will complain about existing even though they chose to force the matter to the point of regulation.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to this President and his EPA that they are simply enforcing the laws as intended is foolish, irrational, and against all known evidence and their own words and policies and actions.

> No one will make a large capital investment if it could be shut down in a few years.

They will if they think they can bribe government to give them exemptions to the new rules or they think they can cash out and leave someone else holding the bag before that happens.

Most regulations provide a grandfather clause that exempt existing players in the game.

burning methane does produce NO and NO2 (the N2 being oxidized at temperature). that does come down with precipitation and collect in bodies of water. over time as evaporation removes the water and its replenished with acidic rain, the concentration increases arbitrarily high.

idk how much NOx a GW or two of low efficiency (20%) gas turbine units produces, how wide that plume might be, and what the envionmental impact might be. but if we employed a few people that practice doing this kind of I'm sure they could tell us with high confidence.

Somebody mentioned that a solar panel field to power a data center requires a lot of impact assessment paper work and approvals.

Whereas natural gas generators do not.

Hence the runs on gas turbines, while solar panels are plentiful. ( Although I'd guess the consistency of power is a bigger issue. )

Running existing coal is now supposedly more expensive then putting in new wind or solar ... all else being equal.

If coal doesn't pencil out economically for the grid it still likely won't pencil out economically for data centers even if you remove some of the compliance stuff.

> expect data center to be data center + coal power plant soon

Why do you think that’s likely?

A number of data centres have been proposed in Alberta, including a giant Meta one. Alberta has a derelict, obsolete power grid that can't even serve the current population, so you might wonder how that is possible.

They're coupling them with dedicated natural gas power plants. Meta finally stopped the green charade and simply dropped out of RE100, as they're all just going full speed ahead on destroying the planet.