"We've set a goal to achieve net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030." and, in a table later, "Reduce 50% of our combined Scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 absolute emissions by 2030. Invest in nature-based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize our remaining emissions." and "Run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030."
"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.)
Exactly the same stated goals, just written in a different place. There's more hedging around it now: they call it a "moonshot" and say that they might not manage it, but they never actually promised to do it before.
notatoad · 4h ago
carbon-free energy on every grid where they operate also sounds like a significantly more ambitious goal than net-zero across the company, because it means actual reduction in emissions, rather than relying on offsets.
if it's a serious committment to being carbon-free, i think this sounds like a positive change. if it's a moonshot that they have no real intention of actually meeting, then it's a lot less impressive. i guess we'll see...
IshKebab · 3h ago
> carbon-free energy on every grid where they operate also sounds like a significantly more ambitious goal than net-zero across the company, because it means actual reduction in emission
Not necessarily. In the UK the market for zero-emission electricity is separated from the actual electricity itself. So you basically sell the "greenness" of the electricity separately from the electricity itself. Customers who want green electricity buy the electricity, and buy some "greenness" (called a REGO).
It does make sense, and a lot of people claim it's some kind of scam when it really isn't... But it does make the relationship between the consumption and production of green energy more complex.
For example, suppose 10% of power comes from green energy, but only 5% of people care about it remotely. The market value of a REGO is basically zero. Even if the number of people who care about green energy doubles to 10%, there's still perfect supply so the market value is still zero and it won't have any effect on green energy production. That isn't quite the case but it doesn't seem far off - I couldn't find up-to-date numbers but it seems like the market price of REGOs is on the order of £5-15/MWh, which is very low. Probably because the UK's energy mix is actually very green these days.
No idea how common this system is in other countries.
p1mrx · 2h ago
"24/7 carbon-free energy" is actually a much stronger goal, because (for example) it's physically impossible to buy solar/wind energy on a calm night, so they would need to pay more for an alternative like batteries or nuclear.
jltsiren · 2h ago
It would have been an ambitious goal in 2010. But the fundamental issue with it is similar to buying offsets.
If you are connected to the grid, the power you use is effectively generated by the power plant with the highest marginal costs. That often means fossil fuels. It doesn't matter whether you are buying generic power from the grid, or if you have a contract stating that the power you use is generated by renewables or nuclear. If you disconnect from the grid, the overall demand goes down, and some of the most expensive generation capacity is no longer needed.
In the long term, if there are many customers buying explicitly carbon-free power from the grid, it may increase the construction of new carbon-free generation capacity. But that effect is difficult to quantify.
p1mrx · 2h ago
"In 2024, we increased our 24/7 CFE percentage from 64% to 66%, and nine out of 20 grid regions with Google-owned and -operated data centers achieved at least 80% CFE."
Look at those numbers. 100% still is a very ambitious goal. Currently 0 global customers are buying 24/7 carbon free power from the grid, and even getting from 0 to 1 will require a lot of boots on the ground building real infrastructure. Afterwards, getting from 1 to [everyone] is just a matter of scale.
Even the "lazy" strategy of buying up capacity from existing nuclear plants requires outbidding the existing customers (if the law allows it), and only works in regions where nuclear plants actually exist.
jltsiren · 1h ago
Buying carbon-free power from the grid was a big thing in Finland (and maybe in wider Europe) around 2010. But companies eventually stopped talking about it, as it's mostly greenwashing with limited real-world impact.
p1mrx · 1h ago
Were they buying time-independent blocks of carbon-free power, or 24/7 carbon-free power? The latter is significantly more difficult.
jltsiren · 1h ago
24/7. There was enough hydro and nuclear in the grid, and even more in the connected grids in Norway and Sweden. Most of the time, carbon-free power was no more expensive than generic power, which emphasized how meaningless the entire idea was.
It was a byproduct of the EU habit to create markets and competition where they don't naturally exist. You can buy electricity from any power company, and that company can then generate it itself or buy it from the market. Once you have a market like that, it's easy to add requirements such as carbon-free power. As long as the fraction of the market buying indulgences is lower than the share of the power generation meeting the requirements, fulfilling them is essentially free.
p1mrx · 1h ago
> Most of the time, carbon-free power was no more expensive than generic power
Okay, let's ignore "most of the time" and focus on times when carbon-free power was more expensive. Were these companies actually footing the bill in that case? Because increasing the marginal funding toward clean sources when the grid is dirtiest is the whole point.
jltsiren · 59m ago
You can pay the market price for power or agree on a fixed-term fixed-price contract. In the latter case, the power company carries the risks. The market is cheaper on the average, especially if you can adjust your demand down when the prices are high. Back then, the prices were relatively stable, but today they fluctuate wildly due to the prevalence of wind power.
In any case, carbon-free power from the grid is mostly a legal/financial construct with limited real-world impact. When the grid is dirtiest, market prices are set by fossil fuels with high marginal costs, and clean sources get the same price without any tricks.
simianwords · 4h ago
What’s the real difference? Don’t offsets also do the same thing?
If I emit 5g of CO2 but purchase similar in offsets - the offsets have to achieve a reduction of 5g unless something like a scam is going on.
jampa · 3h ago
"Carbon offsetting is like saying to your husband or spouse: ‘I’m going to cheat, but I’ll buy you a diamond ring.’"
Sometimes, the carbon offsets are from projects that would be built anyway, and there is a lot of sketchiness all around.
It might be better than nothing or it might empower companies to pollute more and then say, "Look, we are offsetting all this!"
shaftway · 3h ago
I like how your example still involves moving carbon around.
foota · 4h ago
Some of these offsets are of dubious quality. E.g., I think some of these offsets are from _not_ doing something that you might have otherwise done, but maybe you wouldn't have done that thing regardless.
simianwords · 4h ago
Interesting. Maybe the offset should be the expected value of co2 that would not be emitted after accounting for probability. It doesn’t seem like a scam fundamentally.
notatoad · 3h ago
i think that's exactly it, it's not fundamentally a scam, but it's not as simple as 1:1 "5g in, 5g out" because there's always some formula to calculate how much carbon has been "saved" by the company selling the offsets taking whatever actions they are taking. which gives the companies selling offsets a financial motive to maximize that calculation, and in some cases does lead to outright scams.
the classic example is landowners selling offsets for the mature forests on their land - that's good! and incentivising the preservation of forests is good! but that forest already existed, and has existed for hundreds of years, so does it really make sense that some company can count it against their carbon emissions and claim to be "net zero" just because they paid a landowner to not cut it down?
it makes the whole concept of offsets less of an overall pure good than emitters simply not emitting carbon in the first place, because that is actually a very simple and clear calculation.
colechristensen · 3h ago
Some of those "avoided" things can be as dumb as having a parcel of forested land that you didn't chop down. Those trees were already there and claims that they might not have otherwise been without a little credit money are questionable.
p1mrx · 2h ago
The biggest problem with carbon offsets is that they're not pinned to a particular time of day.
If you buy a 1 GWh block of wind/solar energy for a month, you're not doing anything to supply clean energy when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing.
"24/7 carbon free" means increasing the time resolution from 1 month to 1 hour, and funding projects that deliver clean energy when you're actually using it. This includes stuff like batteries, nuclear, and geothermal.
stocksinsmocks · 3h ago
That assumes the seller of the offset actually offset something rather than created an opaque paper trail that makes it impossible to know if they did anything at all. I don’t think Carbon market makers have a good track record.
colechristensen · 3h ago
It's going to happen anyway for at least a large portion of every day simply because it's cheaper. Electricity is a sizable chunk of the cost to operate a datacenter and at least while the sun is up, solar is significantly cheaper than any other energy source. Grid scale battery overnights is cheaper but less so obviously.
You don't need climate pledges when the thing you're pledging to do saves you substantial amounts of money, and we really don't need quite so much climate moralizing when now the transition to carbon free electricity seems obvious, inevitable, and imminent because of direct immediate cost.
Now the question is just how can we accelerate this a little without creating false economies or distorting the market too much, just a small incentive here and penalty there along with funding for big projects to make them happen earlier.
p1mrx · 1h ago
> It's going to happen anyway for at least a large portion of every day simply because it's cheaper.
That's precisely why a 24/7 goal matters. Energy is already cheap and clean for a large portion of the day, but covering the rest of the day will require significant investment.
thegreatpeter · 46m ago
How did the journalists who do this full time for a living, miss this part?
downrightmike · 5h ago
They should just pave the mojave with solar panels. Nearly no one lives there and no one wants to live there and it is dead center to western states.
If China can pave mountains, a little desert with caliche should be easy
tjwebbnorfolk · 4h ago
As a rule, if you're tempted to begin any sentence with "they should just..." -- don't.
Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada -- not very eco-friendly, you'd agree? Also the extreme heat destroys solar panels. Also, dust. Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.
There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.
agnokapathetic · 4h ago
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance
not true. in standard HV-AC lines, power losses are ~10% per megameter. HVDC gets to 3-5%. So Nevada to Seattle would be at most 20% loss, and in practice 15%, and with HVDC closer to 7%.
I have no dog in this fight, but this is so impressive it sounds wrong. I don’t think it is wrong, I’m just really blown away
yndoendo · 1h ago
"Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet" by Varun Sivaram [0] is a good source on ways to improve renewable energy from infrastructure design changes. He talks about the HVDC longitude runs that would improve transfer of electricity to areas that may be cloudy where it is sunny during peak.
My point of view with Tesla vs Edison is that they were both right and wrong under select circumstances.
This is where you picture an expanding wireless sphere of transmission from a point source and since the surface area of this sphere grows by the square of the distance you get this "power attenuates by the square of the distance" rule.
This of course doesn't apply to power over a 2D cable.
Aurornis · 4h ago
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance
Power transmission lines at 60Hz primarily have ohmic losses, which are linear with length of the conductor.
Interesting fact - Power transmission lines are long enough that the capacitive and inductive effects do matter a little bit, even though it's only 60Hz. That's why spacing between conductors is important. 3-phase lines will also rotate the order of conductors every so often to keep the average spacing between all pairs of lines similar.
vizzier · 3h ago
The mind boggles at how many little bits of information like this keep our world running smoothly...
strongpigeon · 4h ago
> As a rule, if you're tempted to begin any sentence with "they should just..." -- don't.
Strongly agreed.
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada
What? HVDC lines are usually estimated to have 3.5% power loss per 1000 km. Since power transmission is done using power lines, the inverse square law doesn't really apply here.
> There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.
That does remain true however. Cost concerns, grid access concerns, environmental concerns are all good reasons.
badc0ffee · 3h ago
Confidently, impressively wrong. Imagine how the power grid would work if there were 95% losses over 900 km.
Rebelgecko · 4h ago
Seattle is fine on power, you can pave the parts of the Mojave in California to power California instead (although tbh I think what we need most in CA is storage for when the sun goes down).
I think you can also reduce heat loss by cranking the voltage up, right? I imagine that's how current interstate/cross-country power deals work
downrightmike · 4h ago
Bigger interstate wires hold more power and have a much higher thermal mass, which is fine until someone's tree shorts everything out because lines sag greatly with more heat/power
IncreasePosts · 4h ago
I think you're over estimating losses for high voltage transmission lines. It's "only" 800 miles from the Mojave to seattle.
In China there is a high voltage transmission line over 2000 miles long
derefr · 3h ago
I'll ignore your other points, because sibling comments are addressing them better. So here's something more unique:
> Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.
This is true in general, but in this specific case, there are a lot of obvious ways to get around the problem, because Nevada is a moth-eaten shirt of federal land reservations — Nevada-the-political-entity only owns/regulates ~15% of the land of Nevada-the-geographic-territory.
With the current state of the US federal government, lobbying to privately use one of those federal reservations would be a walk in the park; and once you're going "California -> federal land" instead of "Calfornia -> Nevada", regulation gets a lot simpler.
Fun fact: there's a National Forest in Nye County (bordering California) that runs right up to the edge of the DoE-reserved area where they did the nuke tests. The feds are fine with running HVDC lines through National Forests (they're not Parks, after all), and "repurposing nuked ground for solar" is actually an easy-to-sell narrative at all levels. You could build solar there and backhaul it to California without ever touching land regulated by Nevada-the-political-entity.
amanaplanacanal · 4h ago
Seattle isn't a good example, as they have been carbon neutral since 2005. They have lots of hydro power in the Pacific Northwest.
dwedge · 4h ago
Paving deserts with black heat absorbers that are only 10-20% efficient in converting that energy to electricity could well end up affecting climate more than burning coal would
glenstein · 3h ago
1% from a Dyson Sphere would be a better energy return than 100% efficiency from any conventional energy sorce. Similarly, 20% from solar is competitive with 60% from nuclear, 50% from coal, and is easily better than 100% from my neighbor Dan riding a bicycle powered electricity generator.
You can't cite efficiency percentages in a vacuum to imply they are a better or worse than alternatives, because those aren't percentages of the same kinds of things, and they don't tell you about the economics, production in absolute terms or EROEI.
Ardon · 3h ago
The solar panels would overheat (and lose efficiency), since ~80% of the solar energy hitting it is absorbed as (mostly) heat.
Generating solar energy in deserts is often done with a mirror based heating system for this reason.
glenstein · 1h ago
Something like 98-99% installed solar capacity in the American southwest is traditional PV. Mirrors are there, and they're awesome, but PV dominates.
PV are designed to account for heat and "less efficiency" means they risk performing at 17-18% instead of 20%. And it's actually generating more total energy at 18% because more total sunlight is hitting it, an advantage in desserts.
Ardon · 29m ago
Yeah that's true.
I was thinking more long term though, deserts see much faster yearly degradation than places with more normal temps. (up to 2-3% compared to the standard 0.5-0.8%)
That's just an economic factor rather than a blocker. PVs are cheap as right now, and could be even cheaper if they weren't tariffed. I wouldn't be surprised if PVs in the desert is nonetheless the right approach right now, and not concentrators.
easygenes · 3h ago
Definitely not. At global scale, the offset effects of solar installations outweigh albedo effects on the order of about 30x. [0][1]
Amazon claimed their energy usage was "matched with 100% renewable energy" in 2023, while Google's goal is to actually "run on 24/7 carbon-free energy".
Google already claims to have matched 100% of their energy with renewables since 2017.
deelowe · 3h ago
Carbon offsets are not the same as being carbon neutral.
mullingitover · 6h 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.
ActorNightly · 4h ago
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)
worik · 2h ago
> 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 · 1h ago
> * 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 · 1h ago
> 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.
dfxm12 · 6h ago
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.
wcunning · 5h ago
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 · 4h ago
>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 · 4h ago
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 · 4h ago
> 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 · 2h ago
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:
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 · 4h ago
This. Both parties in the market are in on the same scam to fool the end customer and shareholders
Muromec · 4h ago
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
Filligree · 5h ago
Who would want to? Solar power is cheaper than any alternative, so long as you’re allowed to use it.
HardCodedBias · 4h ago
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 · 4h ago
this is not true. solar+battery+natural gas backup is cheaper than any other form of power by a lot.
nostrademons · 2h ago
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.
dpkirchner · 6h ago
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.
No comments yet
lawlessone · 5h ago
Probably both really.
photochemsyn · 5h ago
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.
yieldcrv · 5h ago
> 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.
mullingitover · 5h ago
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.
cosmic_cheese · 5h ago
If you’re really smart, you exploit the cheap solar panels to provide energy for your own solar panel factories.
ajross · 5h ago
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 · 3h ago
> 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.
thrance · 4h ago
> 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 · 5h ago
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.
amanaplanacanal · 4h ago
If China wants to subsidize solar panels for me, I'm all for it.
triceratops · 4h ago
> 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 · 5h ago
> 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 · 5h ago
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 · 2h ago
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.
micromacrofoot · 4h ago
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
boringg · 5h ago
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.
adgjlsfhk1 · 3h ago
reducing air pollution in the US is good too.
30-40 years of cheap, CO2 free energy sounds pretty good to me.
throw9394494i88 · 5h ago
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!
cenamus · 5h ago
Except when the panels stop nothing happens for 20 something years?
physhster · 5h ago
Better than not having solar panels at all...
triceratops · 4h ago
> 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.
unethical_ban · 5h ago
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.
immibis · 5h ago
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 · 5h ago
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 · 4h ago
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 · 5h ago
remarkable
koolala · 5h ago
please use a /s for sarcasm like this
barbazoo · 6h ago
> “Running the global infrastructure behind our products and services, including AI, takes considerable energy,” said Google in its Environment 2025 report, which explained that it will be almost impossible to meet its erstwhile net-zero ambitions, partly due to its expansion in AI.
Greed, greed, greed. They'd rather see the world burn than not be first in AI whatever that means. They could still achieve net zero, they have just chosen not to. Unimaginable amounts of money but it's never enough.
boringg · 5h ago
So they don't make net zero but they still continue to improve their operations and have a lighter green footprint while maintaining themselves in the great AI race.
Can anyone shed any light on the difference between net-zero and what they will actually be able to achieve? Will be hard given that the workloads for AI have sucked up all available energy resources. I have to think at the margin it is getting very expensive to acquire those resources.
wnevets · 6h ago
Capitalism is the most efficient system for resource allocation or something.
dlachausse · 6h ago
Do you have an example of an alternative economic system that is more efficient at resource allocation in practice, not just theory?
throw-qqqqq · 6h ago
No alternatives have been tried on a global scale, so I don’t think anyone has the practical evidence you request.
dlachausse · 6h ago
I think a large nation the size of the former Soviet Union or China should be enough to invalidate communism and centrally planned economies if that’s what you’re suggesting.
nathan_compton · 5h ago
I guess ask a Chinese person? Like I'm sure many Chinese people aren't happy about the way their state functions, but the vast majority of them live their lives pretty much like we do. I don't know if I would take that as a total invalidation of whatever it is they have over there. Would I prefer a western style system? Definitely, but I'm not sure its so easy to point at China and say "this is an abject failure."
In fact, quite the opposite: most of the poverty reduction in the last 50 years has been in China, for example. Most of the cheap stuff we buy is manufactured there. Being the "factory of the world" doesn't seem like a definitive invalidation of that system.
ackfoobar · 4h ago
The poverty reduction comes from the Chinese "Communist" Party adopting capitalism.
nathan_compton · 4h ago
This is a pretty glib way of putting it. The chinese system isn't really capitalism, at least not of the "free market" type. Like I'm not saying that communism is responsible for the improvements in poverty, but I am saying that a significantly non-capitalist system has resulted in big changes. My point is that we often talk like anything that is not a pure capitalism is bound to grind to a halt and be catastrophically bad, but that isn't true.
kjkjadksj · 5h ago
Those just invalidate totalitarianism. On the other hand, the US government uplifted itself from the great depression and won WWII thanks to a centrally planned economy. People like to forget about that fact though.
dlachausse · 5h ago
How do you achieve nation or world scale communism without totalitarianism? I am one of many people who know the history of communism’s failures and will never accept it willingly.
frank_nitti · 5h ago
I would be more interested to see your response to the key point of their comment - that the US exemplified this on a large scale in recent history.
That would be more compelling than to simply claim to have a lot of knowledge of history
dlachausse · 3h ago
I don’t think the World War II economy is repeatable today. It was a time of great patriotism with the majority of the nation supporting the war. People were willing to sacrifice for the cause and accept rationing of goods and making substitutions. They also knew that these sacrifices were temporary and helped their loved ones win the war and hopefully return to them sooner.
Today in America it is hard to get more than half the population to agree on anything. There is no unifying catalyst to bring about the consensus, cooperation, and personal sacrifice that would be necessary to implement a centrally planned economy in the United States today.
kjkjadksj · 1h ago
We already have communism to a certain degree in every democratic government. You already accept it willingly. It is just a matter of expanding more government programs on top of sectors being squatted by rent seekers looking to make money without actual contribution to the economy beyond rent seeking from those that do contribute to the economy. The only hard part is that rent seekers tend to have an outsized influence on politics than workers.
Really, what is the utility of a rent seeker? By definition they are a leach on the actual productive elements of an economy. A waste. An inefficiency. I mean, you pay someone to do something, but you have to pay them even more than what might be required because they have this nonworking person sustaining themselves on rent seeking you also need to pay stuck on that back of that worker. That is the situation in so many economic sectors. It leads to a huge loss of money and productivity objectively. It leads to businesses outsourcing labor due to the artificial costs brought on by speculative rent seekers in a given local economy.
My landlord has no job. They collect probably 16k in rent a month from all the units in the small complex in which they raise rents yearly. In terms of investment in the property they once hired a handyman to cauk my sink so probably not even $200 a unit a year in overhead on average. They don’t do renovations or any work between tenants beyond sweeping up the floors and they try and keep as much security deposit for themselves as possible for stupid things. I pay a substantial portion of my income not to upkeep the roof over my head, but to ensure my landlord can have an upper class existence in a high cost of living area while not having to work a job and contribute any labor or ideas.
Does that seem like a good system to you? Enabling freeloaders to leech off the people doing the actual work that makes the world spin, to a point where they are paid far more than most workers? Passing that lifestyle to their nonworking children through inheritance? Essentially creating a hidden nonworking feudal kingdom sustained by the functional economy? One that has outsized political and media influence to ensure the boat is not rocked? Really think about what is actually happening in our economy.
nashashmi · 5h ago
Resource allocation? Yes, normal socioeconomics. But did it have rapid growth trajectory? No. It lacked the ambition needed to drive humanity to maximum consumerism.
Before capitalism and communism was a thing, we had normal economics. And the worst part of this in some places was the bourgeoisie. They kept the resources in their control. And communism was supposed to be a banging of the piñata that shook the tree. Capitalism was a response to communism, yet installed a basic transition to a socialist education system and for educational wealth to be added.
I guess a good antidote to bad actors is for a wealth tax. Unused or underutilized wealth gets taxed until the net tax is reduced to whatever financial return it has.
abdullahkhalids · 5h ago
There are none. But I don't want the economic system to be judged by its ability to do resource allocation. I want my economic system to be judged by its ability to improve metrics of human well being - and not even the median well-being, but the well-being of say the 10% percentile person in society.
Sure, resource allocation can be a instrumental to those goals of human well being, but not the directly optimized metric. So, for example, I care very little gdp/capita when you can just as easily measure life expectancy or food stress levels.
On such counts, capitalism has a mixed record. Today, for example, a lot of countries that are "more capitalistic" than others have poorer metrics of human development than those that are "less capitalistic".
Muromec · 4h ago
>There are none. But I don't want the economic system to be judged by its ability to do resource allocation. I want my economic system to be judged by its ability to improve metrics of human well being - and not even the median well-being, but the well-being of say the 10% percentile person in society.
That requires resource allocation as a prerequisite and a functioning democracy that values this metric. Blaming the first one for not having the latter is a choice, but a strange one.
astrobe_ · 2h ago
Not so strange. Just like communism slips to oligarchy, capitalism slips to plutocracy, and as such actively undermines democracy. It doesn't that campaign budgets are capped when you have the right media owners on your side.
People decide on resource allocation, period. It is as "efficient" as choosing human laws versus natural selection, the latter being exactly the model capitalism is copied from.
_Algernon_ · 5h ago
One issue with capitalism — and every alternative system would have its own variant of this problem — is rent seeking. Players become so powerful within the economic system that they no longer play by the rules, but rather write the rules to their benefit. This allows them to extract value instead of creating value.
This is a run-away positive feedback loop which is kept in check by regular revolt and redistribution of wealth (see eg. the labor movement).
abdullahkhalids · 4h ago
Yes. The obvious solution is to either design your politico-economic system that big players never emerge, or are such that they don't have incentives to corrupt (eg. SOE).
Another example of the latter, is that large companies should always be majority owned by their employees in a 1/N fashion. The idea being that even if such players try to rent-seek, at least the rent is being extracted in favor of normal people rather than a small class of rich people.
parthdesai · 6h ago
AI is literally an existential threat to their business, what are you talking about?
yifanl · 5h ago
If the only way to appease shareholders next quarter was to detonate an ICBM in Times Square, do you do it?
gosub100 · 5h ago
That's a strange way to spell "competition". Where is it written that environmental considerations go out the window when having to compete in business?
dlachausse · 6h ago
More than any other company, Google needs to succeed in AI. AI chat has already replaced search engines for many people. Nearly all of Google’s revenue comes from advertising.
watwut · 5h ago
Funny enough, that was googles choice. And They made the search worst was consciously as a business strategy, because worst search meant more queries.
And they forced ai on top of search because they wanted to.
munk-a · 5h ago
They're a dinosaur and have forgotten how to innovate and provide new value. This is what complacency and shifting your business to focus on regulatory capture ultimately leads to.
ncruces · 3h ago
Are their competitors more energy efficient somehow?
This is a thread about them not being able to meet carbon neutrality commitments because of AI, which they feel they need to because competitors are eating their lunch.
Are the competitors not eating their lunch? Are they doing so because they're more green? Otherwise what are they expected to do? Not compete? “Innovate” themselves out of not needing energy consuming AI?
dmbche · 4h ago
Shit, I hadn't had that thought but it's self evident, the "worse search = more queries". Thanks for the insight.
jm4 · 6h ago
They have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Bailing on AI because they can't do that and also be net-zero is a good way to get sued.
munk-a · 5h ago
Never before have I heard of lighting a pile of cash on fire being a fiduciary duty. Post-GPT AI may eventually prove a highly profitable venture - right now the only people making money are the shovel sellers and most of the launched applications can't seem to attract users at a price point that's sustainable.
fmbb · 5h ago
Sued for what?
AI is not making anyone money except Nvidia.
kjkjadksj · 5h ago
Don’t the shareholders benefit from having an earth worth investing in that isn’t falling apart from climate catastrophe in a few decades?
watwut · 5h ago
Actually, fiduciary duty is not actually a mandate to be a maximal psychopath nor a mandate to spend billions on high risk investments.
As in, fiduciary duty does not prevent companies from being net-zero nor does it mandate AI.
goku12 · 3h ago
Our economy is energy-starved and our biosphere is in a precarious situation. Meanwhile, the current generation of AI is energy inefficient as hell, for both training and inference. They need massive datacenters to teach a model what little kids learn effortlessly. The two are neither compatible, nor sustainable. What fraction of AI training and inference is justifiable under the current circumstances? I understand that AI has some novel and urgent applications, including for tackling the crisis itself. But if the justification for AI chatbots for people too lazy to do an old-fashioned web search is corporate profits against the destruction of massive amounts of biomass, we better apply the emergency brakes on it fast. The biosphere and countless lives are vastly more important than the greed of a few rich people who don't even know what to do with the wealth they have.
Simon_O_Rourke · 5h ago
Jeez, those guys just get more evil by the day. We're not too far from them joining in the local seal clubbing expedition.
goku12 · 4h ago
I don't think they started that way. Most companies start with lofty idealistic goals that motivate them to reach financial self sustainability. However from that point of time, any company is at risk of being taken over by people whose only motivation is wealth. They crossed that landmark a long time ago.
Not a week goes by without another news of one of their latest transgressions. At this point, news like this isn't a sign of something worsening over there. It's just them carrying on with their mission to subvert each safeguard in the pursuit of that little bit extra profit.
neuroelectron · 4h ago
I feel like I should delete my gmail account but the way I use it is probably costing them more to maintain it than it's worth.
gmuslera · 6h ago
Don't worry, in 100 years whatever remains of human civilization will be net zero.
Maybe it should be the governments responsibility to ensure clean power is available? Why do private businesses need to resort to this kind of posturing.
nemo44x · 3h ago
Google decision makers are obviously very smart people. Do decisions like this mean they acknowledge that net-zero is more a political ideal than an actually effective policy? After all, if they truly believed this was an existential issue they’d make every effort.
some_random · 6h ago
To be somewhat pessimistic, these pledges always struck me as being fairweather, politically motivated, and deliberately gamed. That's not to say that it's meaningless there's definitely some good work being done, it's just that I don't think that work is all that connected to the pledges.
matthewdgreen · 5h ago
Pledges are good. They give executives something to point to when they make short-term less-profitable decisions, and insulate them from shareholder lawsuits. Essentially then (and ESG) are a very lightweight opportunity to drive some long-term decision making into what is otherwise a relentlessly selfish and short term process.
And as the expression goes: who knows, perhaps the horse will learn how to sing.
gosub100 · 5h ago
Case in point: the work from home policies that have been largely rescinded since COVID.
Net-zero is a bad goal, it set you up for failure in other area.
EX: zero death from Covid, oh, we fck the next generation with isolation and screen.
I singular objective like that make you blind, it become a god you sacrifice everything else to.
4ndrewl · 4h ago
I mean, if there's one thing we know about Google - give it a few years and they'll ditch that thing they were _so_ into. Products, principles, whatever.
mempko · 6h ago
The lesson here is clear, corporations won't do anything that's good for the ecology and survivability of our species unless forced.
kjkjadksj · 5h ago
If only we could remind them somehow that inevitable migration, famine, and mass death is not as profitable as alternatives.
nathan_compton · 5h ago
We could "remind them" by passing laws that made them pay for externalities.
jeffbee · 4h ago
Like, uniquely among all other industries? You don't think the petrochemical industry, for example, needs to pay for its larger externalities?
nathan_compton · 4h ago
I think pretty much all industries could be paying more taxes.
jeffbee · 3h ago
Big same, friend. But the kinds of people who think taxing externalities of AI would be a big victory are going to be extremely mad about $8/gal motor fuels.
_Algernon_ · 4h ago
Who passes those laws? The politicians bought and paid for by the same companies?
goku12 · 3h ago
That's the failure of the people. Those politicians are supposed to represent their constituents - not their highest bidder. Democracy is not a system where people choose a politician and hand them the power and authority over themselves for the next half a decade. Instead, people have to constantly and consistently boss them and hold them accountable. This is the duty of every citizen towards a democratic constitution, without which the latter is not even viable.
I know what response to expect for the above. It will be contemptuously dismissed with the remark that it's just a fantasy. But I hope you're seeing the congress people running out of town halls via the backdoors in disgrace after their constituents heckled them and challenged their demagoguery. Sadly, it's a tad bit late. This should have been the response to much less provocation. Still, many of those politicians are now afraid to blindly endorse the ideas of their overlords. This concept isn't new either. This was widely experimented with during the French revolution. They had provisions to recall and replace the reps in such instances. What people need are political education and a strong allegiance to the constitution.
lwo32k · 4h ago
The Vatican has survived all that including the fall of countless nations and empires. Guess how they did it?
kjkjadksj · 1h ago
Unfortunately not all of us can establish a religion capable of organizing a continents worth of peasants into being alright with the status quo that keeps a boot on their neck.
micromacrofoot · 4h ago
for people continually chasing power that eventuality is actually an upside
kjkjadksj · 1h ago
I’m sure many aristocrats buried without a head in France also thought their money would buy security from mob justice and insulate them from the breakdown of the social hierarchy that protected them in the first place.
hungmung · 5h ago
I strongly suspect that the net zero thing is at least half bullshit anyway, and probably more like 90%. We have forests on paper that have no basis in reality, either because of wildfires or because they just planted seedlings in summer and they died immediately. Those carbon credits don't get negated though. But now you get a forest of carbon in the atmo + whatever emissions those credits justified, while "conscious consumers" pat themselves on the back for choosing net zero products.
Where there is a layer of abstraction involving money, there is always bullshit.
themgt · 6h ago
We made a pledge "to prove that a carbon-free future is both possible and achievable fast enough to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change", but it turned out generating a short AI slop video uses 110kWh of energy. Anyhow, ...
Previously, on https://sustainability.google/operating-sustainably/:
"We've set a goal to achieve net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030." and, in a table later, "Reduce 50% of our combined Scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 absolute emissions by 2030. Invest in nature-based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize our remaining emissions." and "Run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030."
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.)
Exactly the same stated goals, just written in a different place. There's more hedging around it now: they call it a "moonshot" and say that they might not manage it, but they never actually promised to do it before.
if it's a serious committment to being carbon-free, i think this sounds like a positive change. if it's a moonshot that they have no real intention of actually meeting, then it's a lot less impressive. i guess we'll see...
Not necessarily. In the UK the market for zero-emission electricity is separated from the actual electricity itself. So you basically sell the "greenness" of the electricity separately from the electricity itself. Customers who want green electricity buy the electricity, and buy some "greenness" (called a REGO).
It does make sense, and a lot of people claim it's some kind of scam when it really isn't... But it does make the relationship between the consumption and production of green energy more complex.
For example, suppose 10% of power comes from green energy, but only 5% of people care about it remotely. The market value of a REGO is basically zero. Even if the number of people who care about green energy doubles to 10%, there's still perfect supply so the market value is still zero and it won't have any effect on green energy production. That isn't quite the case but it doesn't seem far off - I couldn't find up-to-date numbers but it seems like the market price of REGOs is on the order of £5-15/MWh, which is very low. Probably because the UK's energy mix is actually very green these days.
No idea how common this system is in other countries.
If you are connected to the grid, the power you use is effectively generated by the power plant with the highest marginal costs. That often means fossil fuels. It doesn't matter whether you are buying generic power from the grid, or if you have a contract stating that the power you use is generated by renewables or nuclear. If you disconnect from the grid, the overall demand goes down, and some of the most expensive generation capacity is no longer needed.
In the long term, if there are many customers buying explicitly carbon-free power from the grid, it may increase the construction of new carbon-free generation capacity. But that effect is difficult to quantify.
Look at those numbers. 100% still is a very ambitious goal. Currently 0 global customers are buying 24/7 carbon free power from the grid, and even getting from 0 to 1 will require a lot of boots on the ground building real infrastructure. Afterwards, getting from 1 to [everyone] is just a matter of scale.
Even the "lazy" strategy of buying up capacity from existing nuclear plants requires outbidding the existing customers (if the law allows it), and only works in regions where nuclear plants actually exist.
It was a byproduct of the EU habit to create markets and competition where they don't naturally exist. You can buy electricity from any power company, and that company can then generate it itself or buy it from the market. Once you have a market like that, it's easy to add requirements such as carbon-free power. As long as the fraction of the market buying indulgences is lower than the share of the power generation meeting the requirements, fulfilling them is essentially free.
Okay, let's ignore "most of the time" and focus on times when carbon-free power was more expensive. Were these companies actually footing the bill in that case? Because increasing the marginal funding toward clean sources when the grid is dirtiest is the whole point.
In any case, carbon-free power from the grid is mostly a legal/financial construct with limited real-world impact. When the grid is dirtiest, market prices are set by fossil fuels with high marginal costs, and clean sources get the same price without any tricks.
If I emit 5g of CO2 but purchase similar in offsets - the offsets have to achieve a reduction of 5g unless something like a scam is going on.
Sometimes, the carbon offsets are from projects that would be built anyway, and there is a lot of sketchiness all around.
It might be better than nothing or it might empower companies to pollute more and then say, "Look, we are offsetting all this!"
the classic example is landowners selling offsets for the mature forests on their land - that's good! and incentivising the preservation of forests is good! but that forest already existed, and has existed for hundreds of years, so does it really make sense that some company can count it against their carbon emissions and claim to be "net zero" just because they paid a landowner to not cut it down?
it makes the whole concept of offsets less of an overall pure good than emitters simply not emitting carbon in the first place, because that is actually a very simple and clear calculation.
If you buy a 1 GWh block of wind/solar energy for a month, you're not doing anything to supply clean energy when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing.
"24/7 carbon free" means increasing the time resolution from 1 month to 1 hour, and funding projects that deliver clean energy when you're actually using it. This includes stuff like batteries, nuclear, and geothermal.
You don't need climate pledges when the thing you're pledging to do saves you substantial amounts of money, and we really don't need quite so much climate moralizing when now the transition to carbon free electricity seems obvious, inevitable, and imminent because of direct immediate cost.
Now the question is just how can we accelerate this a little without creating false economies or distorting the market too much, just a small incentive here and penalty there along with funding for big projects to make them happen earlier.
That's precisely why a 24/7 goal matters. Energy is already cheap and clean for a large portion of the day, but covering the rest of the day will require significant investment.
If China can pave mountains, a little desert with caliche should be easy
Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada -- not very eco-friendly, you'd agree? Also the extreme heat destroys solar panels. Also, dust. Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.
There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.
not true. in standard HV-AC lines, power losses are ~10% per megameter. HVDC gets to 3-5%. So Nevada to Seattle would be at most 20% loss, and in practice 15%, and with HVDC closer to 7%.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/1...
My point of view with Tesla vs Edison is that they were both right and wrong under select circumstances.
[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537070/taming-the-sun/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
This is where you picture an expanding wireless sphere of transmission from a point source and since the surface area of this sphere grows by the square of the distance you get this "power attenuates by the square of the distance" rule.
This of course doesn't apply to power over a 2D cable.
Power transmission lines at 60Hz primarily have ohmic losses, which are linear with length of the conductor.
Interesting fact - Power transmission lines are long enough that the capacitive and inductive effects do matter a little bit, even though it's only 60Hz. That's why spacing between conductors is important. 3-phase lines will also rotate the order of conductors every so often to keep the average spacing between all pairs of lines similar.
Strongly agreed.
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada
What? HVDC lines are usually estimated to have 3.5% power loss per 1000 km. Since power transmission is done using power lines, the inverse square law doesn't really apply here.
> There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.
That does remain true however. Cost concerns, grid access concerns, environmental concerns are all good reasons.
I think you can also reduce heat loss by cranking the voltage up, right? I imagine that's how current interstate/cross-country power deals work
> Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.
This is true in general, but in this specific case, there are a lot of obvious ways to get around the problem, because Nevada is a moth-eaten shirt of federal land reservations — Nevada-the-political-entity only owns/regulates ~15% of the land of Nevada-the-geographic-territory.
With the current state of the US federal government, lobbying to privately use one of those federal reservations would be a walk in the park; and once you're going "California -> federal land" instead of "Calfornia -> Nevada", regulation gets a lot simpler.
Fun fact: there's a National Forest in Nye County (bordering California) that runs right up to the edge of the DoE-reserved area where they did the nuke tests. The feds are fine with running HVDC lines through National Forests (they're not Parks, after all), and "repurposing nuked ground for solar" is actually an easy-to-sell narrative at all levels. You could build solar there and backhaul it to California without ever touching land regulated by Nevada-the-political-entity.
You can't cite efficiency percentages in a vacuum to imply they are a better or worse than alternatives, because those aren't percentages of the same kinds of things, and they don't tell you about the economics, production in absolute terms or EROEI.
Generating solar energy in deserts is often done with a mirror based heating system for this reason.
PV are designed to account for heat and "less efficiency" means they risk performing at 17-18% instead of 20%. And it's actually generating more total energy at 18% because more total sunlight is hitting it, an advantage in desserts.
I was thinking more long term though, deserts see much faster yearly degradation than places with more normal temps. (up to 2-3% compared to the standard 0.5-0.8%)
That's just an economic factor rather than a blocker. PVs are cheap as right now, and could be even cheaper if they weren't tariffed. I wouldn't be surprised if PVs in the desert is nonetheless the right approach right now, and not concentrators.
Coal starts with pulling down entire mountains to get to the coal. The whole process starts with environmental destruction and that's how it ends.
The thermal mass of the panels is no where near significant. Especially compared to a run away greenhouse effect we know coal to cause.
This is reasonable, it's a nearly impossible goal to achieve.
Meanwhile: "Amazon meets 100% renewable energy goal 7 years early"[1]
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-renew...
Google already claims to have matched 100% of their energy with renewables since 2017.
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.
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
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.
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.
Which is good, because carbon offset are a scam.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
But your point otherwise stands; solar + battery is cheaper than any fossil fuel form of power.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And at the cost of the future, period. Climate change promises to be extremely onerous to future generations, from a purely economical POV.
And it would be a lot cheaper to run those factories if solar power were cheap.
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.
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.
this is just a massive self-own at this point
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.
30-40 years of cheap, CO2 free energy sounds pretty good to me.
Edit: US has no competitive way to manufacture panels, and 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.
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.
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.
Greed, greed, greed. They'd rather see the world burn than not be first in AI whatever that means. They could still achieve net zero, they have just chosen not to. Unimaginable amounts of money but it's never enough.
Can anyone shed any light on the difference between net-zero and what they will actually be able to achieve? Will be hard given that the workloads for AI have sucked up all available energy resources. I have to think at the margin it is getting very expensive to acquire those resources.
In fact, quite the opposite: most of the poverty reduction in the last 50 years has been in China, for example. Most of the cheap stuff we buy is manufactured there. Being the "factory of the world" doesn't seem like a definitive invalidation of that system.
That would be more compelling than to simply claim to have a lot of knowledge of history
Today in America it is hard to get more than half the population to agree on anything. There is no unifying catalyst to bring about the consensus, cooperation, and personal sacrifice that would be necessary to implement a centrally planned economy in the United States today.
Really, what is the utility of a rent seeker? By definition they are a leach on the actual productive elements of an economy. A waste. An inefficiency. I mean, you pay someone to do something, but you have to pay them even more than what might be required because they have this nonworking person sustaining themselves on rent seeking you also need to pay stuck on that back of that worker. That is the situation in so many economic sectors. It leads to a huge loss of money and productivity objectively. It leads to businesses outsourcing labor due to the artificial costs brought on by speculative rent seekers in a given local economy.
My landlord has no job. They collect probably 16k in rent a month from all the units in the small complex in which they raise rents yearly. In terms of investment in the property they once hired a handyman to cauk my sink so probably not even $200 a unit a year in overhead on average. They don’t do renovations or any work between tenants beyond sweeping up the floors and they try and keep as much security deposit for themselves as possible for stupid things. I pay a substantial portion of my income not to upkeep the roof over my head, but to ensure my landlord can have an upper class existence in a high cost of living area while not having to work a job and contribute any labor or ideas.
Does that seem like a good system to you? Enabling freeloaders to leech off the people doing the actual work that makes the world spin, to a point where they are paid far more than most workers? Passing that lifestyle to their nonworking children through inheritance? Essentially creating a hidden nonworking feudal kingdom sustained by the functional economy? One that has outsized political and media influence to ensure the boat is not rocked? Really think about what is actually happening in our economy.
Before capitalism and communism was a thing, we had normal economics. And the worst part of this in some places was the bourgeoisie. They kept the resources in their control. And communism was supposed to be a banging of the piñata that shook the tree. Capitalism was a response to communism, yet installed a basic transition to a socialist education system and for educational wealth to be added.
I guess a good antidote to bad actors is for a wealth tax. Unused or underutilized wealth gets taxed until the net tax is reduced to whatever financial return it has.
Sure, resource allocation can be a instrumental to those goals of human well being, but not the directly optimized metric. So, for example, I care very little gdp/capita when you can just as easily measure life expectancy or food stress levels.
On such counts, capitalism has a mixed record. Today, for example, a lot of countries that are "more capitalistic" than others have poorer metrics of human development than those that are "less capitalistic".
That requires resource allocation as a prerequisite and a functioning democracy that values this metric. Blaming the first one for not having the latter is a choice, but a strange one.
People decide on resource allocation, period. It is as "efficient" as choosing human laws versus natural selection, the latter being exactly the model capitalism is copied from.
This is a run-away positive feedback loop which is kept in check by regular revolt and redistribution of wealth (see eg. the labor movement).
Another example of the latter, is that large companies should always be majority owned by their employees in a 1/N fashion. The idea being that even if such players try to rent-seek, at least the rent is being extracted in favor of normal people rather than a small class of rich people.
And they forced ai on top of search because they wanted to.
This is a thread about them not being able to meet carbon neutrality commitments because of AI, which they feel they need to because competitors are eating their lunch.
Are the competitors not eating their lunch? Are they doing so because they're more green? Otherwise what are they expected to do? Not compete? “Innovate” themselves out of not needing energy consuming AI?
AI is not making anyone money except Nvidia.
As in, fiduciary duty does not prevent companies from being net-zero nor does it mandate AI.
Not a week goes by without another news of one of their latest transgressions. At this point, news like this isn't a sign of something worsening over there. It's just them carrying on with their mission to subvert each safeguard in the pursuit of that little bit extra profit.
And as the expression goes: who knows, perhaps the horse will learn how to sing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_gov...
EX: zero death from Covid, oh, we fck the next generation with isolation and screen.
I singular objective like that make you blind, it become a god you sacrifice everything else to.
I know what response to expect for the above. It will be contemptuously dismissed with the remark that it's just a fantasy. But I hope you're seeing the congress people running out of town halls via the backdoors in disgrace after their constituents heckled them and challenged their demagoguery. Sadly, it's a tad bit late. This should have been the response to much less provocation. Still, many of those politicians are now afraid to blindly endorse the ideas of their overlords. This concept isn't new either. This was widely experimented with during the French revolution. They had provisions to recall and replace the reps in such instances. What people need are political education and a strong allegiance to the constitution.
Where there is a layer of abstraction involving money, there is always bullshit.