“Washington Post: Big Tech Loves Coal”, by DAVID BLACKMON

You have to love the Big Tech companies’ insisting their operations are “green” when they will be powered mainly by coal plants. The hypocrisy is so thick you could slice it with a knife.

Washington Post: Big Tech Loves Coal

DAVID BLACKMON

OCT 12, 2024

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By now, we are all aware of the enormous new demand the rapid multiplication of data centers to feed AI and other new technological advancements is placing on the US regional power grids. The new demand from big tech is being added to an electric system already strained by huge demands from Bitcoin mining, EV charging, and general population growth and economic expansion.

This demand growth is now completely overwhelming the ability of power companies to build new electric generating capacity rapidly enough to keep up. This is especially true for companies operating in areas that restrict such new generating capacity to be “green,” i.e. intermittent wind and solar. These data centers and other big power demand hogs require reliable generation, 24 hours a day, 7 days every week, so something has to give.

With governments at all levels clinging to regulations and permitting processes designed to accommodate a world long in the past, the explosion in new demand is creating unintended consequences that are destined to utterly eliminate any remaining chance the US and other western nations will be able to meet their fantasy “netzero by 2050” pledges.

In a slanted story out today, The Washington Post chronicles one such unintended consequence in which an explosion of new Big Tech data centers in the Omaha, Nebraska area is forcing the local electric utility to delay closing of not one, but two big coal-fired power plants.

Here’s an excerpt:

A utility promised to stop burning coal. Then Google and Meta came to town.

Story by Evan Halper

OMAHA — Residents in the low-income, largely minority neighborhood of North Omaha celebrated when they learned a 1950s-era power plant nearby would finally stop burning coal. The community has some of the region’s worst air pollution and high rates of asthma.

But when the 2023 deadline to rid that plant of coal arrived, the power company that owns it balked. Eliminating toxic emissions conflicted with a competing priority: serving massive, power-hungry Meta and Google data centers the utility helped recruit to the region before it secured enough new energy to meet the extra demand.

The fast-growing data centers — which provide computing power for artificial intelligence — are driving explosive growth in the area’s energy use. Electricity demand in Omaha has increased so much overall, according to the Omaha Public Power District, that permanently switching off the two coal-burning generators at its North Omaha plant could buckle the area’s electricity system.

“A promise was made, and then they broke it,” said Cheryl Weston, who has lived for five decades in North Omaha. “The tech companies bear responsibility for this. The coal plant is still open because they need all this energy to grow.”

Coal is now planned to burn in North Omaha through 2026, according to the utility, although Weston and other critics are skeptical it will stop then.

The disputes in Omaha over data centers and power demand are playing out across the United States. Rapid data center growth has also been accompanied by utility plans to prolong the use of coal in Georgia, Utah and Wisconsin. The Nebraska story reveals in detail how the race by giant technology companies to gain the advantage in AI is conflicting with climate goals and potentially harming public health.

The Omaha Public Power District blames the missed closure date for its North Omaha coal-burning units on the slow arrival of clean energy supplies from wind and solar, which have met with heavy opposition in rural areas. It also cites regulatory delays that have slowed a plan to replace coal-burning units with natural gas, pointing to long waits to connect new projects to the regional electrical grid and mandates for minimum power supplies. But others in the energy industry say that’s not the full story.

The electricity that Google and Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — are devouring is a major factor in the extension of coal burning, they say. According to the utility’s own estimates, two-thirds of projected growth in demand in the Omaha area is attributable to the massive data centers rising largely on former farmland in the surrounding prairie.

“If not for the data centers and poor planning by the utility, they would not need to push to keep those coal units open,” said Devi Glick, a principal at the consulting firm Synapse Energy Economics. “It is disingenuous to say that is not what is driving this.”

The data centers’ need for electricity is enormous. Meta’s Nebraska data center alone used nearly as much energy as the North Omaha coal units produced in 2023, company and federal energy disclosures show. It is enough electricity to power more than half the homes in Omaha.

Google’s electricity use in the Omaha region eclipses that of Meta, according to tracking by the research firm DC Byte. The data shows Google uses more total electricity in Nebraska than anywhere in the United States.

The conflicts in Omaha are not unique. Companies are scouring the nation for alternative sites for data centers as they encounter land and energy shortages in tech hubs such as Northern Virginia and California’s Bay Area. Communities that recently landed on the radar of Silicon Valley are being visited by battalions of tech executives, energy developers and real estate brokers looking for power.

Omaha emerged as prime territory because of its bountiful, cheap electricity and seemingly endless opportunities to convert cornfields into vast solar and wind farms.

Despite the slow arrival of new solar and wind sources into the utility’s portfolio, tech companies insist their data center operations in Nebraska are green. By signing contracts with distant renewable power developers, they claim to have “net zero” impact on greenhouse gas emissions, even as the North Omaha coal plant continues to pollute locally.

[End]

You have to love the Big Tech companies’ insisting their operations are “green” when they will be powered mainly by coal plants. The hypocrisy is so thick you could slice it with a knife.

Trust me on this: You will be reading many, many stories like this one in the months to come, about the need to keep coal-fired, gas-fired, and even fuel oil-fired plants in the Northeast up and running for longer because of this tech data center boom.

Even better, before too much longer you will be treated to stories about regulators in some parts of the United States of by-God America going back to permitting NEW coal-fired power plants because their economics are so much better and the fuel so much more abundant and readily available than other potential power sources.

Scoff at that last notion now if you like, but if you do, be sure to bookmark this piece and get back to me when it happens. It’s inevitable.

That is all.