The Weekend Wonk: How Not to Do a Data Center

Great CNBC report above profiles Elon Musk’s “Colossus” Data Center just outside Memphis in South Haven, Mississippi.

Takeaway: Primary objections to this facility stem from the install of a large number of gas turbines, essentially big jet engines, to power the facility, without proper pollution control or sound mitigation (if that’s even possible).

This is the configuration that is most problematic from a climate perspective, as well.

The report has interview clips from Jigar Shah, former Director of the Department of Energy Loan Program Office under Joe Biden, and one of the sharpest observers in this space.

Mention is made at the end of how other communities are attempting to head off this kind of fiasco – Illinois new Data Center Power Act is given as an example.
Key concepts would be – Bring your own Clean Power, no jet engines, get a plan on the water issue. (clean power ie solar or wind, kind of negates the water issue when coupled with closed loop cooling systems)

The Associated Press recently reported that, “Michigan, Oregon and Minnesota led the way, enacting laws in the last 18 months designed to protect their pre-existing requirements that electric utilities use only emissions-free energy sources by 2040.”

Compare and contrast Musk’s Memphis project to Google’s plans for new Data Centers in Michigan and Minnesota:

Washington Post:

Google, Meta and others have resorted to modified jet engines, diesel generators and rebooting nuclear and coal plants to power their data centers, while asking electric utilities for grid upgrades. That’s contributing to rising electricity prices, up 42 percent since 2020.

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Compare and Contrast: Two Candidates Respond to Toxic Air

Above, Abdul El-Sayed will compete in the Michigan Democratic primary against Rep. Haley Stevens to be the US Senate nominee to replace the retiring Gary Peters.

Below, John James is the Trump endorsed candidate in the Republican primary for Michigan Governor.
Voting is on August 4th.

UPDATE: Below, CBC reporting on US lawmaker’s criticism.

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The New Climate Denial – a Dishonest “Dog’s Breakfast”

Yet another interview in my series on the “New Climate Denial” that we have seen resurrected in the Trump administration, in fact, Andrew Dessler was the first scientist I spoke to several months ago on this.
Above, we set the table a bit, and Dr Dessler did say that, at least, in the recent “Climate Working Group” report from Chris Wright’s Department of Energy, a motley crew of geriatric fossil fuel apologists admit grudgingly that a greenhouse effect exists, but that’s “a pretty low bar.. it’s like acknowledging that the Earth is round..”.

Below, Dessler mentioned another issue, the denial that Sea Level rise is accelerating, something that recent research has firmly established.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:

A July 2025 report from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) claims that U.S. tide gauge measurements “in aggregate show no obvious acceleration in sea level rise beyond the historical average rate.”

However, a new study by Chris Piecuch, a physical oceanographer with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), reaches a dramatically different conclusion.

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Meanwhile, in the Arctic, Fires on the Increase

A wildfire along Greenland’s coast in August 2017 was one of the most damaging in its history.Photograph: NASA

Bookmark this for the next person that tells you “forest management” is the cause of increasing wildfires.

There are no forests in Greenland.

Guardian:

Scientists have expressed concern after two wildfires broke out within a week of each other on the Arctic island of Greenland earlier this month.

Fires were burning close to Sisimiut, Greenland’s second largest town and a popular tourism centre, on 14 and 15 June, satellite imagery has shown, while a second blaze hit Kujalleq, on the island’s southern tip, on 17 June.

While most of Greenland, a largely autonomous territory, is covered in vast ice sheets and thick glaciers, a significant part is ice-free and covered in tundra. Wildfires in these areas are rare, but becoming more common.

For two fires to break out this early in the summer, however, is particularly unusual. “Vegetation fires at high northern latitudes are more usual in July and August,” said Dr Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

Sonja Diaz, a scientist at the Environmental Change Research Unit of the University of Helsinki, who conducted field research in Greenland after a major wildfire in 2019, said the timing was not unheard of but that it felt “quite wild” to see the island burning so early in the year.

“Wet [conditions] and snow do not favour fire ignition and spread,” she said. “The conditions need to be warm and dry enough.”

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Zeke Hausfather on Climate Predictions and Clean Energy

Climate deniers are partying like it’s 2009, and it looks like we have to walk thru all this BS yet one more time.

As part of my newest series of interviews with scientists on our current wave of “New Climate Denial”, I spoke with Zeke Hausfather last week.
Some of Zeke’s remarks have been brutally misused by the Climate Denial establishment.
I was on local public TV with a rep from our friendly neighborhood Right Wing Think Tank, the Mackinac Center, a few months ago, and the gentleman mentioned Zeke, purp0rtedly, as a climate scientist who had backed off the well established physics and revised dire predictions for planetary warming.

The real story is that Zeke, and other experts, have recognized that clean energy has become so competitive in recent years, that the worst case scenarios for carbon emissions have become less likely – not that the physics has changed.

New York Times:

It’s rare for technical papers about climate modeling to kick off a heated public debate, or attract attention from the White House.

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Teachable Moment: Scientists on Wildfires and Climate Denial

As fires explode once again in Canada’s boreal forests, and unprecedented smoke clouds descend over the Eastern US, atmospheric expert Daniel Swain explains a newly popular climate denial meme, above.
Liars can use statistic. Who knew?

Nature -Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth:
Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency  of extreme events (≥99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme.
Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our study highlights that fire behaviour is worsening in several regions—particularly the boreal and temperate conifer biomes—with substantial implications for carbon storage and human exposure to wildfire disasters.
—–

Below, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in his confirmation hearing, stands by his assertions that wildfire intensification from climate change is “hype”.

Washington Post:

The frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires around the globe have doubled in the past two decades because of climate change, according to a study published last year in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Rising temperatures have ushered in an era of hotter and drier weather, lending the right conditions for wildfires to erupt, the researchers found.

A study released last week in the journal Nature Reviews also found that climate change is contributing to “weather whiplash” — periods of torrential rain followed by dry, tinderbox-like conditions — in the Los Angeles area. Experts say this trend set the stage for the Los Angeles blazes, along with other key factors such as urban sprawl and a resistance to clearing vegetation around homes.

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Choking Smoke Returns to God’s Country

Above, Mackinac Bridge Webcam from the north side, looking south over the Straits of Mackinac and the bridge.

If you are not familiar with the Upper Great Lakes, this might not have the emotional freight that it carries for those of us who have grown up around the world’s largest bodies of fresh water.
The Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan’s lower peninsula to the sparsely populated wilderness of the north, is generally considered the gateway to God’s country, and a place where historically, a high pressure system blowing from the northwest is as fresh as breeze as one could imagine, coming off the Canadian boreal forests and perhaps a few hundred miles of pristine Lake Superior.
Heartbreaking does not even begin to describe the emotion.

Below, view from the south approach to the Bridge.

Below, clear day view of the Straits and Bridge, from the south, compared to today.

Below, Fox Weather reporting on smoke.

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Data Centers Quandary: Gas or Renewables?

Fast moving energy landscape is demanding power for Data Centers, and for now, pushing up greenhouse emissions as developers have been choosing gas as the speediest path to powering up.
But some savvy operators, as well as policy makers, looking out a decade or two, wonder about the wisdom of relying on fossil fuel, with the prices for clean energy, particularly solar and batteries, crashing month by month, and the urgency of climate change only rising.

CNBC:

Google parent Alphabet on Monday announced it will acquire Intersect, a data center and energy infrastructure company, for $4.75 billion in cash in addition to the assumption of debt.
In a release at the time, Intersect said its strategic partnership with Google and TPG Rise Climate aimed to develop gigawatts of data center capacity across the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in renewable power infrastructure by the end of the decade.

Sheldon Kimber, Founder and CEO of Intersect, on Energy Empire Podcast:

…if I were starting my own company, I see clean firm and next-gen geothermal where it becomes really hard to imagine putting large amounts of that in the load pocket, and those technologies are going to have to compete head-to-head with renewables for transmission. I wouldn’t bet against solar and batteries. I just wouldn’t. ….I don’t know anybody on the planet who’d argue that’s a great strategy.

 It’s all about the flexibility to get rid of the gas over time. We are not building anything that isn’t in a place where there are enough renewables around it, which we control, that we can decarbonize it as batteries get better. We’re building flexible gas that’s modular, can be taken out, can run at a lower capacity factor, with enough renewables on the site that we can keep building until it’s 100% clean firm. The problem is people siting a big combined-cycle gas plant behind the meter in a tight, landlocked area that can never be decarbonized. That’s a recipe for stranded costs.

Associated Press:

Lawmakers in states with stronger climate policies don’t want data centers to hinder their goal of slashing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

In other states, environmental advocates and corporations with clean energy goals are working regulatory levers to push monopoly utilities that historically control the energy supply and grid access.

The problem clean energy proponents are confronting is that tech giants are demanding power at such speed and scale — some data centers consume more energy than a mid-size city — that the construction of wind and solar simply can’t keep up.

Continue reading “Data Centers Quandary: Gas or Renewables?”