Big Tech, Which Signaled Its Green Virtues Ad Nauseam, Kicking Us Off Social Media for Saying Otherwise, Now Wants Natural Gas
Doug Sheridan takes a look at Big Tech’s energy problems (they need natural gas) and what these modern-day tycoons are now doing to address them:
Bloomberg writes, Meta is venturing into electricity trading, betting it can accelerate the construction of new US power plants vital to its AI ambitions. The foray comes after Meta heard from investors and plant developers that too few power buyers were willing to make the early, long-term commitments required to spur investment, according to the company’s head of global energy.
Trading electricity will give Meta the flexibility to enter more of those longer contracts.
“Plant developers want to know that the consumers of power are willing to put skin in the game,” he said. “Without Meta taking a more active voice in the need to expand the amount of power that’s on the system, it’s not happening as quickly as we would like.”
Securing a steady supply of electricity has become a challenge for tech companies, including Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google. They’re all racing to develop more advanced Al systems and tools that use massive amounts of electricity.
Most power companies can’t shoulder the cost of building new generation without long-term commitments from buyers to purchase electricity. For tech companies, trading power offers a way to sign those contracts and hedge some of the risk.
A tech firm, for instance, might commit to buy large amounts of electricity from a new plant under a “take-or-pay” deal, knowing that if its data centers use less than expected, it can resell the surplus into wholesale power markets.
Meta says the ability to trade power will give it more flexibility to secure and manage energy and capacity deals. “For example, Meta could commit to long-term purchases from power plants that aren’t yet constructed, which in turn will enable these new power plants to complete the necessary long-lead time steps to be built,” it said.
Our Take 1: In the past, this kind of move would have been largely for encouraging intermittent wind and solar on to grids so tech company’s could claim green credits for data centers, some of which not even on the same system.
Our Take 2: Now, the big driver for Big Tech is getting new natural gas-fired generation—which doesn’t want to build on systems ladened with wind and solar generation—to build. In a sense, Big Tech has helped create the problem it’s now trying to solve.
Our Take 3: Tech companies might be magicians when it comes to programming AI... but when it comes getting the most for their buck in energy and power markets, they appear grade out pretty poorly. Lot’s of waste.
Our Take 4: Big Tech better tread carefully when it comes to sourcing its power from established US grids. Power prices are rising (see chart) and it’s a virtual certainty data centers connected to grids—not withstanding the difficulty in determining the cause in each case—will prove convenient scapegoats for higher power prices.
My Take: Big Tech helped create the situation in which they now find themselves entwined by playing the climate virtual signaling game and suppressing our challenges to the obvious grifting schemes. So, pardon me if I don’t give a damn about their pain. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to offer a couple of suggestions:
Drop the green virtue-signaling, all of it, and get behind efforts to supply the energy we all need. Let there be no more canceling of social media accounts or suppressing of challenges to the climate scam.
Build your own damned power plants and stay off the grid. Lead the way in creating a free market in electricity and energy. Build small natural gas plants, small nuclear reactors, and even small coal plants if for no other reason than to beg for forgiveness for being such asses in pursuing your dreams of being masters of the universe.
I also have a suggestion for all of us. Let’s never forget how Big Tech messed with us and, more importantly, with free speech. Let’s never forget what Gates, Zuckerberg, and their ilk at Google and Twitter did to us before Elon Musk turned everything upside down. Let’s never trust them again, but rather be eternally vigilant. Imagine what they can do with AI, which is simultaneously a blessing and a curse.
The wild rush to benefit from it, and I plead guilty in that respect myself, ignores the huge risks involved, which some are only too willing to take with others’ lives. The threat of nuclear war is nothing as compared to what some of the leading AI developers have in mind, and we shouldn’t be in any hurry to accommodate everything they want.
#AI #Grid #Electricity #BigTech #PowerPlants #DougSheridan
🤣🤣 Well now, don't be mixing words.
Excellent take -- the tech overlords want us to give up our data and intellectual property for free to feed their algorithms, and then they turn around and want us to foot the bill for their ginormous electricity demands. No freakin' way. There is nothing free market about that!