The point that stood out to me as concerning was "The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average." I'd be fine wi

The point that stood out to me as concerning was "The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average." I'd be fine with as many data centers as they want if they stimulated production of clean energy to run them. But that quote links to another article by the same author. Which says "Notably, the sources for all this power are particularly “dirty.” Since so many data centers are located in coal-producing regions, like Virginia, the “carbon intensity” of the energy they use is 48% higher than the national average. The paper, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that 95% of data centers in the US are built in places with sources of electricity that are dirtier than the national average. " Which in turn links to https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09786 https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09786 Which puts the bulk of that 48% higher claim on "The average carbon intensity of the US data centers in our study (weighted by the energy they consumed) was 548 grams of CO2e per kilowatt hour (kWh), approximately 48% higher than the US national average of 369 gCO2e / kWh (26)." Which points to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?tab=chart&time=latest..2023&country=EU-27~KHM~OWID_UMC~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric... For the average of 369g/KWh. That's close enough to the figure in the table at https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-01/egrid2022_summary_tables.pdf https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-01/egrid2022... which shows 375g/KWh (after converting from lb/MWh) But the table they compare against shows. VA 576g/KWh TX 509g/KWh CA 374g/KWh and the EPA table shows VA 268g/KWh TX 372g/KWh CA 207g/KWh Which seem more likely to be true. The paper has California at only marginally better than the national average for renewables (Which I guess they needed to support their argument given the number of data centers there) I like arxiv, It's a great place to see new ideas, the fields I look at have things that I can test myself to see if the idea actually works. I would not recommend it as a source of truth. Peer review still has a place. If they were gathering emissions data from states themselves, they should have caclulated the average from that data, not pulled the average from another potentially completely different measure. Then their conclusions would have been valid regardless what weird scaling factor they bought in to their state calculations. The numbers might have been wrong but the proportion would have been accurate, and it is the proportion that is being highlighted.