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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 pa

• dfxm12 1y 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.
  • dpkirchner 1y 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.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • lawlessone 1y ago
    Probably both really.
  • Filligree 1y ago
    Who would want to? Solar power is cheaper than any alternative, so long as you’re allowed to use it.
    • HardCodedBias 1y 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 1y ago
        this is not true. solar+battery+natural gas backup is cheaper than any other form of power by a lot.
        • nostrademons 1y 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.
  • wcunning 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
• throw9394494i88 1y 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!
  • unethical_ban 1y 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.
  • cenamus 1y ago
    Except when the panels stop nothing happens for 20 something years?
  • physhster 1y ago
    Better than not having solar panels at all...
  • genter 1y 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.
    • cmcconomy 1y ago
      remarkable
    • goku12 1y 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.
  • immibis 1y ago
• boringg 1y 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 1y ago
    reducing air pollution in the US is good too. 30-40 years of cheap, CO2 free energy sounds pretty good to me.
• yieldcrv 1y 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 1y 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.
    • ajross 1y 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 1y ago
• photochemsyn 1y 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.
• ActorNightly 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
• nsoonhui 1y ago
  >> 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. What evidence you have to justify your accusation? From another poster here 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.) So I would say you need to backup your claim _really_ well instead of just interpreting things in the worst way possible according to your imagination.
  • mullingitover 1y ago
    Yes, we all read the article and nobody's disputing that Google hasn't removed the pledge, just made it less visible. I'm just giving my interpretation. We also all saw Sundar being paraded around like a prisoner of war at the inauguration (to be generous, another interpretation being that he is an enthusiastic collaborator in a despotic regime). He's clearly involved politically in this regime, and they have made their stance on clean energy clear. To be willfully blind to that reality is simply a choice I'm not making.