4 ms·

Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage. Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.

by km3r 6mo ago

swarnie 6mo ago
Imagine the additional space needed to power a scaled DC with solar. I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county. But what's an extra 500 acres between friends.
- bloppe 6mo ago
  It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing that actually matters. People don't really care about the presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect it might have on public land use. You can always regulate the electricity market and public land use directly, instead of regulating the construction of data centers which is more of a second-order effect. These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.
- butvacuum 6mo ago
  Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine with conversion efficencies half what they are now)... comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of the field is covered with panels- at least according to some studies.
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    That isn't the whole story. At least some of these new datacenters are gigawatt class. That's multiple sq km of solar. Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users. If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it will require many times that amount due to how large the heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.
    - butvacuum 6mo ago
      did you move the goal post, or erect a new one? either way- residential use is penny ante in terms of water usage. So much so that comparing data center use to residential use without including industrial, commercial, and irrigation can only be in bad faith. Particularly since usage reports typically present all the numbers in the same chart or grid.
      - fc417fc802 6mo ago
        The concern is resource usage. Water had been left out, so including it isn't shifting the goalposts given the context. The comparison was intended for illustrative purposes. Residential usage provides something relatable and is the general standard for these sorts of discussions. Even comparing to industrial most operations don't use anywhere near as much electricity or water. The new gigawatt class datacenters are in the same ballpark as aluminum smelters, but rather than melting metal they sink all that energy into water.
    - km3r 6mo ago
      What? The water is not getting boiled off. Datacenters, for the most part, have closed liquid loop cooling systems. Electricity goes in, hot air and bits come out.
      - fc417fc802 6mo ago
        The old datacenters had. I don't think anyone is air cooling (radiator or otherwise) a gigawatt. Convert 1.3 million liters per hour from boiled water to air and you get an absurd number.
- donmcronald 6mo ago
  > I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county. What's the math on that? It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.
  - hermanzegerman 6mo ago
    It's not a If/Or Question. Agrisolar is even beneficial to farmers
  - butvacuum 6mo ago
    For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?
- MattSteelblade 6mo ago
  A Technology Connections video recently changed my opinion on this. The land required to power the entire U.S. would be less than the farmland we currently use for ethanol production.
  - butvacuum 6mo ago
    Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take his word for it. The Department of Energy has all the data available, so do a dozen different other private and public institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some napkin math.
idle_zealot 6mo ago
They had that opportunity, to build up the infrastructure necessary to operate, to build in places where they wouldn't reduce people's quality of life. They chose to do everything they could to squeeze out some extra profit. Requiring good behavior in one specific way wouldn't be sufficient when dealing with such obviously bad actors. They can try again to get the right to build once they've won back the trust of Mainers.
butvacuum 6mo ago
Because we already do. Its why electricity costs money. In my area big consumers and producers already pay through the nose to tie into the grid. What we _should_ be asking is where all the money we paid for infrastructure and upkeep went for the last two decades of decreasing power usage.
bluGill 6mo ago
That isn't the factories job - that is your utilities job.
- mmmm2 6mo ago
  And when it's the utility's job, who's footing the bill?
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    There are many customers to spread that over in proportion to their usage. This is standard acconting they have been doing for years
Bratmon 6mo ago
Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore. The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you don't like" as a compromise.
- carefulfungi 6mo ago
  Of course Mainers aren't monolithic... https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legislators-vote-to-legalize-plug-in-solar https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legisla.... https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/solar-distributed-generation https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/so...
  - Bratmon 6mo ago
    Utility solar is VERY different from small-scale solar panels on houses. And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want to see more of those things.
    - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
      This. Utility solar in Maine in 2020-whatever is a lot like the crown's wood lots in Scotland in 1520-whatever. The locals lives aren't made any better by it and some people down south who hate them make bank. Say what you want about resource extraction, it necessarily leeched far more wealth into local economies. I personally think it's short sighted but I see why they're not a fan.
- throwaway27448 6mo ago
  > Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore. I mean, some do... this implies a terrible politician to not address the material concerns of Mainers though.
  - 6mo ago
bornfreddy 6mo ago
Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't that what they did? Here is the max. power you can draw from the grid, feel free to be more efficient or to produce your own electricity.
culi 6mo ago
The title is misleading. It's not a "ban", just a "moratorium" until November 2027 And your "easy solution" has had a lot of research debunking its efficacy and a lot of holes in it. https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-failed-25-years-and-most-should-be-phased-out-research-0 https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-fa...
- ainch 6mo ago
  Carbon offsets are a sham, but you could just require them to directly pay for the actual energy infrastructure required. If you need 1GW of electricity, develop 1GW of solar.
  - irishcoffee 6mo ago
    Surely you realize that building the infrastructure and driver of the 1GW provider would be, hopefully, carbon neutral?
    - ainch 6mo ago
      Sorry, I'm not picking up on the connection - could you expand? Do you think they should also pay for offsets alongside developing energy infrastructure?
      - irishcoffee 6mo ago
        I guess what I'm asking is how long it takes, soup-to-nuts, for the 1GW installation to be carbon neutral or better? I've read anywhere from 7 months to 25 years. Maybe its dependent on location?
        ainch 6mo ago
        Oh sure, I see what you mean - thanks for clarifying. On top of your point, it's true that CO2 has a prolonged impact on global temperature even after it's been 'removed' from the atmosphere, so even once solar pays back the original carbon investment its impact lingers for a while. I guess at a certain point you're getting at a more fundamental question about the value of AI (plus technology and everything else) - what level of environmental tradeoff is acceptable? One thing I slightly lament about the discourse is that tradeoff is widely discussed in the case of AI, but not in the context of stuff we do. I suspect most people aren't aware that the water use associated with eating a burger dwarves a year of ChatGPT, that a long-haul flight wipes out the emissions savings of a couple years' veganism, or that renewables have their own impacts, like the demolition of Chile for copper.
cmiles74 6mo ago
You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center projects are an easy target. I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target
- antisthenes 6mo ago
  Mandating renewables for data centers would have left you with checks notes a shitload of renewables after the AI bubble bursts. Something that should (with good governance) lower energy costs.
  - vkou 6mo ago
    If you or Google have a plan to make the federal government stop shutting down renewable projects, we can re-examine the data center question after you carry it out.
einpoklum 6mo ago
Why? Because: 1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in wattage used. 2. That investment should already be happening, not subject to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds of biosphere degradation etc.
- km3r 6mo ago
  It's in addition to our normal efforts to switch to renewable. No one said this replaces those existing programs. That investment should be happening, but it's not going to comes from companies that you ban from operating.
throwaway27448 6mo ago
> Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage. That still doesn't cover making the data centers provide value to the people who live there.
josefritzishere 6mo ago
I would argue it's childish for data centers operators to act so entitled. This is Maine's decision to make.
harimau777 6mo ago
Can we trust them to actually do it? Not to find some loophole? Or to wait until they are established and then lobby to have the requirement removed?
- bryan_w 6mo ago
  Can we trust them to not build the data center anyways? If you think companies always get their way, then a ban is useless, as they will just do it anyways. If on the other hand, believe in the rule of law, then creating a good airtight law that sets the stipulations that would be needed before building a data center is what lawmakers should be doing

Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage. Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.

by km3r 6mo ago

Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage. Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.

swarnie 6mo ago

Imagine the additional space needed to power a scaled DC with solar. I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county. But what's an extra 500 acres between friends.

bloppe 6mo ago
It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing that actually matters. People don't really care about the presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect it might have on public land use. You can always regulate the electricity market and public land use directly, instead of regulating the construction of data centers which is more of a second-order effect. These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.
butvacuum 6mo ago
Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine with conversion efficencies half what they are now)... comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of the field is covered with panels- at least according to some studies.
- fc417fc802 6mo ago
  That isn't the whole story. At least some of these new datacenters are gigawatt class. That's multiple sq km of solar. Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users. If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it will require many times that amount due to how large the heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.
  - butvacuum 6mo ago
    did you move the goal post, or erect a new one? either way- residential use is penny ante in terms of water usage. So much so that comparing data center use to residential use without including industrial, commercial, and irrigation can only be in bad faith. Particularly since usage reports typically present all the numbers in the same chart or grid.
    - fc417fc802 6mo ago
      The concern is resource usage. Water had been left out, so including it isn't shifting the goalposts given the context. The comparison was intended for illustrative purposes. Residential usage provides something relatable and is the general standard for these sorts of discussions. Even comparing to industrial most operations don't use anywhere near as much electricity or water. The new gigawatt class datacenters are in the same ballpark as aluminum smelters, but rather than melting metal they sink all that energy into water.
  - km3r 6mo ago
    What? The water is not getting boiled off. Datacenters, for the most part, have closed liquid loop cooling systems. Electricity goes in, hot air and bits come out.
    - fc417fc802 6mo ago
      The old datacenters had. I don't think anyone is air cooling (radiator or otherwise) a gigawatt. Convert 1.3 million liters per hour from boiled water to air and you get an absurd number.
donmcronald 6mo ago
> I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county. What's the math on that? It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.
- hermanzegerman 6mo ago
  It's not a If/Or Question. Agrisolar is even beneficial to farmers
- butvacuum 6mo ago
  For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?
MattSteelblade 6mo ago
A Technology Connections video recently changed my opinion on this. The land required to power the entire U.S. would be less than the farmland we currently use for ethanol production.
- butvacuum 6mo ago
  Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take his word for it. The Department of Energy has all the data available, so do a dozen different other private and public institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some napkin math.

idle_zealot 6mo ago

They had that opportunity, to build up the infrastructure necessary to operate, to build in places where they wouldn't reduce people's quality of life. They chose to do everything they could to squeeze out some extra profit. Requiring good behavior in one specific way wouldn't be sufficient when dealing with such obviously bad actors. They can try again to get the right to build once they've won back the trust of Mainers.

butvacuum 6mo ago

Because we already do. Its why electricity costs money. In my area big consumers and producers already pay through the nose to tie into the grid. What we _should_ be asking is where all the money we paid for infrastructure and upkeep went for the last two decades of decreasing power usage.

bluGill 6mo ago

That isn't the factories job - that is your utilities job.

mmmm2 6mo ago
And when it's the utility's job, who's footing the bill?
- bluGill 6mo ago
  There are many customers to spread that over in proportion to their usage. This is standard acconting they have been doing for years

Bratmon 6mo ago

Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore. The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you don't like" as a compromise.

carefulfungi 6mo ago
Of course Mainers aren't monolithic... https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legislators-vote-to-legalize-plug-in-solar https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legisla.... https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/solar-distributed-generation https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/so...
- Bratmon 6mo ago
  Utility solar is VERY different from small-scale solar panels on houses. And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want to see more of those things.
  - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
    This. Utility solar in Maine in 2020-whatever is a lot like the crown's wood lots in Scotland in 1520-whatever. The locals lives aren't made any better by it and some people down south who hate them make bank. Say what you want about resource extraction, it necessarily leeched far more wealth into local economies. I personally think it's short sighted but I see why they're not a fan.
throwaway27448 6mo ago
> Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore. I mean, some do... this implies a terrible politician to not address the material concerns of Mainers though.
- 6mo ago

bornfreddy 6mo ago

Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't that what they did? Here is the max. power you can draw from the grid, feel free to be more efficient or to produce your own electricity.

culi 6mo ago

The title is misleading. It's not a "ban", just a "moratorium" until November 2027 And your "easy solution" has had a lot of research debunking its efficacy and a lot of holes in it. https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-failed-25-years-and-most-should-be-phased-out-research-0 https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-fa...

ainch 6mo ago
Carbon offsets are a sham, but you could just require them to directly pay for the actual energy infrastructure required. If you need 1GW of electricity, develop 1GW of solar.
- irishcoffee 6mo ago
  Surely you realize that building the infrastructure and driver of the 1GW provider would be, hopefully, carbon neutral?
  - ainch 6mo ago
    Sorry, I'm not picking up on the connection - could you expand? Do you think they should also pay for offsets alongside developing energy infrastructure?
    - irishcoffee 6mo ago
      I guess what I'm asking is how long it takes, soup-to-nuts, for the 1GW installation to be carbon neutral or better? I've read anywhere from 7 months to 25 years. Maybe its dependent on location?
      - ainch 6mo ago
        Oh sure, I see what you mean - thanks for clarifying. On top of your point, it's true that CO2 has a prolonged impact on global temperature even after it's been 'removed' from the atmosphere, so even once solar pays back the original carbon investment its impact lingers for a while. I guess at a certain point you're getting at a more fundamental question about the value of AI (plus technology and everything else) - what level of environmental tradeoff is acceptable? One thing I slightly lament about the discourse is that tradeoff is widely discussed in the case of AI, but not in the context of stuff we do. I suspect most people aren't aware that the water use associated with eating a burger dwarves a year of ChatGPT, that a long-haul flight wipes out the emissions savings of a couple years' veganism, or that renewables have their own impacts, like the demolition of Chile for copper.

cmiles74 6mo ago

You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center projects are an easy target. I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target

antisthenes 6mo ago
Mandating renewables for data centers would have left you with checks notes a shitload of renewables after the AI bubble bursts. Something that should (with good governance) lower energy costs.
- vkou 6mo ago
  If you or Google have a plan to make the federal government stop shutting down renewable projects, we can re-examine the data center question after you carry it out.

einpoklum 6mo ago

Why? Because: 1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in wattage used. 2. That investment should already be happening, not subject to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds of biosphere degradation etc.

km3r 6mo ago
It's in addition to our normal efforts to switch to renewable. No one said this replaces those existing programs. That investment should be happening, but it's not going to comes from companies that you ban from operating.

throwaway27448 6mo ago

> Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage. That still doesn't cover making the data centers provide value to the people who live there.

josefritzishere 6mo ago

I would argue it's childish for data centers operators to act so entitled. This is Maine's decision to make.

harimau777 6mo ago

Can we trust them to actually do it? Not to find some loophole? Or to wait until they are established and then lobby to have the requirement removed?

bryan_w 6mo ago
Can we trust them to not build the data center anyways? If you think companies always get their way, then a ban is useless, as they will just do it anyways. If on the other hand, believe in the rule of law, then creating a good airtight law that sets the stipulations that would be needed before building a data center is what lawmakers should be doing