It should be mind numbingly trivial to stand up a solar farm and ram through some transmission lines in the desert, and mind numbingly hard to set up a temporary gas generator. We needed regulatory exemptions yesterday for clean energy, public transit, and EV charging.
Oh it would be if AI actually made money. Turns out all those companies cheap out and don't actually want to put down the 20 billion for a nuclear reactor- which should be trivial if they were really the future!
They have billions of dollars, they're short on TIME.
They want computers in racks now and (rightfully imo) look at yearslong approval processes with disgust. Look at Ashburn, VA - they extract loads of money from these companies, and they keep getting investments because constructing new datacenters is easy thanks to state laws.
It's not about the money here it's about the time.
Yes, it does. If you want solar? You need lots of panels on lots of land far away from the DC. You need transmission lines connecting the two. You need to fight NEPA/CEQA/whatever lawsuits for each element of the plan, the local town councils of wherever the hell you're trying to build, and the worst part is that they aren't even required to give you an answer - they can drag out the approvals for years until you give up and leave.
Compare that to a gas turbine, which can be trucked in, plugged in, and running inside a few days. Yeah, I think we should take measures to limit gas turbine deployments and encourage companies to spend more of their money connecting renewables to the grid, but that means that they need to be able to do it quickly and without catering too much to local interests.
> The rest of us have to follow the rules, but not them.
The rest of us are not installing 1MW gas turbines in our backyards. Even if we were, I don't think the current administration wants to enforce environmental rules on anyone unless it's to block renewables construction.
They don't care if you have to follow the rules either. Why don't you get mad about the fact that you are forced to obey all these idiotic rules instead of somebody else finding a way around them.
It also allows for easy in-transit checking: anyone on the "secure" side of the fare gates must be in possession of a card whose last transaction was a tap-in. There's no chance of a cheeky "it wasn't me who jumped the turnstyles - it was my lookalike", and you can have roaming groups of ticket validators who board random carriages and check everyone.
No, we will not get to a post oil society by self flagellating like Europe, but by making sustainable options so cheap and plentiful that they displace unsustainable options. (Of course there’s some market intervention and government investment necessary to get there)
One of these days, electricity will be so cheap that we can carbon capture our way back to 0C net warming and fuel flights for every Indian and Chinese with fuel made from CO2. The developing world will accept nothing less than the abundance route to decarbonization.
I don't understand, you want to create a copy of Venice?
The issue is not just the pollution from air travel, but also the types of consumption and ways of life that it enables. Besides ressources are not unlimited so even if you have fee energy, you still need to extract aluminium etc from the ground, and pour concrete on land to build airports and oversized infrastructure.
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