DOJ claims xAI's gas turbines are a matter of 'national and energy security'
Posted by dlgeek 11 hours ago
Comments
Comment by Terr_ 11 hours ago
> resulting in a corresponding increase in three major air pollutants:
Sometimes I wonder how valuable it would be to go to vulnerable areas (ecologically or socio-economically) and record baseline pollution, noise, etc. readings, simply to give future residents some statistical ammunition against some New Thing ruins the old implicit standard of safety and comfort.
I guess the problem is you don't always know what to measure until it's nearly too late, such as if the problem is a new chemical that needs a particular test to measure, or noise that isn't about raw decibels but causes problems with particular frequencies and harmonics, etc.
Comment by x______________ 9 hours ago
SpaceX, the new Tesla... who saw that coming? :(
Comment by boothby 9 hours ago
Comment by wernerb 8 hours ago
Comment by trhway 8 hours ago
Comment by stymaar 8 hours ago
Comment by protocolture 8 hours ago
Comment by mikestaas 8 hours ago
Comment by JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago
None. If this continues, the economy pivots to profits to the President.
Comment by YeahThisIsMe 8 hours ago
Comment by thisisit 7 hours ago
Comment by ffsm8 6 hours ago
You probably just don't take offense there because it more closely aligns with your personal world view - or you dismiss it as the ramblings of a madman, without realizing that you aren't doing the same for "RW".
It's a sad reality we live in. And it's the same in my country (not American), albeit not as extreme as it is in the US right now.
Comment by tastyface 2 hours ago
RW has absolutely no integrity.
Comment by thisisit 1 hour ago
The sad reality is people have lost the ability to counter the argument and instead counter bias.
Here you instead of countering what was being asserted that this government has knowingly involved in lot of bad faith argument - and there are so many of them - another one is Trump Kennedy center fiasco - trying to muddle the argument with "but LW also does it too" and have no factual argument.
Lets assume LW are the biggest liars in the world and gaslight people. What then? How does it change what is happening here? Just because one party is guilty doesn't mean other is clean.
Comment by matwood 9 hours ago
Comment by georgemcbay 8 hours ago
Comment by Gigachad 8 hours ago
Comment by ProofHouse 8 hours ago
Comment by b800h 8 hours ago
Comment by nerdsniper 8 hours ago
I suspect because these data centers are usually placed in areas where land and labor are very cheap, which in some/many states are predominantly black(er) areas.
Really though, the USA has been chipping away at the ability for groups like these to show “standing” so its mildly impressive that this case got this far.
Comment by Terr_ 7 hours ago
1. It seems the plaintiff is the Southern Environmental Law Center, which makes a lot more sense when the issue is violations of environmental law. The NAACP is supporting, and I can imagine that there are some consistent overlaps between what the two groups are concerned with, given that where people pollute in the south correlates to where certain ethnicities can afford (or were allowed) to buy property and live.
2. Certain laws (in this case probably the Clean Air Act) creates a category of "citizen suits", or "private right of action". While that doesn't totally eliminate "I am harmed" standing, it does means you don't need to "the one whose laws were harmed." In other words, it means you can sue for a violation of federal law instead of being stuck waiting for the federal Department of Justice to care.
Comment by MallocVoidstar 8 hours ago
Comment by xnx 3 hours ago
Comment by negergreger 3 hours ago
Comment by holistio 9 hours ago
Comment by jmyeet 8 hours ago
[1]: https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/11/20/...
Comment by stymaar 7 hours ago
Comment by bob1029 7 hours ago
Running on exactly one kind of fuel is also a bit risky for a few reasons. The grid offers a significantly more diverse fuel mix. It might occasionally be more expensive, but it is also much more reliable.
The grid also offers significantly better fault handling & inertia. An order of magnitude better or more. All those aeroderivative turbines together don't make for much of a brick wall. They are quite fragile compared to what you would find in the turbine hall of a combined cycle plant. GPU load tends to be non-linear and coordinated. To the other side of a circuit it could look like a fault condition when a large cluster fires up a training batch.
Comment by agnosticmantis 5 hours ago
Accounting has never been a concern in a Musk company or to his shareholders, as is evident from SpaceX IPO. People invest in him because he can make "number go up" regardless of profit and loss.
He's not running conventional profitable businesses, but ponzi-esque growth stories that keep ballooning to no ends without ever reaching a climax.
Nobody cares today what he promised 5 years ago (e.g. Tesla owners making $35k/yr passive income from their cars robotaxi'ing) because they're looking at what he's promising for the next 5 years (probably humanoid robots on Mars with an infinite TAM).
Comment by finnthehuman 6 hours ago
In a conversation about negative externalities, I don't see the purpose of such a statement. If everything else were equal, nobody would choose negative externalizes just for the fun of it.
Furthermore, a company 'wanting' something is only loosely correlated with the internal political will and resource allocation to achieving it. And says nothing about whether that internal effort is appropriately scaled to the external complexity of the task.
Comment by trhway 8 hours ago
That probably one of the reasons of such a glorious success there.
Comment by stymaar 7 hours ago
Comment by gregjw 9 hours ago
Comment by chinathrow 8 hours ago
Comment by phtrivier 8 hours ago
Anyway, now that half of HN readers are SpaceX shareholder, directly or indirectly, how do we exercise the supreme power over the company, granted to us by capitalism, to ask the board to replace the turbines by another form of energy production in line with science ?
Comment by Gud 8 hours ago
Comment by charcircuit 8 hours ago
Comment by stymaar 8 hours ago
He'll only listen to you if you're a racist conspiracy theorist though.
Comment by phtrivier 5 hours ago
Comment by stymaar 5 hours ago
Comment by ElenaDaibunny 8 hours ago
Comment by fy20 9 hours ago
Comment by cryptonym 8 hours ago
Comment by Forgeties79 9 hours ago
Comment by ExoticPearTree 8 hours ago
That being said, why don’t utilities provide power when it is needed and make peopke wait for months or years on end? I don’t think it is cheaper to run on generators for months/years.
Comment by stefan_ 9 hours ago
Of course someone will go „its just energy“ and use almost free natural gas. In some places in the US a diesel generator with gas from the pump is likely cheaper too.
Comment by iknowstuff 9 hours ago
Comment by westurner 8 hours ago
Shouldn't all methane-powered equipment have this AGR (or similar) new emission reduction technology?
From https://www.ornl.gov/news/add-device-makes-home-furnaces-cle... :
> ORNL’s award-winning ultraclean condensing high-efficiency natural gas furnace features an affordable add-on technology that can remove more than 99.9% of acidic gases and other emissions. The technology can also be added to other natural gas-driven equipment.
Develop an AGR Acidic Gas Reduction add-on part for methane turbines?
Would (Solar Turbines,) consider selling an AGR emissions limiting product or add-on?
ScholarlyArticle: "Nondestructive neutron imaging diagnosis of acidic gas reduction catalyst after 400-Hour operation in natural gas furnace" (2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13858...
FWIU basically no generators have a catalytic converter, because catalytic converters require computer-controlled fuel ignition.
There's also turquoise hydrogen; H Hydrogen from Methane CH4.
Comment by westurner 8 hours ago
But then what do you do with the CO2?
Comment by graemep 8 hours ago
Comment by westurner 8 hours ago
Ironically, it looks like you have to add oxygen back to that to make it worth money:
Public link: Commercial Methane Pyrolysis Overview https://gemini.google.com/share/918e7883df8a :
> Because the economic model of pyrolysis requires selling the solid carbon byproduct, local carbon black prices dictate profitability
; per/kg:
> Carbon Black: $1.20 - $1.80
> o-CNTs: $150 - $300+
Comment by metalman 6 hours ago
Comment by sbseitz 9 hours ago
Comment by ulfw 8 hours ago
Comment by nujabe 9 hours ago
Comment by bflesch 8 hours ago
Epstein files highlight that once you achieve intergenerational wealth there is a natural tendency to make your children legally immune so that your wealth can't be stolen. It's not only about achieving a diplomatic passport from some small nation as honorary consul in order to avoid a parking fee, but about placing your offspring in positions at five eyes intelligence agencies which makes them legally immune and gives them access to fake identities.
During cold war there was a national security need for extra-congressional operations in foreign countries and off-the-record budgets, which had to be managed by "someone" on a need-to-know basis.
My research indicates that many of the billionaires we see today are five eyes nepo kids. Their grandparents did great things for the country during WW2/cold war, many of them were researchers in national security context (Maxwell in electronics, Epstein in electronics/medicine/psychiatry, (van) Trump in radiology/agriculture/pathogens).
My theory is that their work for five-eyes intelligence ties together the now-famous family names such as Maxwell, Epstein, (van) Trump, Thiel, Jarecki, Sweeney, Ellison, Lawrence, Graham, Fox, King, Richardson, and many others, as they pop up together in primary sources in the national security context since at least WW2.
There is a reason why middle names such as "Baron" or "Earl" or "Don" (Spanish for lord) keep showing up. Many come from old-money aristocracy with the ability to change IDs at will.
For example Donald Trump is on the record to have (ab)used fake identities throughout his career, and some primary sources indicate that he used further identities that have not been publicly reported on such as "Donald Epstein" - a name that pops up together with Kashoggi. Also Maxwell and Epstein are documented in the files to have used fake identities.
So the whole thought process about "morals" or "stealing" is wasted time, the King and his Lords and Knights can do whatever they want and nobody can stop them.
The only thing that has changed is that for 50 years we all believed into the "American Dream" and the rags-to-riches fake stories, when in fact the aristocracy never left, kept their wealth offshore, and can make their kids pop up at will at the top of any industry of their choice.
Comment by AbramsAi 8 hours ago
Comment by seattle_spring 8 hours ago
Comment by charcircuit 8 hours ago
Comment by glaucon 8 hours ago
Comment by nerdsniper 8 hours ago
Comment by MallocVoidstar 8 hours ago
Comment by charcircuit 8 hours ago
Comment by Gud 8 hours ago
Typically they are unused in storage and brought to location without power. It could be a warehouse with sensitive equipment (freezers etc), a hospital in need of extra power etc.
This is clearly a case of abuse and people should go to jail for wrecking the planet.
I work in the energy sector and I’ve done routine maintenance on backup generators, including work on the diesel engines.
Comment by charcircuit 8 hours ago
xAI temporarily has these generators at the location. It's not meant to be constantly be there.
Comment by bcraven 6 hours ago
https://naturalgasintel.com/news/data-centers-going-off-grid...
Comment by Gud 8 hours ago
They are normally used during power outages or during construction(days, not weeks).
Comment by charcircuit 7 hours ago
Comment by Gud 7 hours ago
Comment by arjie 9 hours ago
So there's outrage and all that, but this is the fundamental law of the USA: the law is the Word; and all bugs in it are features.
For the most part, I get why this helps the USA. But boy does it feel like there's going to be a reckoning one day.
Comment by bxk76 8 hours ago
Comment by leonidasrup 8 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
So even through some German politicians are currently discussing nuclear phase-in, no investor will invest in nuclear power in Germany, because no investor could be sure that the next or over-next government with participation of German Greens would not again vote for nuclear phase-out.
As much I like some political ideas of German Greens, I understand that for the older generation of Greens, nuclear power is the prime evil which has to banished from face of the Earth and the reason for existence of the German Green party.