To be fair, the emissions from those gas turbines are far less harmful than the pollution emitted by the refinery in the area. It’s still going to contain NOx and of course CO2 and it objectively will add to the total pollutants in the area. But fighting gas generators is less fruitful than fighting against the nearby processing plant that dumps aromatic hydrocarbons (benzene, toluene, xylene - all chemicals that once they enter the human body have no real biological pathway to be broken down and removed… they just bounce around and fuck up things until they cause cancer).
I’ve worked around these new datacenter generators. One thing that they do really well is they have huge power storage capabilities because the datacenter draw can ramp up and down by tens of megawatts in less than a second. So they have to use a combination of batteries and flywheels to buffer the increase. This means they’re far more efficient than even normal grid operations.
I’d still like to see much more solar, however. But it’s a red state so the higher long term cost of burning fuels and maintenance of moving parts is worth it for owning the libs.
They’re also emitting a lot of unburned natural gas, there are plans to install a lot more turbines, and it’s much easier to fight something new and illegally installed than something that’s been around a while. Plus, it’s the NAACP fighting it, which makes sense, because the turbines are being used to power a chatbot that’s tuned to be racist.
Ideally, we want to get rid of all fossil fuels, but any little place a victory is possible is a good thing.
Eh… I’ve been in the room while the operators of these plants overviewed infrared cameras which spot methane leaks very clearly. They take those emissions very seriously because in this particular instance - it’s fuel and they are paying for it directly. It’s not like on the production or transport side where leaks are just a fact of life and are overlooked because gasses are less valuable than the liquids.
The ethics of power production has an obvious gradient. These modern modular on site gas plants are way, way less shitty than most. Not as ethical as renewables but renewables can’t achieve the sudden demand changes. The best would be for the damn nazi chatbot to just not exist.
edit: nazi fuckboy musk could actually afford the huge batteries necessary for making renewables work in this case. They’re really expensive but he used to fucking champion that shit before he pulled off his mask and put on his armband.
So they had permits, but only for like half of the generators. Did they now get permits for all the generators?
Probably a win-win in Musk’s eyes
