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Martin  Grosskopf's avatar

Thanks (as always!) for the post, John. Being in the same business as Generation, I'd generally agree with many of the points. But holding those companies having the largest datacenter buildouts 'accountable' to their climate commitments is impossible in practice. Firms like Amazon (which Generation owns and does engage with) will build out as much new power capacity as needed to meet their growth ambitions and will be comfortable with reducing carbon intensity even if absolute emissions go up (ironically not much different than an oil company). Unlike heavy industry, they do have the margins to do much of the buildout with renewables or eventually nuclear, but you will see deals for dedicated NG plants. Unsuprisingly, the public grid will backfill with cheaper NG baseload when existing nuclear or renewables (+storage) is recontracted to datacenters at higher rates. From a systems perspective, the accountability just isn't there, while the need to own the names is usually paramount.

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Prof. Wayne Visser's avatar

Thanks John. Good to have another piece of credible research on this. Perhaps a counter-view is Hannah Ritchie's recent analysis of AI's energy / emissions profile (https://substack.com/home/post/p-151770312), albeit she concludes that uncertainty remains high. The key conclusion, for me, is not to panic, or try to put AI back in the genie lamp, but rather to be vigilant and to hold data companies accountable. Another entangled problem to solve

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