We are creating the final boss of tragedy of the commons.
I used to think we were progressing up an exciting tech tree. That seems naive now.
Water, land, energy, the soundscape, intellectual property that incentivizes the dissemination of good ideas, digital networks of information and self-expression, perhaps even the economic value of expertise itself are all being sacrificed in the now for promises of utopia in the future.
Precious eggs to give to those promising a utopian omelet, eventually.
because no one believes there are legal consequences if they don't
and there are a lot of ways to doge it even if there where a reliable government in place
like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dogeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).
Similar to the “carbon neutral by X date” promises, this was common around 2016 or so. Notice how companies have mostly cancelled or redefined those promises several years later, once the issue is out of the limelight.
If it is not legally required, it will not be done.
>like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dodgeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).
And it's not just data centers, it's all sorts of industry. My local gravel and concrete plants run their "big stuff" off generators because the cost of the utility drop for their amperage doesn't make sense. And nobody will connect the dots between these choices and the requirements we've saddled utilities with. They're spinning up generator not because it's cheaper per watt, but because they're not operating on the 40yr timeline you need to be in order for the red tape you have to go through to put in permanent infrastructure to pencil out.
I'm an abutter for a utility project and I've gone to the meetings for and it's an absolute massive boondoggle. My energy bill is going to reflect god knows how many hundreds of billable hours it takes for these hired lawyers and engineers to prove to the system that they're not gonna fuck over any endangered frogs by widening the cut to meet some industry standard that changed over the past N year and dumping culverts and fill in some places where streams criss cross it.
Literally nobody involved cares. The abutters don't care. The town wants it to go forward because it's all trivial and it's not like it won't be their ass if they block an upgrade to industry standards and something happens. The system is just going through the motions. The city engineer grills them about petty bullshit because it's literally his job. They know he will and they have the answers but he makes a show out of the subjective things. Ditto for the conservation commissioner. It's like the Israel missiles meme. One side is my tax dollars and the other side is my energy bill. We're all doing this because some slimy politicians wanted to pander to some shortsighted big picture ignoring environmentalists 50yr ago and beurocacy has perpetuated and grown itself since. No public interest is served by this.
And the cherry on top is that at the margin, we get shit like generators that don't need to exist because the cost of the alternative is driven up to the point the fuel inefficient (and also dirty) solution makes sense.
I promise you, the City Engineer is aware of the bullshit. You catch a whiff, but they live in the stink. It's been clear for a while that there's conflicting interests and the only real way to fix it is to change incentives. However, if you're insinuating that the Clean Water Act is made by "slimy politicians and big picture ignoring environmentalists" then you're wrong. That's about the best common sense environmental reform in the last 100 years aside from removing lead from gas.
> The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses
Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last year because of enterprise demand) or require higher pay from everyone else
(3). Highly preferred that you are not going to impact cost negatively to households (otherwise why we have this discussion)
based on these assumptions, solution I see is, BigTech subsidising energy costs for 10 years for nearby households (area will be geofenced, e.g. in the radius of 50km), subsidy will be based on the prices outside of that radius. e.g. if you everyone outside of closest DC pays 1$ and in the radius prices become 1.5$, 0.5$ will be covered by BigTech and they're also responsible & pay to setup the system to automatically include everyone in subsidy program, not like you need to apply
Also BigTech is not going to build the power generation plants, it must be built by existing processes to minimize impact on pricing
A higher tax on DC with the tax revenue invested into public electrical infrastructure and public power stations. With billions powered into AI they can out-price everyone out of resources they use - be it directly (high electricity rates) or indirectly (high prices for everything which is needed to expand power networks). But it will not happen of course.
Put some company stock in escrow. If they fulfill the promises, they get it back. If not the government keeps it, and uses it to build whatever needs to be built.
> IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.
It is important to remember that clarifying the legal implications of "pledge" is entirely different than supporting and/or defending this instance of its usage.
One can do the former whilst repudiating the latter and remain logically consistent.
It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers.
We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.
Price of power goes up and the local people are not connected to the benefits. You might think they will receive a lot of money in taxes but you would be wrong because they have tax breaks.
Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier".
The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for consumers than it is now.
I personally think all of this is very speculative for now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying" their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer perspective.
Not to mention the danger of energy production, even nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware; make no mistake on who will get preference.
"Attempt" is doing a lot of work there. Companies are driven by a profit motive, and are practically required to renege on promises that are not legally enforced.
In a different world they would have earned trust and deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is not that world.
I don't believe them. I don't trust corporations. At all. I look back at all the broken promises of corporations like AT&T, all while doing massive stock buy backs, and I simply don't want to hear their bullshit anymore.
The tech companies don't really have any issue paying for the capacity, this is a negligible cost compared to the compute capital, they just want streamlined regulatory approvals to bring the plants online.
Oh the "pledges" - tell me again how the Billionaire's Giving Pledge - the ultimate "pinky promise" of the 1% - is going?
Launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, it was sold as a historic shift in philanthropy. Fast forward to 2026, and the data suggests it’s been more of a "Wealth Preservation Society" than a massive wealth redistribution event.
This will be just as trustworthy. We need laws - not merely rhetoric pledges !
Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.
The current US government is systematically attacking anything which tries to "reduce the effects of climate change" and claims it's mostly all a scam.
So no.
But what probably also isn't included but should is environmental damage.
Running low quality "temp." gas turbines non stop isn't without filters etc. isn't just bad for the climate, it's a air pollution which can directly affect anyone in it's path with not only increased chances for lounge cancer but also much more short term effects like asthma, and increased chances of asthma attacks ending deadly. Especially if the weather prevents easy dispersion (like it tends to do in winter). It's not that long ago (<80y) that the west had acid rains, and deadly smog accidents exactly from this kind of negligent shit. And if we look at Asia this is sometimes still a topic today (but has gotten much better compared to just ~20 years ago).
No MBA pencil pusher wants to run an inefficient local turbine. It's just that the timeline and upper cost bound of doing that is less crap than having a "real utility" build more power at "real utility scale" and run you a wire because the latter is subject to all manner of delay and cost overrun.
And there's no inherent physical or economic reason for it to be that way. We made it that way. The metaphorical local turbine is less worse specifically because people like you, saying the exact same things you're saying right now have saddled the "real utility scale" generation, and more importantly, the wire to the big industrial consumer who'd pay for it with all sorts of requirements.
It costs tens of thousands of dollars of lawyers and engineering over years just to dump a concrete culvert in a ravine where it crosses a power line clearing and fill over the top, all because of the red tape. Say nothing of the cost to do all the legal paperwork to get the utility cut in the first place. Now multiply by every mile the wire has to go, add in the wires, etc, etc. For an industry that might boom and bust in 2, 5, 10yr dumping a fuel guzzling turbine in your parking lot at 5x the cost per watt starts to look pretty good.
The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.
I suggest it’s easier to leave to carbon in the ground in the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic. But if you want to go with charcoal it’s probably best to get wood from coppicing.
I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details
trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition
and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues
(Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.)
but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap
hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead
It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and their sacrifices.
completely ignoring all existing technologies related to that topic to spout obvious nonsense about "cutting down trees and burying them" (which would bind active bio mass which isn't a grate idea, also that won't produce oil anyway not that this is relevant for the discussion)
various ways to reduce the carbon in the air do exist (and without trees)
and the carbon can be both recycled for other usage and literally placed in the earth, too
it is not rally a solution for climate change as it's very expensive to do. But this also makes it a good idea to "make companies pay for it" (at least if their carbon-equivalent output goes above a certain threshold). Because if they have the choice between very expensive carbon removal or reducing carbon output for a much cheaper price they will do the later; But in emergency/outlier situations they still can do the former, just at a very high price.).
You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots.
Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.
Nuclear power is a pain to build and maintain and un-build once it gets to old to reliable run it (the later part is commonly overlooked in cost calculations).
It is also a ~50 year investment.
This makes it not very attractive for companies and is why most nuclear power is state sub-ventioned.
Theoretically the US had something similar to a state bank to help companies to finance exactly such projects, but Trump/DOGE defounded it for publicity reasons which makes it even less likely for private nuclear power plants.
Many "we will use nuclear power" statements do rely on mini reactors. But AFIK pretty much all mini reactor projects have ended in dead ends so far. With promised at best working out on paper (and quite often not even there).
So my guess is: They will claim they want to use Nuclear and might even intend to do so. But in the end look at their balance sheets and risk calculation and go "nah, lets do coal/gas/oil". There probably will be some single public co-investment into a nuclear power plant which "happens" to also be government sponsored to keep up the pretense.
We should be focusing on how to build large turbines and transformers more quickly. A lot of transmission projects are blocked on equipment. There are warehouses full of photovoltaics that we cant use because of other industrial bottlenecks. We can build an entire PV plant before we can obtain a single custom transformer for a substation.
I've seen Musk note in an interview that at year-end the bottleneck will not be CPU/RAM etc, but electricity. And new powerplants are backlogged for years.
That's why he wants to go into space (10x solar potential because you don't have a day/night cycle, no clouds, no dust/rain, no temperature loss, no orientation issues, and no atmosphere reducing solar).
To me it seems ridiculous, for one because sending 150kg to space costs about $500k, and this is about the weight of a solar installation that costs $800 to install and generates about $1000 worth of electricity across 20 years at utility wholesale prices.
But suppose it was cheaper and viable, and earth-electricity was indeed capped, you could argue (if you believe the hype) that developing AI is an existential arms-race objective for US/China.
But from what I've understood that's just not the case at all. Something like 170+ coal plants are scheduled to be decommissioned, and the average coal and gas plant runs at 40-50% of capacity, because wind/solar is eating their lunch (cheaper marginal $ per kWh). i.e. there is so little demand that these plants keep using less capacity and shutting down superfluous plants.
You'd think if experts believed electricity was going to be a bottleneck, that venture capital / AI companies, or even traditional capital, would be buying up plants or signing guaranteed-usage contracts. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
The point of your whole argument is that “financial experts” are always rational and are not affected by bubbles, it took months from energy experts talking with media/investors to the Big Tech would start talking about “energy crisis”.
In fact, Nadella publicly stated that he has a large amount of hardware in inventory that has already been purchased but cannot be utilized due to insufficient energy.
Much like the price of RAM, SSD, and GPU. The ballooning data-center energy consumption costs have already broken the middle class economic-loop Westinghouse electric drove in the 1950s. Some are seeing their utility bills double.
People are not voluntarily going to build things that make less profit.
It is a suckers bet assuming the unscrupulous will grow a conscience. =3
Pledge my ass. It is either law mandating those massive datacenters absorb the cost with heavy penalties for non compliance or it is just BS talk (what it seems to be at the moment)
This is really a state law issue and there's really no solution for spiralling energy costs other than nationalizing utilities or otherwise making them into state or municipal entities, much like municipal broadband.
Take the case of Duke Energy in North Carolina, which illegally raised rates too much. Utilities prices are supposedly regulated but utilities work around this by simply moving costs to things they can charge whatever for (eg transmission costs vs energy costs).
The NC Court of Appeals ruled that Duke Energy's actions were illegal BUT there would be no refunds for customers [1], in part because lawmakers passed a law to allow them to do this retroactively [2]. Also, if Duke Energy had to repay customers they can simply raise prices to recoup those costs even though the money was improperly charged in the first place.
So consumers will keep paying for the infrastructure to connect up these data centers and will keep subsidizing the ongoing energy costs.
It feels like ordinary people are becoming increasingly unnecessary. With AI, data centers, and big corporations, they don’t really need ordinary people anymore apart from their own employees. Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them, and ordinary people could just be put in zoos for display.
The capitalists realized that if they literally starve the working class there will be revolution. But if they produce enough so they can sustain (barely) rest of the people with 1% output while they consume 99%, it will be okay.
So don't worry, you'll have basic ~~income~~ soylent green.
Isn't that contradicted by the fact that data centers are increasing electric prices in the areas they are built? It seems to me that either the data centers are drawing power from the grid or the utilities are gouging people. Either one should be stopped.
I find the whole thing a little odd. They’re basically pledging to pay their electricity bills. So what? So does every business.
Saying they’re going to pay for generation and transmission adds little. That’s already baked into the charges! It’s like saying they’re going to finally pay for the farmers to grow the produce and the drivers to get the produce to market when they buy apples--as though spontaneous generation and teleportation was ever an option.
An actual problem was them trying to avoid paying.
They'd ask the utilities to make Gigawatts of energy available over the next two decades and the utilities would say "No problem, just sign here and agree to pay for us building out the grid to support that".
Then the AI companies said "No we only want to pay for energy if we actually use it, if we go bust or decide not to use the energy in a couple of years we want you to charge all the others consumers to recoup that cost".
No idea if that's addressed here. I'm assuming not.
It was never clear if that reflected uncertainty about future demand or of they just like shifting costs and risk onto other people whenever possible.
edit: the pledge references this problem, whether it actually solves it I don't know.
They are pledging to not only pay for their own bills but rather increase the supply of electricity itself. This will reduce retail electricity prices.
This mean retail consumers are paying less for electricity than what they would have paid if not for the pledge.
What if they pay own bills (why is this even a subject of discussion?), increase supply (formally), but electricity prices still go up anyway? Just curios if scenario from my descrition even possible...
Some towns in my state are already complaining about the noise from turbines supplying on-site power to a data center that's been built here. They're keeping people up at night. I'm broadly supportive of a "techie go home" movement.
Do they pledge the costs of noise pollution and damage to water sources? Let’s be honest - these pledges are theater that reflects an agreement between tech oligarchs and the Trump administration. The pay the bribes via donations or whatever, and get back this deceptive theater show.
Trump helping tech bros sell more data centers. A pledge is moronic. You pay for what you use since time immemorial. Don't need to redefine existing words with new meaning.
Even if the pledges are in good faith, people are being naive about how utilities work.
The general goal for utilities has been to pursue the next “thing” and work toward some sort of regulation to lock in demand, which can be used as a lever to seek price increases and consolidate.
If there’s margin to be had, the utilities will find a way, and prices will go up either way.
We are creating the final boss of tragedy of the commons.
I used to think we were progressing up an exciting tech tree. That seems naive now.
Water, land, energy, the soundscape, intellectual property that incentivizes the dissemination of good ideas, digital networks of information and self-expression, perhaps even the economic value of expertise itself are all being sacrificed in the now for promises of utopia in the future.
Precious eggs to give to those promising a utopian omelet, eventually.
which means nothing
because no one believes there are legal consequences if they don't
and there are a lot of ways to doge it even if there where a reliable government in place
like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dogeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).
Similar to the “carbon neutral by X date” promises, this was common around 2016 or so. Notice how companies have mostly cancelled or redefined those promises several years later, once the issue is out of the limelight.
If it is not legally required, it will not be done.
>like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dodgeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).
And it's not just data centers, it's all sorts of industry. My local gravel and concrete plants run their "big stuff" off generators because the cost of the utility drop for their amperage doesn't make sense. And nobody will connect the dots between these choices and the requirements we've saddled utilities with. They're spinning up generator not because it's cheaper per watt, but because they're not operating on the 40yr timeline you need to be in order for the red tape you have to go through to put in permanent infrastructure to pencil out.
I'm an abutter for a utility project and I've gone to the meetings for and it's an absolute massive boondoggle. My energy bill is going to reflect god knows how many hundreds of billable hours it takes for these hired lawyers and engineers to prove to the system that they're not gonna fuck over any endangered frogs by widening the cut to meet some industry standard that changed over the past N year and dumping culverts and fill in some places where streams criss cross it.
Literally nobody involved cares. The abutters don't care. The town wants it to go forward because it's all trivial and it's not like it won't be their ass if they block an upgrade to industry standards and something happens. The system is just going through the motions. The city engineer grills them about petty bullshit because it's literally his job. They know he will and they have the answers but he makes a show out of the subjective things. Ditto for the conservation commissioner. It's like the Israel missiles meme. One side is my tax dollars and the other side is my energy bill. We're all doing this because some slimy politicians wanted to pander to some shortsighted big picture ignoring environmentalists 50yr ago and beurocacy has perpetuated and grown itself since. No public interest is served by this.
And the cherry on top is that at the margin, we get shit like generators that don't need to exist because the cost of the alternative is driven up to the point the fuel inefficient (and also dirty) solution makes sense.
I promise you, the City Engineer is aware of the bullshit. You catch a whiff, but they live in the stink. It's been clear for a while that there's conflicting interests and the only real way to fix it is to change incentives. However, if you're insinuating that the Clean Water Act is made by "slimy politicians and big picture ignoring environmentalists" then you're wrong. That's about the best common sense environmental reform in the last 100 years aside from removing lead from gas.
> The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses
Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last year because of enterprise demand) or require higher pay from everyone else
So what’s the solution? No data center? Let the current landscape of power companies operate as is?
Let's make some assumptions first:
1. DCs must be built anyway
2. You can't take away energy from households
(3). Highly preferred that you are not going to impact cost negatively to households (otherwise why we have this discussion)
based on these assumptions, solution I see is, BigTech subsidising energy costs for 10 years for nearby households (area will be geofenced, e.g. in the radius of 50km), subsidy will be based on the prices outside of that radius. e.g. if you everyone outside of closest DC pays 1$ and in the radius prices become 1.5$, 0.5$ will be covered by BigTech and they're also responsible & pay to setup the system to automatically include everyone in subsidy program, not like you need to apply
Also BigTech is not going to build the power generation plants, it must be built by existing processes to minimize impact on pricing
A higher tax on DC with the tax revenue invested into public electrical infrastructure and public power stations. With billions powered into AI they can out-price everyone out of resources they use - be it directly (high electricity rates) or indirectly (high prices for everything which is needed to expand power networks). But it will not happen of course.
Put some company stock in escrow. If they fulfill the promises, they get it back. If not the government keeps it, and uses it to build whatever needs to be built.
Yes. No data centers.
LOL, they just introduced QoS into the electricity grid.
That concept was effectively already available. Hospitals tend to have multiple grid hookups before falling back on local generation.
You can read the actual pledge at [0]. The executive order regarding it is at [1].
There's some speculation in the comments about what is or isn't in the pledge. I recommend reading it yourself.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/03/ratepayer-protec...
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/03/rate...
This sounds really cool and all government
> IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.
It is important to remember that clarifying the legal implications of "pledge" is entirely different than supporting and/or defending this instance of its usage.
One can do the former whilst repudiating the latter and remain logically consistent.
It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers.
We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.
This absolutely cannot backfire. /s
What’s wrong with this?
Price of power goes up and the local people are not connected to the benefits. You might think they will receive a lot of money in taxes but you would be wrong because they have tax breaks.
Why would adding a new supplier to the market cause the price of power to go up?
Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier".
The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for consumers than it is now.
I personally think all of this is very speculative for now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying" their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer perspective.
Not to mention the danger of energy production, even nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware; make no mistake on who will get preference.
Grid overload if they produce too much base load.
Interconnection expenses.
Same issues as with mining and large industrial clients generally.
so no companies should build anything even if they attempt to pay for the externalities. this is just nimbyism.
"Attempt" is doing a lot of work there. Companies are driven by a profit motive, and are practically required to renege on promises that are not legally enforced.
In a different world they would have earned trust and deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is not that world.
I pledge to bear costs of energy I use.
I was unaware it was optional.
hah yeah that's pretty funny. "you can count on us to pay our electricity bill!" - tech companies.
The way to enforce this would be to provide US citizens with free electric and charge companies only.
That will never happen, but would prevent we the people from bearing these costs directly.
I don't believe them. I don't trust corporations. At all. I look back at all the broken promises of corporations like AT&T, all while doing massive stock buy backs, and I simply don't want to hear their bullshit anymore.
Does a “pledge” have more or less weight than a pinky promise?
This is USA so we all know that those techs companies won't pay a cent back at the end, but the population will.
The tech companies don't really have any issue paying for the capacity, this is a negligible cost compared to the compute capital, they just want streamlined regulatory approvals to bring the plants online.
> The tech companies don't really have any issue paying
It reduces profit.
Oh the "pledges" - tell me again how the Billionaire's Giving Pledge - the ultimate "pinky promise" of the 1% - is going?
Launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, it was sold as a historic shift in philanthropy. Fast forward to 2026, and the data suggests it’s been more of a "Wealth Preservation Society" than a massive wealth redistribution event.
This will be just as trustworthy. We need laws - not merely rhetoric pledges !
Does it include externalities (co2 emissions)?
Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.
The current US government is systematically attacking anything which tries to "reduce the effects of climate change" and claims it's mostly all a scam.
So no.
But what probably also isn't included but should is environmental damage.
Running low quality "temp." gas turbines non stop isn't without filters etc. isn't just bad for the climate, it's a air pollution which can directly affect anyone in it's path with not only increased chances for lounge cancer but also much more short term effects like asthma, and increased chances of asthma attacks ending deadly. Especially if the weather prevents easy dispersion (like it tends to do in winter). It's not that long ago (<80y) that the west had acid rains, and deadly smog accidents exactly from this kind of negligent shit. And if we look at Asia this is sometimes still a topic today (but has gotten much better compared to just ~20 years ago).
Look in the mirror.
No MBA pencil pusher wants to run an inefficient local turbine. It's just that the timeline and upper cost bound of doing that is less crap than having a "real utility" build more power at "real utility scale" and run you a wire because the latter is subject to all manner of delay and cost overrun.
And there's no inherent physical or economic reason for it to be that way. We made it that way. The metaphorical local turbine is less worse specifically because people like you, saying the exact same things you're saying right now have saddled the "real utility scale" generation, and more importantly, the wire to the big industrial consumer who'd pay for it with all sorts of requirements.
It costs tens of thousands of dollars of lawyers and engineering over years just to dump a concrete culvert in a ravine where it crosses a power line clearing and fill over the top, all because of the red tape. Say nothing of the cost to do all the legal paperwork to get the utility cut in the first place. Now multiply by every mile the wire has to go, add in the wires, etc, etc. For an industry that might boom and bust in 2, 5, 10yr dumping a fuel guzzling turbine in your parking lot at 5x the cost per watt starts to look pretty good.
The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.
Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown.
When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.
I suggest it’s easier to leave to carbon in the ground in the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic. But if you want to go with charcoal it’s probably best to get wood from coppicing.
I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details
trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition
and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues
(Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.)
but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap
hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead
It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and their sacrifices.
the only crazy thing here is your comment
completely ignoring all existing technologies related to that topic to spout obvious nonsense about "cutting down trees and burying them" (which would bind active bio mass which isn't a grate idea, also that won't produce oil anyway not that this is relevant for the discussion)
various ways to reduce the carbon in the air do exist (and without trees)
and the carbon can be both recycled for other usage and literally placed in the earth, too
it is not rally a solution for climate change as it's very expensive to do. But this also makes it a good idea to "make companies pay for it" (at least if their carbon-equivalent output goes above a certain threshold). Because if they have the choice between very expensive carbon removal or reducing carbon output for a much cheaper price they will do the later; But in emergency/outlier situations they still can do the former, just at a very high price.).
Making charcoal releases CO2 though? How does that help with carbon capture?
You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots.
Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.
Methane is a significantly more effective GHG than carbon dioxide!
Charcoal is like 80% carbon and the tree extracted it from the atmosphere.
There are no such things as CO2 emissions in this administration. Your AI chatbots will be powered by clean coal and you'll enjoy it!
They have a cute mascot, so it can't be that bad: https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/meet-coal...
Actually, the tweet quoted in the article is firmly in the "you can't make this $%&/ up" category...
/s this guy gets it. Thank you, finally speaking my language
So you believe Microsoft will start opening up coal plants again and not nuclear?
Nuclear power is a pain to build and maintain and un-build once it gets to old to reliable run it (the later part is commonly overlooked in cost calculations).
It is also a ~50 year investment.
This makes it not very attractive for companies and is why most nuclear power is state sub-ventioned.
Theoretically the US had something similar to a state bank to help companies to finance exactly such projects, but Trump/DOGE defounded it for publicity reasons which makes it even less likely for private nuclear power plants.
Many "we will use nuclear power" statements do rely on mini reactors. But AFIK pretty much all mini reactor projects have ended in dead ends so far. With promised at best working out on paper (and quite often not even there).
So my guess is: They will claim they want to use Nuclear and might even intend to do so. But in the end look at their balance sheets and risk calculation and go "nah, lets do coal/gas/oil". There probably will be some single public co-investment into a nuclear power plant which "happens" to also be government sponsored to keep up the pretense.
Sound and particulate pollution too.
While we're at it, water use is another externality.
Strange downvotes for a relevant question.
We're all gonna end up paying for this and everyone involved knows it.
Public investment yields private dividends.
“Socialize the losses, privatize the profits”.
We should be focusing on how to build large turbines and transformers more quickly. A lot of transmission projects are blocked on equipment. There are warehouses full of photovoltaics that we cant use because of other industrial bottlenecks. We can build an entire PV plant before we can obtain a single custom transformer for a substation.
Fear not citizen! Ya boi Elon got you covered with the new Megablock.
Ta da! It's 3 Megapaks wired together with a transformer. Now that's innovation.
See? Without billionaires, who would save us from billionaires?
Tesla’s Megablock: Breaking the Transformer Bottleneck https://www.rebellionaire.com/post/tesla-megablock-transform...
"The invisible hand" of free markets has become truly invisible...
Non-binding and voluntary = a bunch of lip service
The same way Nvidia "pledged" $100B to OpenAI?
I've seen Musk note in an interview that at year-end the bottleneck will not be CPU/RAM etc, but electricity. And new powerplants are backlogged for years.
That's why he wants to go into space (10x solar potential because you don't have a day/night cycle, no clouds, no dust/rain, no temperature loss, no orientation issues, and no atmosphere reducing solar).
To me it seems ridiculous, for one because sending 150kg to space costs about $500k, and this is about the weight of a solar installation that costs $800 to install and generates about $1000 worth of electricity across 20 years at utility wholesale prices.
But suppose it was cheaper and viable, and earth-electricity was indeed capped, you could argue (if you believe the hype) that developing AI is an existential arms-race objective for US/China.
But from what I've understood that's just not the case at all. Something like 170+ coal plants are scheduled to be decommissioned, and the average coal and gas plant runs at 40-50% of capacity, because wind/solar is eating their lunch (cheaper marginal $ per kWh). i.e. there is so little demand that these plants keep using less capacity and shutting down superfluous plants.
You'd think if experts believed electricity was going to be a bottleneck, that venture capital / AI companies, or even traditional capital, would be buying up plants or signing guaranteed-usage contracts. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
The point of your whole argument is that “financial experts” are always rational and are not affected by bubbles, it took months from energy experts talking with media/investors to the Big Tech would start talking about “energy crisis”.
In fact, Nadella publicly stated that he has a large amount of hardware in inventory that has already been purchased but cannot be utilized due to insufficient energy.
1y from here they will be talking how nuclear facilities are necessary
I will take this as seriously as any other promise issued at the White House in this regime.
Much like the price of RAM, SSD, and GPU. The ballooning data-center energy consumption costs have already broken the middle class economic-loop Westinghouse electric drove in the 1950s. Some are seeing their utility bills double.
People are not voluntarily going to build things that make less profit.
It is a suckers bet assuming the unscrupulous will grow a conscience. =3
>"The pledge includes a commitment"
Pledge my ass. It is either law mandating those massive datacenters absorb the cost with heavy penalties for non compliance or it is just BS talk (what it seems to be at the moment)
Like Musk just set up his own turbines regardless of what laws say
I can see how big tech is enthusiastic about freestyling this. Eh sorry I mean bear the cost
Can I pledge to pay taxes?
As long as they promised. Their word is golden
Stealing from the people; enriching myself
This is really a state law issue and there's really no solution for spiralling energy costs other than nationalizing utilities or otherwise making them into state or municipal entities, much like municipal broadband.
Take the case of Duke Energy in North Carolina, which illegally raised rates too much. Utilities prices are supposedly regulated but utilities work around this by simply moving costs to things they can charge whatever for (eg transmission costs vs energy costs).
The NC Court of Appeals ruled that Duke Energy's actions were illegal BUT there would be no refunds for customers [1], in part because lawmakers passed a law to allow them to do this retroactively [2]. Also, if Duke Energy had to repay customers they can simply raise prices to recoup those costs even though the money was improperly charged in the first place.
So consumers will keep paying for the infrastructure to connect up these data centers and will keep subsidizing the ongoing energy costs.
[1]: https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/no-refunds-for-duke-...
[2]: https://sustaincharlotte.org/press-release-nc-lawmakers-over...
It feels like ordinary people are becoming increasingly unnecessary. With AI, data centers, and big corporations, they don’t really need ordinary people anymore apart from their own employees. Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them, and ordinary people could just be put in zoos for display.
>Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them
That doesn't make sense because robots and AI won't have money to buy goods and services.
True but they will focus their market on the every enriching 0.1% that will have all the money.
The capitalists realized that if they literally starve the working class there will be revolution. But if they produce enough so they can sustain (barely) rest of the people with 1% output while they consume 99%, it will be okay.
So don't worry, you'll have basic ~~income~~ soylent green.
People have already hooked up Stripe accounts to OpenClaw instances, so AI's currently buying and selling goods and services.
oh well if they pledge it's okay then!
They’re pledging to do what they were doing anyway. No one with any sense is building large data centers and assuming the grid will supply the energy.
Isn't that contradicted by the fact that data centers are increasing electric prices in the areas they are built? It seems to me that either the data centers are drawing power from the grid or the utilities are gouging people. Either one should be stopped.
move to northern virginia - the capital of data centers - and see what happens to your energy bills…
I find the whole thing a little odd. They’re basically pledging to pay their electricity bills. So what? So does every business.
Saying they’re going to pay for generation and transmission adds little. That’s already baked into the charges! It’s like saying they’re going to finally pay for the farmers to grow the produce and the drivers to get the produce to market when they buy apples--as though spontaneous generation and teleportation was ever an option.
An actual problem was them trying to avoid paying.
They'd ask the utilities to make Gigawatts of energy available over the next two decades and the utilities would say "No problem, just sign here and agree to pay for us building out the grid to support that".
Then the AI companies said "No we only want to pay for energy if we actually use it, if we go bust or decide not to use the energy in a couple of years we want you to charge all the others consumers to recoup that cost".
No idea if that's addressed here. I'm assuming not.
It was never clear if that reflected uncertainty about future demand or of they just like shifting costs and risk onto other people whenever possible.
edit: the pledge references this problem, whether it actually solves it I don't know.
They are pledging to not only pay for their own bills but rather increase the supply of electricity itself. This will reduce retail electricity prices.
This mean retail consumers are paying less for electricity than what they would have paid if not for the pledge.
What if they pay own bills (why is this even a subject of discussion?), increase supply (formally), but electricity prices still go up anyway? Just curios if scenario from my descrition even possible...
that could happen because the demand could rise even more.
Some towns in my state are already complaining about the noise from turbines supplying on-site power to a data center that's been built here. They're keeping people up at night. I'm broadly supportive of a "techie go home" movement.
The only people who believes corpo jackoffery these days are either boomers or people investing their remaining money in big line go up
Like trickle down economics? Fool me once ...
I've read so many of these pledges before.... tl'dr: no, they won't
Do they pledge the costs of noise pollution and damage to water sources? Let’s be honest - these pledges are theater that reflects an agreement between tech oligarchs and the Trump administration. The pay the bribes via donations or whatever, and get back this deceptive theater show.
Trump helping tech bros sell more data centers. A pledge is moronic. You pay for what you use since time immemorial. Don't need to redefine existing words with new meaning.
Everything that the white house says atm, they do the opposite.
Even if the pledges are in good faith, people are being naive about how utilities work.
The general goal for utilities has been to pursue the next “thing” and work toward some sort of regulation to lock in demand, which can be used as a lever to seek price increases and consolidate.
If there’s margin to be had, the utilities will find a way, and prices will go up either way.