By Jo Nova
Google was going carbon free by 2030 right up until it needed reliable hard energy itself, then the Net Zero goals were dropped in a hole. Even though The Goolag has been censoring skeptics and lecturing the public for ten (or twenty) years about the dangers of fossil fuels, now that it wants more power, Google chooses “gas”. Never mind the families that can’t afford dinner …
Google didn’t just promise to use more renewables—it promised to run on carbon-free power every hour of every day. “Climate Change is an urgent threat to humanity,” said Google in 2020. But now Google wants to build a 933MW gas plant in Texas, and is exploring building another huge gas plant in Nebraska.
Google was a key part of the marketing and election campaign to crush fossil fuels and promote the renewables industry, and it’s not even pretending that solar and wind power are the answer any more.
Google to tap into gas plant for AI datacenter in sharp turn from climate goals
— by Dara Kerr, The Guardian,
Michael Thomas, the founder of Cleanview and author of the report [on Google’s new gas plant] said that this power plant would be one of the first direct investments in fossil fuel infrastructure that he’s seen with Google.
“Google has spent decades crafting an image as a clean energy leader,” said Thomas. “I’ve always considered them to be the most committed to their climate goals. But these projects suggest a major strategic pivot at the company could be under way.”
Google are still pushing for Net Zero (they say) but don’t ask them any hard questions:
Asked by Axios last week at an energy conference in Houston about how natural gas jives with the company’s clean energy goals and overall strategy, Google’s head of advanced energy, Michael Terrell, said: “We don’t have anything to say on that.”
In 2024, the company reported a 48% rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 2019, due to datacenter energy consumption.
What they called climate commitments are now referred to as “climate moonshots.”
by its description “fossil fuel” sounds very organic to me. Should make all Vegans very happy!!
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Speculators in oil stocks may have a nasty surprise coming.It may not be restricted to oil stocks:-
https://sonar21.com/is-trump-purging-generals-opposed-to-a-ground-war-in-iran-or-is-it-something-bigger/#comment-384625
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Google are also investigating the Energy Dome storage system for renewables.
Uses liquid CO2 under pressure using standard equipment (e.g. gas cylinders) which is evaporated through a turbine when needed. When there is enough energy for the reverse the heat is stored as hot water, which then helps the evaporation process.
Said to be about 75% efficient. Other non Google planned projects include Finland and India. The system was first run in Sardinia (small scale about 25MW) in 2021 and was successful.
Typically 6 hours claimed for full capacity.
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Sorry, link
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZN0l6zRuJOw
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Reaching net zero by 2050 ‘cheaper for UK than one fossil fuel crisis’ Same source as the post
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Someone at the Guardian speaks a little Truth for once, yet you clumsily reference “someone else” at the Guardian and just like a pigeon playing chess, you strut. You only look clever to you.
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Another alarmist claim based on what real evidence?
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Shouldn’t we now press Google to give us deniers and contrarians a fair representation in search results?
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I wonder if Gulag will now remove the annoying propaganda link they attach to all climate sceptic posts on their YouTube platform which links to
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/what-is-climate-change ?
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I recently sought medical attention.
I went to a place with signs that read “Advanced Urgent Care”.
I pondered when does urgent advance?
So when Google says “Climate Change is an urgent threat to humanity”, they didn’t say it was advanced.
So there is still time for the Tech Overlords to make some even bigger big scratch.
With this unadvanced interval , they may have time to advance to replacing humanity altogether.
Urgent threat neutralized by eliminating the threatened.
Advancement in biology could also be opened to unlimited horizons in this same manner.
(Some of the preliminary work may have already been done.)
Skeptics are inhibiting progress by bringing up stuff someday said and going on about something that is so yesterday.
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Well, for once they’re now telling the truth.
What could be cleaner than hydrocarbon fuels whose primary emissions are carbon dioxide and water, both good for the environment.
Unlike wind and solar there is no clear felling of forests, destruction of birds, bat and insect life, destruction of productive farmland, clearing of paths for transmission lines, visual and infrasound pollution, toxic unrecyclable blades that go to landfill, shadow flicker, hugely expensive electricity which creates poverty etc.
And isn’t it better to burn methane (the primary ingredient in natural gas) and turn it into CO2 rather than let it escape into the environment through seeps etc. since methane is claimed by the anti-energy lobby to be an especially more potent “greenhouse” gas than CO2?
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Unbelievable that our loony left wing donkeys call toxic, unreliable W & S “clean and green”.
We are seeing thousands of klms of Australia’s environments destroyed for their delusional super expensive, unreliable W & S toxic rubbish and then a full replacement every 15 to twenty years.
FFs and Nuclear would last until 2100 and be available 24/7 365 days per year and we know our Victorian Brown coal would be very cheap for that entire period.
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I can see a situation in the woke countries in future where we will have a two tier electrical grid. It will have clean, inexpensive, reliable, gas, coal, real hydro and nuclear power going to Elites like Gulag and senior Leftists, Government and their senior public serpents and we, the down-trodden masses, will have expensive, unreliable rationed power from wind and solar plantations, just enough for a few lights, a microwave to heat your daily ration of insects or gruel, and an Internet connected appliance for Big Brother to monitor you and to deliver propaganda.
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I asked Gulag AI the following questions.
Unfortunately it won’t let me copy and paste the answers from my phone but you can see them here:
https://share.google/aimode/yWB0xdILBGr2Rb6Y9
https://share.google/aimode/EwTUOMtzkVKMqppb0
I then asked it:
It answered:
https://share.google/aimode/s9uy9CvjfOhonc5Pz
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Interesting that the first answer in your last link was about power reliability. But why should AI data centres be the only ones that require power reliability? The AEMO stated grid reliability figure works out at 99.998%. That surely would the same reliability figure for data centres. Therefore our power grids would also have the same power reliability requirements as data centres.
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Thanks for sharing. Wasn’t aware of the extent of online interaction you can have with ordinary online AI which apparently in the case of “G” includes, as you did, the link saving and sharing of a chat. Apparently, these saved chats will stay stored until the originator cancels them.
Made me think and asked what the limits for uploading stuff to a chat are and apparently you can upload a 2gb video for review/add commentary but not cut/edit. Thought of all the YouTube vids of chat bot and bitcoin processing centres and couldn’t help but wonder what a few billion saved 2gb vids would do to an AI centre (the answer seems to suggest millions not billions of vids would have a crippling effect) and the response was:
“You are correct that a massive operation uploading 2GB videos would impact a data centre, primarily through power consumption and heat:
• Energy Intensity: Processing video is exponentially more “expensive” than text. Generating or analyzing a single short video can consume as much energy as running a microwave for an hour.
• The “Computing” Cost: To review a 2GB video, the AI must convert it into tokens (mathematical units). This requires high-performance GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) that pull massive amounts of electricity and generate intense heat, requiring sophisticated cooling systems that consume millions of gallons of water daily.
Storage vs. Compute: While storing 5 million videos might take 10 petabytes (a manageable amount for giants like Google), analyzing them simultaneously would likely trigger Rate Limiting or DDOS protection. The system would prioritize real users and “throttle” or block the bot-like activity to protect the grid.”
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It’s almost as if they always knew that CO2 didn’t matter.
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And Australia with the many known gas-oil fields and believed to be others waiting to be discovered could become an even larger export of energy nation that we are now.
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I am sceptical that there are economy-changing reservoirs left to find and develop. I’ve no doubt there are new resources out there, but it is getting more and more expensive to act on it.
The Great Australian Bight is extremely challenging, especially as it’s also deep-water. It’d need to be truly massive to get development funding, assuming anything of value was found.
Even a floating rig drilling in shallow waters between Victoria and Tasmania costs in the realm of USD$1 million a day just to drill the well, and that’s a harsh environment, but really not the worst. You won’t get much, (if any) change from USD$150-200 million for drilling and “plug and abandonment” of 1 deepwater harsh environment well.
Cooper basin wells are not that cheap either, Just the drilling and casing of 1 well costs in the order of $2-4 million. Running a completion string and connecting to production (without hydraulic fracturing) is a similar cost magnitude, as is the work to decide where to drill, and to get approval.
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Remember Victoria is saving those fossil fuel resources for posterity.
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Google’s head of advanced energy, Michael Terrell, said: “We don’t have anything to say on that.”
Can we assume Mr.Terrell and his “advanced” team expected the question and decided a non-answer would be the best answer.
The combined salaries of this team must be about the size of the GDP of a small country. Google is getting its money’s worth.
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The start of this might show up the impossible reality of Net Zero (although the rest ends as a fairytale).
Sunlight Into Fuel. No Drilling Required.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO_3mapBmhM.
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As climate researcher David Archibald, visiting fellow at the Institute of World Politics, points out, the Chinese are investing in viable non-oil energy sources (like coal to fuel) and stocking up on foodstuffs while our politicians fritter away their time on the non-problem of global warming.
But the greatest danger is a cooler Sun. After the wholly beneficial warming of the twentieth century, our Sun is entering a cooler phase – and only the prepared world will survive.
Stop wasting time and money on UNIPCC climate misinformation based politics
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It’s OK. Google will just buy a lot of carbon offsets with their profits and, BINGO, magically they are carbon neutral again.
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Google has been studying the use of renewable energy to power its data centres for nearly two decades. Back in 2007, it started a research program called RE<C, which literally stated that they were hoping to reduce the cost of renewable energy to less than the cost of energy from coal:
https://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/google-gives-up-on-green-tech-investment-initiative-rec/
It invested nearly $1 billion in various renewable schemes, but in 2011, quietly shuttered its RE<C research program. It wasn't until 2014 that the Google engineers publicly explained the reason for the closure of Google's research initiative:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
"By 2011, however, it was clear that RE<C would not be able to deliver a technology that could compete economically with coal". Perhaps Google should have told our current Energy Minister?
Economic failure didn't stop Google's renewable energy ambitions. In 2017, Google started an AI program called DeepMindEnergy to improve the efficiency of renewable energy sources attached to a grid. The team grew to over 1000 people, but by 2020, all the leadership of the team, the visionaries who set this program in place, had left, perhaps after failed negotiations with the managers of the grid:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/17/climate-change-falls-down-the-agenda-at-ai-lab-deepmind.html
Just another example of ideology failing to have any influence on physics, economics, climate, engineering, or any other field that deals with the real world!
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