Tag: Microsoft

Energy Reality Forces Tech to Ditch Climate Virtue Signaling

In Pecos County, Texas, crews are clearing scrubland for a power plant that will burn natural gas and answer to no one but Amazon.

Microsoft has signed a 20-year deal for power from a Chevron gas plant in neighboring Reeves County.

In 2021, Facebook’s parent company Meta declared climate change one of the most pressing challenges facing the world and positioned itself among the largest corporate buyers of clean electricity. Then came its Hyperion data center in Louisiana.

A cartoon-style illustration titled 'Energy Reality' showing a man wearing a green 'Climate' mask, standing amidst energy infrastructure like wind turbines and natural gas plants in Pecos County, Texas. The image displays humorous commentary on energy, technology, and climate, with text elements emphasizing reliable power and critiques of 'virtue signaling.'

From The CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

In Pecos County, Texas, crews are clearing scrubland for a power plant that will burn natural gas and answer to no one but Amazon. With 35 turbines and a generating capacity of more than 7 gigawatts, the plant will be able to produce more electricity than the Grand Coulee Dam. A state permit allows the facility to emit 33 million tons of greenhouse gases a year, roughly double what comes from an Alabama coal-fired generator that has topped America’s emissions tables for years.

Now recall who founded the company building the gas behemoth. That would be Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who just 5 years ago told delegates at a U.N. climate summit that a rocket ride had shown him a planet that was finite and fragile, prompting a pledge of $2 billion to “restore” nature. The applause was warm. The carbon-intensive private jet that carried Bezos to the Scotland meeting was noted by critics and forgotten by everyone else.

Now, his company is financing what may become the largest point source of carbon dioxide in the United States, whose contribution to the greening of ecosystems should be welcome.

You are watching a conversion, and it deserves your attention because of what forced it.

The template, not the exception
Amazon did not stumble into natural gas. It joined a queue. Enverus Intelligence Research projects that user-owned turbines will account for about 40% of new data center capacity through 2030. Microsoft has signed a 20-year deal for power from a Chevron gas plant in neighboring Reeves County. Interconnection subscriptions are full, transformers are back-ordered, and the only metric that matters is the time it takes to get a power plant in operation.

In 2021, Facebook’s parent company Meta declared climate change one of the most pressing challenges facing the world and positioned itself among the largest corporate buyers of clean electricity. Then came its Hyperion data center in Louisiana. Regulators approved three combined-cycle gas plants for it in August 2025. In March 2026 Meta tripled the order, funding seven more and making the totals 10 gas plants and nearly $11 billion of investment. Meta will underwrite 15 years of revenue, while the turbines will run for 30 – a mismatch that has a dissenting member of the Public Service Commission warning that households may inherit the balance.

Elon Musk built an empire on the premise that combustion belongs to the past. In 2024, he said that a carbon tax was the only action needed to solve climate change. More recently, addressing G20 ministers, he warned of a significant power shortfall next year and defended data center construction against negative public sentiment. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, in the same meeting, asked governments for more electricians and more electricity. Neither man requested more wind and solar installations.

Energy Physics Forces a Hard Reset
Big Tech’s turn toward dedicated gas power does not settle the climate debate, but it exposes the distance between a political narrative and a power grid capable of supporting industries. When servers must run, physics gets a vote and realities are acknowledged.

For example, at the start of 2026, every grid-scale battery in the United States combined could meet national demand for only 15 minutes. Modeling the PJM regional power system through 2045, Jonathan Lesser and Mitchell Rolling found that a grid of wind, solar, and batteries would need 10 times the generating capacity of gas and nuclear power. It would also cost about seven times as much, and cover a land area larger than the PJM service area, which comprises most of the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest.

Yet, despite these facts, pseudo-scientists, grifters, and demagogues lectured for 20 years that coal is immoral, natural gas is a bridge to nowhere, and so-called green technologies are the planet’s salvation. Banks denied financing for hydrocarbon projects in developing countries where surgeons operate under lights powered by unreliable generators and where hundreds of millions cook with sooty wood and dung.

The lesson is the same for data centers and households: Prosperity requires electricity that is available when needed. Dependable systems of conventional energy sources will continue to power the tech revolution and human progress for decades.

Originally published at American Thinker, September 13th, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.

Microsoft Pauses Its Carbon Indulgence Spending. The Usual Suspects Are Upset.

Microsoft has indeed paused new carbon removal purchases, and the carbon removal industry (and its advocates) are reacting strongly.

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

On April 10, Heatmap News broke the story that Microsoft had begun telling carbon removal suppliers and partners that it was pausing future purchases. Bloomberg followed the next day with a confirming account from inside the company. The Microsoft employees who placed the calls, Bloomberg reported, told the developers in at least one case that the decision was “motivated by financial considerations.”

This is, in plain English, a very large deal.

Microsoft was not just a buyer in the carbon removal market. Microsoft, by every available accounting, was the carbon removal market. As of April 13, per CDR.fyi via ESG Dive, Microsoft accounted for 78.5% of all disclosed durable carbon removal contracts, with over 36.4 million metric tons purchased. MIT Technology Review put it more bluntly: “Microsoft is the carbon removal market.” If you have spent the last five years building a startup to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, you have almost certainly been counting on Microsoft to write you a check.

So Microsoft’s “pause,” whatever its eventual duration, has cascaded through what the New York Times itself called, in a December 2024 piece, the “New Climate Gold Rush.” Climeworks and Carbon Engineering, two of the largest direct air capture firms, each hold multi-year Microsoft contracts in the nine-figure range. Bloomberg’s follow-up reporting describes at least one developer being instructed by Microsoft to review the terms of an existing contract in case the company later tried to cut it. Bloomberg’s headline word was “spooked.”

Microsoft’s official line, delivered through Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa, is that all of this is part of a “disciplined approach” rather than a change in ambition. The disciplined approach apparently involves telling counterparties they may want to lawyer up. Welcome to corporate climate communications in 2026.

The Reaction

That is the business story. The political story is more interesting.

Within days of the news, a coalition of fifty-plus advocacy organizations led by the San Francisco activist group Stand.earth published an open letter under the URL microsoftlies.com. As of this writing, the letter is also running as a paid advertisement on Reddit, with Reddit’s own click-tracking IDs in the URL confirming an active promoted-post campaign. The letter is co-signed by Sierra Club, Greenpeace USA, Public Citizen, Friends of the Earth U.S., Hip Hop Caucus, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, 350 Seattle, and a long tail of regional and topical groups.

The letter accuses Microsoft of abandoning its climate commitments, betraying community trust, and killing its leadership on clean energy. It treats the carbon removal pause as part of a broader pattern that includes Microsoft’s AI data center build-out and its enterprise contracts with oil and gas companies. It is, in the well-developed genre of environmentalist open letters, a relatively standard product.

What is worth noticing is the timing, and the apparatus.

A Campaign in Progress

Stand.earth has been escalating attacks on Microsoft for more than two years. The campaign predates the carbon removal pause by a wide margin.

In February 2024, Stand.earth published a report titled “Ctrl-Alt-Incomplete: The Gaps in Microsoft’s Climate Leadership,” arguing that Microsoft’s emissions had risen 46% since its 2020 net-zero pledge. In early 2025, the organization’s blog turned its attention to Microsoft’s AI data center expansion, framing it as a hidden climate cost. In January 2026, Stand.earth issued a critical statement on Microsoft’s data center community plan, attacking its lack of explicit renewable commitments. In March 2026, Stand.earth’s research arm published an analysis calculating that a single Microsoft data center in West Virginia would increase the company’s annual emissions by 44%. Around the same time, it published a follow-on study claiming a combined 160% data center carbon footprint increase from three methane gas projects.

So when Microsoft paused its carbon removal purchases on April 10, the activist infrastructure had already spent two years building the case that Microsoft was a climate villain. The open letter, the website, and the paid Reddit campaign represent the operational arm of that infrastructure, switched on.

This is what a coordinated NGO pressure campaign actually looks like. Reports, then research, then escalation, then events, then paid digital media. It is professional, well-resourced, and built to last.

Who Pays for All of This?

Here is the question Microsoft is presumably asking itself, and that shareholders, reporters, and ratepayers might profitably ask too.

The activist organizations attacking Microsoft for stepping back from carbon removal purchases are not disinterested observers. They sit inside a broader ecosystem of climate advocacy organizations that are, themselves, funded by the same large foundations and corporate donors who have spent the last decade building out the case for corporate net-zero spending. The carbon removal industry that has lost most of its 2026 pipeline is staffed by the same kind of credentialed climate professionals who, on a different day, work for the NGOs writing the open letters. The line between “industry” and “advocacy” in the climate space has been functionally erased for a long time. Even Heatmap News, which broke the story, is a climate-aligned publication. MIT Technology Review’s reporting treated Microsoft’s pause as a crisis for “the industry,” not an episode of a customer making a financial decision.

When eighty percent of a market is one buyer, you do not have a market. You have a subsidy program. When the subsidy pauses, the recipients get loud. And Microsoft who funded the subsidy in the first place is also a major source of funding the NGO’s driving the campaign demanding it resume.

This is the structural reality of the carbon removal economy that the press has not been comfortable describing in plain language. Microsoft’s “disciplined approach” is forcing it into view.

The Inconvenient Comparison

While we are on the subject of Microsoft’s environmental footprint, it is worth noting an unrelated decision the company made in October 2025 that the activist letter conspicuously does not mention.

On October 14, 2025, Microsoft ended free security support for Windows 10. Hundreds of millions of currently-functional PCs cannot meet Windows 11’s hardware requirements (TPM 2.0, eighth-generation Intel processors, comparable AMD processors) and will, as a result, be steered toward either insecure operation, paid extended support, or replacement. The Public Interest Research Group warned before the deadline that the policy could generate a tsunami of e-waste from working hardware that has been arbitrarily deprecated.

This is, by any reasonable measure, a far more direct environmental harm than a temporary pause on speculative atmospheric carbon removal. It is concrete. It is measurable. It is happening right now. Yet none of the fifty-plus signatories of microsoftlies.com have, apparently, been moved to mention it.

The reason, one suspects, is that there is no fundraising tail attached to it. There is no $500-per-ton revenue stream contingent on Microsoft fixing Windows 10. The carbon removal pause, by contrast, has cost the climate-activism-and-startup ecosystem a great deal of money very quickly. So that is the one the open letter is about.

What This Story Is Actually About

Microsoft has not abandoned climate spending. It has, by Nakagawa’s account, paused new procurement while reassessing its strategy. It will probably resume some of it. The pause is consistent with what a CFO would do when reviewing a $100-to-$600-per-ton expense category whose climate benefits are, on the kindest reading, speculative, and whose primary near-term effect on the company’s reported numbers is to fund a “carbon negative” claim that depends on the integrity of contracts running to 2030 and beyond.

What this story actually illustrates is the financial fragility of a market that the press has spent five years describing as a transformative climate solution. A single buyer’s “pause” caused, in Bloomberg’s word, market-wide tremors. That is not a market. That is a sponsorship.

The activists demanding Microsoft resume its sponsorship have every right to make their case. But anyone reading those demands should know what they are reading. It is not, primarily, an argument about climate science. It is an argument about cash flow.

Microsoft, for the moment, appears to be applying its disciplined approach.

With thanks to David Burton (sealevel.info) for surfacing the microsoftlies.com paid campaign and the Windows 10 e-waste comparison.

For National Security, We Need Uranium Mined in America

Perhaps it’s too soon to mark nuclear power’s revival in the U.S. but there is a burst of activity that should ultimately yield a new generation of advanced nuclear plants and small modular reactors. 

From Watts Up With That?

By Ivan Maldonado

Perhaps it’s too soon to mark nuclear power’s revival in the U.S. but there is a burst of activity that should ultimately yield a new generation of advanced nuclear plants and small modular reactors. 

This is especially true for major industrial energy consumers – which now also includes data centers – where there is a strong economic incentive to use more nuclear power instead of natural gas and intermittent renewables. 

In Illinois, Meta recently signed a long-term agreement to buy nuclear power from Constellation’s Clinton nuclear plant, the latest in a slew of deals between big tech and the nuclear industry. Constellation also said it would restart Three Mile Island Unit One in Pennsylvania and sell the power to Microsoft under a 20-year agreement. Google, too, has agreed to fund the development of small modular reactors, or SMRs, at three new nuclear sites in Oregon. TVA plans to build SMRs at its Clinch River site and Kairos Power has a blueprint for an advanced molten salt reactor. Moreover, Amazon, Google and Meta signed a pledge in March calling for nuclear energy worldwide to triple by 2050.

Elevating nuclear power on our list of energy options makes sense because it is the only way to generate large amounts of emission-free electricity reliably for AI-powered data centers, electric vehicles and industries. But surging demand for electricity and nuclear power underscores a serious issue: Who will provide the huge amounts of uranium needed to fuel nuclear plants? 

Currently, 95% of the uranium used at US nuclear plants is imported from other countries, with Russia and former Soviet States flooding the global market and driving free-market companies out of business. China is also rapidly expanding its influence in the global uranium supply chain. But our dependence on uranium imports is not for lack of domestic resources.

In fact, in the mid-1970s the U.S. was the sole supplier of enriched uranium in the West, and business boomed. Since then, artificially low prices – and policy antagonism to domestic production – have forced U.S. customers into the hands of foreign competitors. Currently, there are only five uranium mines operating in the U.S. in contrast to several dozen in the 1970s and 20 as recently as 2009.

A uranium crisis may not be imminent, but the long-term implications of buying cheap foreign uranium instead of from US mining companies are ominous, particularly for national defense, including the Navy’s fleet of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. Our nation’s fleet of 94 nuclear power plants also requires a dependable supply of uranium. 

American industries, including our defense industrial base, are currently under immense pressure from China’s export restrictions on mineral exports – including rare earth metals. We know too well that the era of overreliance on mineral imports must come to an end. This is an economic, energy and national security vulnerability that has become untenable.

Given the risk of a cutoff of uranium imports or a huge spike in the price of uranium, we need a government policy to counter the threat to our national security and economy. President Trump recently said the Administration will draw up recommendations for reviving and expanding U.S. uranium production. That’s a good first step but we must match intent with action.

Our dependence on imported minerals, particularly from adversaries, poses a grave threat to national security. And it will cause serious trouble for key sectors of our economy if something isn’t done soon to boost domestic production. For these reasons, the U.S. now faces a monumental challenge: scaling up production of uranium, diversifying supply chains to protect national security and doing so in ways that are sustainable.

Dr. G. Ivan Maldonado, Professor, Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

AI Energy Surge – Microsoft to Re-Open Three Mile Island

The entire output of the re-opened Three Mile Island nuclear plant will be used to drive artificial intelligence computers.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

The entire output of the re-opened Three Mile Island nuclear plant will be used to drive artificial intelligence computers.

A once-shuttered nuclear plant could soon return to the grid. 

The planned reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant is praised as a boon for Pennsylvania and a boost for AI, but it is loathed by residents still haunted by a near-catastrophic meltdown there in 1979.

…

The resurrection of Three Mile Island (TMI) — half of which remained operating after the 1979 meltdown, only closing down due to economic reasons in 2019 — was prompted by Microsoft’s need to fuel its power-hungry data centers.

A revolution in generative artificial intelligence has triggered a surge in energy needs for those data centers, pushing cloud computing giants to look for additional low carbon energy sources. 

…

For others, the fear and anxiety of 1979 is still strong.

…

A series of equipment malfunctions and human errors saw the plant’s Unit 2 melt down in 1979, releasing radioactive materials into the atmosphere and launching mass evacuations.

…Read more:

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/cheers-angst-as-us-nuclear-plant-three-mile-island-to-reopen/ar-AA1uDRIg

It is hard to get your mind around – the entire output of the re-opened Three Mile Island nuclear plant will be used by Microsoft’s artificial intelligence data centers.

Why does AI need so much power? The reason is big AI systems need to sift through trillions, sometimes quintillions of failed attempts to find the solution they are looking for. Even at billions of potential solution evaluations per second it can take days, months or even years to achieve a result. But this process of digitally mining neural networks to find the nuggets of rightness can be accelerated by adding more computer hardware – an AI hardware arms race which has led to the current situation, in which big tech companies have started rehabilitating nuclear reactors, for the sole purpose of powering their next generation data centers.

Anyone wanting to delve deeper into why AI needs so much power can read an explanation in my recent article about AI and see a real AI in action.

Artificial Intelligence: A Working Demonstration, and Why Big Tech Ditched Big Green

The renewable energy revolution is dead man walking thanks to the rise of AI. Even if better algorithms are discovered, the huge AI data centres won’t be retired, the better algorithms will be used to increase the processing power of existing AI systems, and help design next generation systems which suck even more power.

We stand at the dawn of the Information Age, the age of Artificial Intelligence. Politicians and even tech companies might still pay lip service to renewables, and some of the more intellectually challenged holdout politicians in Britain and Australia still haven’t received the memo, but one thing is beyond doubt: the energy hungry Information Age will not be powered by rooftop solar and “community batteries”, it will be powered by nuclear, coal, gas, whatever scraps of power energy hungry AI companies can scrounge to feed the wolf, to cast into the gaping maw of their frantically growing AI systems, to maintain their competitive edge. Anyone who hesitates or pauses even slightly to question what they are creating will be trampled by the stampede, the race to the finish line.

Drill, baby, drill.

Google, Amazon, give up on national grid, ignore renewables, and buy their own nuclear plants

Two weeks ago it was Microsoft reviving Three Mile Island’s nuclear plant. Now Google is buying seven small modular reactors, and Amazon is  spending $500 million USD on part of a nuclear energy company.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Soon every tech billionaire will have their own nuclear power plant

Two weeks ago it was Microsoft reviving Three Mile Island’s nuclear plant. Now Google is buying seven small modular reactors, and Amazon is  spending $500 million USD on part of a nuclear energy company.

Too bad for the deplorables who get stuck with the expensive wind-solar-battery clunker spaghetti-grid forced on them by the arts graduates in Parliament. An AI datacentre needs all the same thing a human city does — cheap gigawatts, 24 hours a day. The number-nerd men with money have all decided the cheapest reliable answer to running their AI data center cities, while pretending to fix the weather, is nuclear power. (Coal, of course, is cheaper which is why China uses so much, but it’s against the religion).

The unwashed masses won’t get that choice, of course, to sign up with whatever generator they want. Only the uber rich get that kind of luck.

Every one of these tech giants could have poured that money into wind farms and gardens of solar panels, backed up with acres of batteries and ten thousand miles of high voltage towers, pumped hydro, and synchronous condenser flywheels. But none of them want to pour in their own billions anymore, despite the social credit points bonanza and the bragging rights that would bring.

For twenty years these same people have been pushing the renewable hard sell on us, now overnight, without so much as a “sorry” they’ve all flipped, leaving us holding the can of decrepit national grids that can’t do what they were designed to do.

Google will build seven small nuclear reactors, the first by 2030…Our PM and the CSIRO must be feeling hung-out-to-dry. They declared nuclear was the most expensive option and said Australia couldn’t even build one before 2040.

Google signs deal with startup to build small nuclear reactors to power AI

Aljazeera

Google has signed a landmark deal to use electricity produced by small nuclear reactors to power its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts.

Under the agreement with startup Kairos Power announced on Monday, the California-based tech giant will back the construction of seven small nuclear reactors capable of generating 500 megawatts of power. The first reactor is scheduled to come online by 2030, with others to follow in the coming years.

“The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies that are powering major scientific advances, improving services for businesses and customers, and driving national competitiveness and economic growth,” Michael Terrell, the senior director of energy and climate at Google, said in a blog post.

Two days later, Amazon too.

Amazon follows Google in taking the nuclear option to power data centres

EuroNews

Amazon is investing in US firm X-energy to utilise nuclear reactors to power its data centres.

Amazon and X-energy are aiming to have more than 5 gigawatts of SMR-generated power operational by 2039.

The reactors are currently under development, with none currently providing power to the electric grid in the US.

Big investors can help change that, and these announcements could be the “inflection point” that makes scaling up this technology truly possible, Huff said.

Feel the heat. Only weeks ago these same billionaires were raving about renewable energy, downranking and censoring the skeptics… now they are doing exactly what we said all along.

Microsoft ‘Buys’ Nuclear Power Plant to Run AI – and it’s Showing Us the Future

On September 20th there was an announcement by a little known energy company located in Baltimore Pennsylvania:

Constellation announced today the signing of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft that will pave the way for the launch of the Crane Clean Energy Centre (CCEC) and restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1, which operated at industry-leading levels of safety and reliability for decades before being shut down for economic reasons exactly five years ago today. Under the agreement, Microsoft will purchase energy from the renewed plant as part of its goal to help match the power its data centers in PJM use with carbon-free energy.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Nick Bowler

On September 20th there was an announcement by a little known energy company located in Baltimore Pennsylvania:

Constellation announced today the signing of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft that will pave the way for the launch of the Crane Clean Energy Centre (CCEC) and restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1, which operated at industry-leading levels of safety and reliability for decades before being shut down for economic reasons exactly five years ago today. Under the agreement, Microsoft will purchase energy from the renewed plant as part of its goal to help match the power its data centers in PJM use with carbon-free energy.

There are two highly significant things about this announcement. The first is that the company operates a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, the site of one of the world’s biggest nuclear accidents. The reactor was due to be decommissioned in the next few years and the plant shut down completely, but it now has been given a new lease of life with this deal. If Constellation gains approval from its local authorities to go ahead with the project, it will truly be a turning point for the future of nuclear energy.

The second significant fact is that the purchaser of the entire output of this reactor for the next 20 years is Microsoft. The technology giant will build a new plant to develop AI nearby, and it will need the output of a nuclear reactor to guarantee the energy requirements of the project.

The anticipated huge surge in energy demand from this sector (all of which has to be in the form of electricity) is prompting AI companies to make deals with energy companies to secure their slice of the cake in a world where energy security is becoming less and less certain.

AI is set to surpass even the huge energy consumption requirements of digital crypto-currency transactions and storage.

It takes a very long time to build a new nuclear power station, so the spotlight is now turning to small modular reactors (SMRs) for a faster turnaround. These can be built and commissioned a great deal more quickly than conventional reactors, assuming of course that the political will is there to approve their construction in the first place.

There are many companies eyeing the opportunity presented by this new technology. Amongst others, Rolls Royce is getting in on the act – with an emphasis already on “clean and affordable”, tying the technology in to the green revolution in order to win Government backing.

All of this provides both a problem and a solution for the Labour Government’s drive towards Net Zero. It is becoming increasingly clear to many people that the limitations and costs of Net Zero are going to far outweigh the benefits of trying to reach the lofty goals contained in the eco-aspirations of the current Government.

In particular, as many articles on this website have attested to, it will be impossible to rely on renewable sources of energy without a constant power backup. As fossil fuels are ruled out, that leaves only one currently viable source at reasonable price levels: nuclear energy.

However, nuclear energy comes with a severe political taint due to a long history of fear-mongering and negativity, associated for decades with Labour party opposition to the Trident missile system.

The political activism group Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which opposes all forms of nuclear energy, saw a surge in membership when Tony Blair announced plans to expand U.K. nuclear power capacity in 2007.

This rekindling of public anxiety at that time must contain a warning to the Labour Government when it comes to try to ‘sell’ nuclear to its supporters and the public. But how much choice will it really have in the matter? The catalyst for the change is coming from the AI revolution, which doesn’t look like it has any intention of being stopped in its tracks.

This is what Yann lecCun, the Chief AI Scientist at Meta had to say about the deal with Constellation:

AI datacentres will be built next to energy production sites that can produce gigawatt-scale, low-cost, low-emission electricity continuously.

Basically, next to nuclear power plants.

The advantage is that there is no need for expensive and wasteful long-distance distribution infrastructure.

Note: yes, solar and wind are nice and all, but they require lots of land and massive-scale energy storage systems for when there is too little sun and/or wind. Neither simple nor cheap.

AI datacenters will be built next to energy production sites that can produce gigawatt-scale, low-cost, low-emission electricity continuously.
Basically, next to nuclear power plants.
The advantage is that there is no need for expensive and wasteful long-distance distribution… https://t.co/bVxNmYZiQh— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) September 22, 2024

AI and nuclear energy are a marriage made in heaven it seems. It holds out hope for a more sensible energy policy in the U.K. to be developed after all. But expect to see all kinds of hand-wringing and hypocritical statements from the Government as it tries to make nuclear power palatable to its Left-wing supporters.

Tech Giant Secures Deal To Bring Back Reactor At Infamous Nuclear Power Plant

A shuttered nuclear power plant with a checkered past will partially be coming back online after Microsoft obtained a deal to purchase energy from one of the plant’s reactors, according to a Friday press release.

From Watts Up With That?

The Daily Caller

Owen Klinsky
Contributor

A shuttered nuclear power plant with a checkered past will partially be coming back online after Microsoft obtained a deal to purchase energy from one of the plant’s reactors, according to a Friday press release.

The 20-year power purchase agreement, which the tech giant secured with Constellation Energy, would bring back the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania — the site of a 1979 meltdown that resulted in a large-scale evacuation of nearby pregnant women and school-age children. The project aims to provide power for Microsoft data centers as tech companies push to expand electricity production to support their artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud storage needs, the release says. (RELATED: Biden-Harris Admin’s Multi-Billion Dollar Electric School Bus Program Is A Huge Gift To China, House Report Finds)

“Powering industries critical to our nation’s global economic and technological competitiveness, including data centers, requires an abundance of energy that is carbon-free and reliable every hour of every day, and nuclear plants are the only energy sources that can consistently deliver on that promise,” Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of Constellation, stated in the release alongside Microsoft. “We look forward to bringing [the Three Mile Island plant] back with a new name and a renewed mission to serve as an economic engine for Pennsylvania.”

🧵

The agreement would bring back Unit 1 at Three Mile Island, which was shuttered in 2019 for “economic reasons,” according to Constellation’s statement. Unit 1 is adjacent to the Unit 2 reactor that caused the worst nuclear meltdown in U.S. history on March 28, 1979, which results in 40% of people evacuating the area.

The Three Mile Island power plant will have a capacity of 835 megawatts, enough to power more than 700,000 homes. It is expected to create 3,400 direct and indirect jobs, according to the press release.

The decision to reopen the Three Mile Island reactor comes as tech companies are increasingly looking to nuclear energy to power their AI and data center needs, with Amazon Web Services spending $650 million on a nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania earlier this year. The trend could affect power grid reliability and affordability as it provides the businesses with “first dibs” on electricity, Pennsylvania Consumer Advocate Patrick Cicero told the WSJ in July.

Nuclear power has aroused public suspicion, largely due to incidents like Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl, in which reactor meltdowns caused radiation to flood areas surrounding nuclear power plants. However, it could be a viable pathway to reducing emissions and accomplishing the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of having the U.S. power sector reach net-zero emissions by 2035.

“This is a valuable opportunity to invest in clean, carbon-free and affordable power — on the heels of the hottest year in Earth’s history,” Pennsylvania state Rep. Tom Mehaffie said in the Constellation press release. “This will transform the local economy and presents a rare opportunity to power our economy with reliable clean energy that we can count on.”

Constellation and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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New Climate Institute Claims Microsoft is “Unjustly” Quarantining Their Emails

Hundreds of governmental and non-governmental organisations working on climate change appear to have been experiencing disruption to email communication when their communications contain any reference to the NewClimate URL.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Trojan, virus, hack or Microsoft defect?

MICROSOFT ERROR OR EXTERNAL ATTACK CAUSING DISRUPTION TO EMAIL COMMUNICATION ACROSS THE CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNITY

Publication date 27 Oct 2023

Since 17 October, to our knowledge any email with the NewClimate URL (newclimate dot org) in the email body, link, signature, reply header or contained anywhere in an attachment is unjustifiably quarantined by Microsoft email servers without any notice, regardless of who sends or receives the email.

That our own email flow is disrupted is the least of our problems: all Microsoft tenants are afflicted by the same issue when this URL appears in their emails, or any attachments they share, even when we are not a party to the communications.

…Read more: https://newclimate.org/news/microsoft-error-or-external-attack-causing-disruption-to-email-communication-across-the

I feel a bit sorry for them, having your email system arbitrarily shut down is an unpleasant experience.

But they really should read some help pages on what to do. Microsoft in particular provides clear guidance on what to do if their system accidentally flags you as spam.

Their SPF record looks reasonable:

“v=spf1 +a include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:spf.mandrillapp.com -all”

The SPF record is an entry on your website DNS registration which tells other email servers who is allowed to send legitimate emails on your behalf. New Climate’s SPF record means anything on their own domain server (+a), outlook or mandrilapp.com (a mass email provider) is allowed to send emails on behalf of new climate.

All internet exposed websites are under continuous attack by automated malware bots, so it is possible either one of these bots found a weakness, or they innocently tripped the paranoid hair trigger of one of today’s email systems.

I also ran their site through a malware checker, which didn’t spot any malware. When websites are infected one of the first things which tends to happen is they start sprouting malware on all their web pages. Though sometimes the malware is sneaky and only appears at random intervals, so the malware test is not definitive.

I wish new climate good luck restoring their email system. I believe a big part of the solution to the climate panic is better communication between all parties, so if interrupting new climate’s communications is a deliberate act, it is a deplorable and heinous act which does no good for anyone.