• 3 Posts
  • 111 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The headline makes no sense to me and the article crosses over 2 problems in the energy transition.

    Microsoft is only involved in purchasing the power, not the facility itself. In my understanding, that means that Constellation is the only party here involved in the government backed loan. Noting also that the loan itself is not malicious, nor is its use to restart the facility - if nuclear facilities should not be funded or have any special tax status then that should have been considered in the government’s legislation.

    The 2nd part about the power from the plant going to grid, and not to Microsoft’s data centres directly is a known issue which close to all companies exploit by buying green certificates which I understand are currently done monthly in some areas. That means we do not trace that each electron provided to a user was from renewables, instead we aggregate that a company (via purchasing “green” certificates) shows that enough “green” electricity, anywhere on a connection, was produced to cover their usage for that month. This has nothing to do with Microsoft, their data centres, or this facility in general but is currently being dealt with. It will be clear in the power purchasing agreement how much power Microsoft will purchase from the facility directly and how it is delivered.

    Am I missing something?

    And no, I don’t think nuclear power is overly helpful given the exorbitant cost, time and waste aspects


  • I would argue that your perspective is a narrow one and you need to change what info you are consuming. My personal take (if you have any interest):

    1. Most of the people on this world are not rich enough to be part of daily traffic jams. They are just trying to survive and enjoy life with what they have.

    2. Current resource competition is driven by profit seeking and not bourne out of necessity (i.e. we’re not “competing” in the traditional sense, where countries at war are doing so to feed their people etc… At least, not yet.)

    3. There is definitely more space and resources available for more people, if we learn to better distribute what we have - the how of this, while keeping everyone happy, is the billion dollar question.

    4. You can choose to live in the jungle by yourself if you want, no one is (hopefully) forcing you to take part in working etc.

    5. If you can, you should go travel more. If you can’t, go volunteer some of your time to your community. It tends to clear my “the world is going to shit” thoughts. Sure, there’s problems everywhere, and we should fight for the ones we feel are important, but there is also a lot of great things happening.