The proper response to being in an area where datacentres are crowding in is "lobby your elected officials to increase property taxes and not give out tax increment financing deals". Tax everything, and tax it well. They'll stop building new datacentres in your area, and the ones that are there will (unless they were given a long-term sweetheart deal beyond your already-low tax rates) start being cash cows for your area.

Really, you don't see any difference between Elon Musk and, say, John Stankey? Is John Stankey actively transforming the US into an autocratic fascist-adjacent state?

Would you buy from a company called Plantations Inc which proudly advertises that all of its products are made by daily-whipped slaves? Are there no limits to how self-focused you are in your consumption?

It's one thing to say "this particular issue isn't mine, so I'm only going to think amount myself". It's an entirely different issue to have no moral bounds.

This headline sounds like something you'd hear coming from a news report on a TV in the background near the start of a horror movie.

What are you talking about? EV sales are booming, in no small part thanks to Trumps war with Iran.

My EV is an appreciating asset at the moment because used prices are rising.

Those are often the first things to be electrified, because the operators are closer to rational actors who see the immediate savings. Of course the real world gets in the way, but for example about half the busses here are electric because one of the companies replaced them all as part of a fleet upgrade a couple of years ago. They are much nicer too.

Of course, Norway isn't some third world country.

Michaux has been widely discredited. His 2021 report, for example, listed 65.4% of energy as wasted. That's probably true, most fossil fuel powered systems produce massive amounts of waste heat. But he still seems to think that we need to produce that much if we switch to electricity, which is obviously not the case.

Some of it is just misrepresentation. He uses Germany as an example, claiming they need 12 weeks of energy storage. The estimate he cites, which was already outlandish, actually says 24 days, and that's ridiculous. In the real world, there is no need for a whole country UPS because with enough renewables you only ever see hours of deficit, which can be covered with gas (only because it's cheaper to do that and offset it than to go 100% renewables/storage).

He also ignores all the HVDC lines that were being built at the time, and hasn't updated for all the once built since or announced since, so his estimate for the battery storage requirement is at least an order of magnitude off. He also bases his mineral estimates on old chemistry that was poor even when he wrote it, let alone today, and assumes it all has to be lithium ion battery storage.

He does the same thing with copper. Bases it off old technology, ignores aluminium as a conductor, ignores recycling, and vastly over-estimates the requirement.

The whole thing is full of obvious holes. Reality is that most countries can get to over 95% renewables + storage, and then some other sources for the remaining few percent which can have carbon capture and offsetting to reach net zero. The result is cheaper energy and a small chance we might not completely bugger up the planet.

Sure we can produce enough batteries for everyone to have an EV, and for grid storage too. The main issue is we have fallen a bit behind on the tech, on the chemistry.

Not that we shouldn't do that sort of thing, but to have any chance of this not being an absolute shit-show that causes an unprecedented global disaster, we need to do a hell of a lot more than just plant trees.

Basically everyone needs to do what China is doing in terms of renewables and storage build-out. The scale is unimaginable for most of us in the West. The biggest projects we ever did are tiny in comparison.

That's very doable with current EVs. In fact about a decade ago Bjorn Nyland used to tow a trailer that size in the middle of the Norwegian winter, with an old Tesla.

A few hours journey is no problem, even in cheap EVs. Here, for under the equivalent of $25k before tax, you can get an MG that will do 3 hours of non-stop driving at motorway speeds. I've done it in March, in the rain and the dark. It's only when you push out to 5 hours that you need to stop and charge, but personally I need a comfort break anyway.

As more people get EVs, other people start to realize that they will work for them. They work for almost everyone, except for people with *very* unusual and special requirements. As for used, the situation isn't ideal at the moment, but here the standard is an 8 year battery warranty and repairs/replacements after that period are possible, so it's on a par with buying a fossil. Actually probably slightly better, as there are some really unreliable combustion engines on the market. JLR is notorious for them.

The problem is not overall capacity. It's that they're all crowding into the same areas. Most places in the US (let alone the world) have nobody building datacentres anywhere near them. They all want to go into the places with not merely cheap power, but cheap property taxes and other incentives. Some places will tax everything, down to the servers themselves, whereas some will only tax the land and the building shell, not even the power interconnects or cooling systems.

When everyone wants to rush into the same place, it overtaxes the local grid; they have to build not just more generation, but power lines, substations, etc. And all of this has to go through permitting. There's no real limit to how much generation can be built, but none of the datacentre operations want to wait, because they're all worried about missing out on the opportunity. Hence the reason that they try to come up with stopgaps, like installing their own generators, or... this approach.

ECL MV1 / Lambda is 3,5 miles from the Googleplex. And 10-12 miles further to the southeast, Santa Clara is one of the densest datacentre hubs on Earth.

If you care about where they actually live, and distances to datacentres:

Sundar Pichai: Los Altos Hills, CA: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-6mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub (CoreSite SV9, Vantage, Colovore), 9-11 miles

Larry Page: Palo Alto, Ca: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 4-5mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 10-12mi.

Sergey Brin: Los Altos Hills / Bay Area: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-7mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 9-12mi

Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind CEO): North London, UK: London Docklands Hub (Telehouse / Equinix), 7-9mi; Slough Data Center Hub (Equinix, Yondr), 18-20mi

I don't know about you, but they're all way closer to datacentres than I am.

No, they are cheaper to buy. Both new and used, cash or credit.