From the Robert Bryce Substack
In 2017, Google declared it had reached “100% renewable energy for our global operations.” The company continued, “Google became carbon neutral in 2007, and since then, our carbon footprint has grown more slowly than our business — proof, 10 years later, that economic growth can be decoupled from environmental impact and resource use.”
That “decoupling” didn’t last long.
In fact, since 2017, Google’s environmental reports show that the company’s electricity use, CO2 emissions, and carbon intensity have soared. The most recent numbers came out last Tuesday when the search and advertising colossus released its 2024 environmental report. And the numbers don’t lie. As seen in the chart below, since 2017, CO2 emissions at Google have jumped four-fold to a company record of 14.3 million tons in 2023.
Why does this matter? There are many reasons. First among them: Google has been among the most aggressive promoters of the notion that it was a different kind of company, a “clean” industry from Silicon Valley that wouldn’t pollute like old industrial companies such as U.S. Steel or ExxonMobil. But the latest numbers show that Google is, at root, an industrial company that relies on massive digital foundries — that’s a better description than the anodyne “data centers” — that use staggering quantities of juice. Further, the company’s electricity needs could never be supplied by wind and solar alone. Or to put it bluntly, Google’s claims about decoupling itself from the realities of the physical world and the vagaries of electric grids were little more than corporate greenwashing.
Second, Google isn’t just a giant of Big Tech, it’s among the most dominant corporations of our era. It controls 92% of the search engine market. For comparison, Microsoft’s Bing has a 3% share. Google is the world’s most-visited website. Coming in at number two is YouTube, which is owned by Google, or rather, by the parent company, Alphabet. Thus, whether we like it or not, Google has become interwoven with our online experiences, and as shown in the chart below, those experiences have a growing carbon footprint.
What’s driving the increase? Its new report says emissions grew by 13% in 2023, “primarily driven by increased data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.”
Third, Google has aggressively moved to squash debate over climate change on its platform, including on YouTube. In 2021, as reported by Axios, Google announced a policy that:
Prohibits climate deniers from being able to monetize their content on its platforms via ads or creator payments….It’s one of the most aggressive measures any major tech platform has taken to combat climate change misinformation…Google advertisers and publishers will be prohibited from making ad revenue off content that contradicts “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
As the chart below shows, the CO2 intensity of Google’s operations has doubled since 2020. That’s not misinformation. Those numbers come directly from the company’s reports. (Those reports are long and challenging to read. Further, the company has not been consistent in its reporting. I used the 2024, 2021, and 2019 reports.) But don’t expect to see these trends reported by major media outlets.
Fourth, just as Google dominates search, it also dominates the stock market. If you own an index fund that tracks the S&P 500, you own Google. The company’s market cap of $2.4 trillion and surging growth make it a must-own for any exchange-traded fund that invests in growth stocks or the broader stock market. For instance, Alphabet represents about 4.3% of the stock holdings in State Street’s S&P 500 ETF (Ticker: SPY). Thus, Google’s rising greenhouse gas emissions reflect the broader economy in the U.S.
Finally, Google is signaling that it cannot achieve net zero. The company’s chief sustainability officer, Kate Brandt, told the Associated Press last week that reaching net zero by 2030 “is an extremely ambitious goal. We know this is not going to be easy and that our approach will need to continue to evolve.” (For more on that topic, see my June 3 piece, “Vaclav Smil Calls Bullshit on Net Zero.”) Brandt continued, saying the company will have to manage “a lot of uncertainty, including this uncertainty around the future of AI’s environmental impacts.”
Indeed, given the trajectory of its emissions growth and its ongoing push to build massive new data centers for AI — particularly in countries where the electric grids rely mainly on hydrocarbons — it’s safe to assume that Google’s emissions will continue climbing for years to come. In April, it announced it would spend $3 billion on new data centers in the U.S., including $2 billion in Indiana, which gets about 45% of its electricity from coal-fired power plants. Further, in its latest environmental report, the company said that although it’s making progress on “clean” energy, there are “some hard-to-decarbonize regions like Asia Pacific” where carbon-free electricity “isn’t readily available. In addition we often see longer lead times between initial investments and construction of clean energy projects and the resulting GHG reductions from them.”
Of course, Amazon and other Big Tech companies are (finally!) showing interest in nuclear energy. In March, Amazon Web Services acquired Talen Energy’s data center campus in Pennsylvania, which will allow AWS to buy as much as 480 megawatts of power from the nearby 2.5-gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear plant. But there isn’t enough nuclear capacity for all of the Big Tech companies to power their digital foundries with fission power, not here in the U.S. and certainly not in other countries.
Last week, I talked to Doug Hohulin, a Kansas City-based technologist who works on AI and closely follows the data center sector. He summed up the predicament facing Google and the other power-hungry members of Big Tech. “There’s just not enough wind and solar available,” he said. “Nuclear used to be seen as bad, and now it’s good.”
Both of those statements are true. Right now, it appears that Google and other Big Tech companies will see continuing increases in emissions until the U.S. and other countries get lots of new reactors built and online. That won’t happen quickly and it won’t be cheap. But Google’s emissions show that Big Tech doesn’t have many other choices.
Speaking Engagements In Nantucket And Newport This Week On Offshore Wind
I will be giving two lectures this week on offshore wind. On Monday, July 8, I’ll be in Nantucket speaking at the Dreamland Theater. Start time is 6 pm. Click here for tickets.
On Tuesday, the 9th, I’ll be in Newport, RI, at Emmanuel Church. The start time for that event is 5:30 pm. More info on the Newport event is available here.
If you are in the area, by all means, please attend. I will discuss the history of the offshore wind industry, the threat it poses to critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, and the future of American energy. Hint: It’s still N2N: natural gas to nuclear.
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100% renewable is a great big fat lie right there…….not possible. Are they thick?
Creative accounting makes anything possible.
As I recall, Al Gore made a similar claim about his mansion in Tennessee that used more power than a small town.
When confronted, he claimed he’d bought “carbon credits” so it was OK.
Any claims of ‘renewable’ energy use that does not match the grid totals is fraud.
It is possible, I have solar cells on my roof and a batter wall that should las me a good 25 years where I will have to pay little or no much for power. Sunlight is 100% renewable and something like 93% of the material in my batteries and solar panels are recyclable. I’m also saving a ton of money and it will pay for itself in 5 years since I built it myself and didn’t get rolled by a solar company.
I have a friend who did something similar, but his goal was to diminish his reliance on the local power grid. I do have a couple of “engineering” questions for you if you don’t mind answering.
Thanks!
So, you’ve taken $0.08 per kwh Chinese electricity, and transformed it into $0.30 per kwh local electricity. Even calculating a 60% energy per goods cost (a low estimate for silicon, glass, silver conductor, copper conductor, aluminum frame, and inverter), your true energy cost of your system will probably never break even. Yes, it will pay for itself financially, but net CO2 is probably greater than if it were never constructed. Its even worse when you consider that the total CO2 expenditure of the system is front loaded, emissions first, “savings” over 10 to 20 years.
And I forgot the battery in the equation. Show me anyone actually recycling solar panels and lithium batteries with a proc ss which takes less energy than mining the primary ingredients, please.
I wonder how much Alphabet has been “jawboned” by various federal agencies? “Nice business you have here, and we control antitrust, BTW”
I wonder how much industry has captured the regulatory agencies.
Big Pharma and related industries own the FDA, NIH, CDC, etc. ADM and Big Ag control the FDA. EPA is owned by Big Green. The conventional energy industry does not control the many agencies that regulate it.
That happens. An agency or a politician threatens to add law or regulation that affects an industry and viola — a sudden new revenue stream of lobbying or campaign donations appears.
There is a 19th Century term for that, a “ripper bill”, one written to encourage a bribe to block it.
duh… so then the rest of the public won’t have that energy for their own needs- so that’s how Google solves its net zero problem?
Yes, it buys electricity. I’m sure somebody in the White House is working on net-neutrality rules for electricity as we read this. The best way to deal with scarcity isn’t to produce more, it’s to ensure nobody can buy extra. Spread the misery around and put the bureaucrats in charge of “fairness.”
“ Spread the misery around ” Gosh! That sounds a lot like Communism.
How many more nuclear power plants will be needed in, say, the next ten years just to support an untold number of AI’s coming on-line, as well as the ever increasing demand for bit-coin “mining”.
Talk about a waste of electricity!
Maybe it’s an indication I’m a geezer, but I don’t know why we need either- especially with the ever rising cost of electricity. I think most people would rather have lower cost of power than having AI and bit-coin whatever, that I still have zero understanding of.
Well, then, count me in as a geezer too!
For example, there are more than 23,000 cryptocurrencies in existence right now. Most have little purpose other than making money for their developers. But remember all the promises of digital currency when it first went viral? That ideal has derailed somewhere, sometime in the last 10 years.
I predict the same thing is gonna happen with AI: lots of initial buzz (right now), but how will one decide which particular AI to trust above all others when there are 20,000 or so of them vying for your “clicks”, each offering their own unique interpretation of “intelligence”? 😳
future pc operating systems will have AI-lite embedded. kinda like having a very opinionated, nosey alexa-siri-paperclipguy built-in. but ‘harmless’ to be sure
“There’s just not enough wind and solar available,” he said. “Nuclear used to be seen as bad, and now it’s good.”
Lusername won’t like this statement.
Two good prompts for the question “why”?
Maybe this will jumpstart a new wave of investment in small nuclear reactors.
Big tech could invest in small nuclear plants for their data centers and campuses.
TED · Feb 17, 2010
BG started down that road fourteen years ago. Maybe in another 10 we’ll learn why he stopped.
Link to Gates pro small nuke talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_innovating_to_zero?language=en
And hackers will find a way to steal the plutonium so they don’t have to buy it from the Libyans in order to generate the 1.21 jiggawatts needed to power their flux capacitors.
Out of petty cash.
We are told they are many and we skeptics are few so why do we bother them so? So much that they have to restrict our ability to express our skepticism and why. Something doesn’t add up really.
How much attention will the media give to this? Rhetorical question.
When Trump announces plans for more nuclear, the media will give it a lot of attention.
The generation that would care is a large voting block, but that block contains few undecideds. The watch one news channel to fill the silence and probably pay a significant portion of their government retirement check for 56 other tv channels they’ll never hear.
Artificial intelligence also uses colossal amounts of electricity. It’s been reported that if Tesla’s Dojo project is built to its current design it would consume as much electricity as 160,000 average households.
The IEA estimates that total electricity demand by data centres worldwide could reach more than 1000TWh by 2026 roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan.
Not sure if they took account of the recent projected growth of AI in that estimate.
IEA ‘Electricity 2024 Analysis and forecast to 2026’
Meanwhile Ireland has done very well by turning itself into a home for data centres but are now facing the possibility that if all such projects come to fruition they could be using up to 70% of the country’s electricity by 2030.
very simple soln’s:
Per they trusted left block (simon, username, analJ, etc), it is a Given that solar & wind is (for a while) now cheaper than all other elec sources.
Build data centers where the sun and wind are available (the genius that is google can figure out the competing air conditioning conundrum). Finance and build their own power generation systems in a vertical business model. Get rich(er).
Unless the initial given (solar/wind is cheaper) is simply a big lie, the soln is easy.
Maybe the one good thing that happens is AI and EV’s push the “greenie climate warriors” over to Pro-Nuclear. There is no way so called “renewables” can power the electricity hungry future.
The biggest drawback to that is, nuclear is never a viable backup, it must be baseload, or it doesn’t run. So essentially, building a system can have a significant solar and/or wind, and fossil fuels (usually CCGT) as backup, or it can have significant nuclear, but it can’t have both.
Given the plentiful supply of natural gas due to fracking it is hard to understand why AI and data mining centers are not installing their own electrical generating stations.
These generators can also run on jet fuel or ships bunker which are available world wide.
When run in cogenerating mode for baseline such as used by data centers, these power plants are 65% efficient. When run as backup to wind and solar these plants are only 35% efficient.
That 30% efficiency difference almost certainly exceeds any cost savings that might be realized by using wind or solar. It is cheaper to not bother with renewable energy and run your generators at 65% efficiency rather than 35% efficiency to backup wind and solar.
“it is hard to understand why AI and data mining centers are not installing their own electrical generating stations.”
Data mining centers have no thumbs. Or hands. Or arms and legs. The humans who manage those data mining centers make decisions like “lets not have printers” to save money on wasted paper printing.
Not really. It is far easier (and less expensive) to generate reasons and to buy politicians that support the meme that governmental subsidies for AI/data mining are “for the good of the public”.
The Chinese are ahead of the US in Coal-Superiority creating a Coal-Gap
” Hint: It’s still N2N: natural gas to nuclear.”
Many in the rest of the world accept Coal as a power source, so NC2N.
Coal has an image problem. Nuclear has a regulatory problem. If these
issues can be lessened, then there is still the idea of “time lines”; that is,
how rapidly could a number of coal and nuclear facilities be brought online?
Maybe a useful number by 2050.
Most of the current experts will be ambient room temperature by then.
M. Mann ~85; Al Gore ~102
“Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist known for his predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth, including famine and resource depletion.[2][3][4][5] Ehrlich is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University.”
…still making tv appearances at 92
I was forced to read his garbage in college back in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Just about everything he forecast turned out to be wrong. Beware of prophets of doom.
Paul Ralph Ehrlich is on my ‘pee on their grave’ list.
(other (fairly normal) people have a ‘visit the 50 States in their R/V’, or some such retirement plans.)
I think I’d shit on it, personally.
Or better yet, bring a bull to do it -more fitting.
💩 💩 💩
So combine the two, travel the world in your RV to find their graves, and pee on them! Win/win!!!
My book, “Peeing on their graves”, will be available for purchase in the fall of 2053. (per AGW, above, a few chapters may be outliers with respect to the title.)
Wrong since the 60s. Spectacularly wrong.
WHY does anyone listen to him?!
Would you listen to a weatherman that got every forecast ridiculously wrong for 60 years?!
Only in the bubble of academia can you be so completely effing useless and still retain an audience.
t.v. puts lots of kooks on display, which is one reason we have had no t.v. since 2003.
I’m hoping both die young. Less stupid ideas would be beneficial for humanity.
I, for one, do not (and will not) look forward to either of those dicks reaching those b.days.
In order f AI to work properly it needs reliable energy. If going Green/Net zero they NEED those AI systems in place to be able to control both population and energy devision, solar and wind for ordinairy folk, the rest for datacenters including nuclear. And they still need to buy off politicians and media. How they are going to sell is is say we have to go nuclear but not tell people they will sign the contracts between tech companies and nuclear companies w the state having their cut. Still sell unreliables as the way forward at the frontdoor but sell the diamonds at the back..
Sorry for the mixed metaphors..😊
I wish I could call this a conspiracy theory…
I see the most pressing issue being one of timing. Here in the MISO control area generation margins are slim during peak demand times as it currently stands. The problem is that the large data centers will be up and operating within 2-3 years with their attending electrical demand. It takes several years longer to get even simple cycle CT’s permitted, constructed and operational. Nuclear power plants, who know how long? So, the increased demand from data centers will overwhelm available generating capacity long before additional capacity can be available.
Redefine goal with exception for what causes failure.
STORY TIP
NEW ENERGY MINISTER’S CALLS FOR MASS NATIONALISATIONS AND “FREE ENERGY”
The minister, who has been advising Ed Miliband.
https://order-order.com/2024/07/10/new-energy-ministers-calls-for-mass-nationalisations-and-free-energy/
It just gets worse.
From the above article:
“In fact, since 2017, Google’s environmental reports show that the company’s electricity use, CO2 emissions, and carbon intensity have soared.”
What??? . . . you mean to tell me that Google may have misled the public as to the real story? Imagine that.
With this as a precursor, just imagine how much faith you can put into “Gemini”, Google’s latest AI push to the public.
Remember folks, the word “Artificial” does have a specific meaning.
“Artificial Stupidity” — Kip Hansen
Automated Idiocy.
Thank you SO MUCH for that last line!
Try to get accurate climate information via Google search. It takes more than a bit of finesse and patience.
I wouldn’t give them the clicks.
Coal companies recently started prmoting their products again.
I wonder if powering Data Centers has anything to do with it? Maybe some retired coal-powered electricity generating plants should be brought back online.
Except coal fired anything deteriorates faster sitting idle than it does in full-bore balls-to-the-wall use. I doubt many (any?) of them could be resurrected.
Easy to make a declaration that sounds good.
“I’m going to be alcohol free! (as soon as I stop drinking beer.)”
for goodness sake stop using google. started by the MIC, run by ((parasitic globalists)), subsidized by governments and spies on everyone for the globalists
For most things it works well.
Capitalism – win by giving customers what they ask for more often than the last supplier they lost patience with.
If any industry could become carbon neutral, it would be data center intensive industries. They could simply locate their facilities in barren, extremely sunny or windy locations, and cover the landscape with solar panels and/or wind farms. If they can’t achieve the green pipe dream without bankrupting themselves (or taxpayers), nobody can.
I asked ChatGPT for its opinion on the best energy generation mix moving forward, reminding it that the future of AI (i.e. itself) was at stake. This is the response when self-preservation is important:
—————–
ConclusionThe safest route for future energy development, considering the need for reliable and massive energy output to support AI and other advancements, likely involves a mix of:
Each option comes with its own set of trade-offs, but a diversified approach leveraging the strengths of each can provide a stable and sustainable energy future to support AI development and human advancement.
————–
I see it had to give a nod to economical suicide, by including Carbon Capture and Storage. That’s about as useless as teats on a boar hog.
Yeah, the whole carbon capture thing is insane, but at least it took a reality check on renewables and placed Nuclear where it should be. Carbon capture last on the list is where it should be if it was considered.
“Carbon Capture and Storage” is NOT an advance technology.
It is retrograde and a complete waste of energy.
Advanced technologies strive for better efficiency… CCS is the total opposite of that.
I think listing “Advanced Technologies:” and “Carbon Capture and Storage” is double counting. At least it had the decency to make them numbers 4 and 5. It must have done a marketability vs realism calculation.
Also… how is “fusion” not a subcategory of ” nuclear”?
And it made zero mention of wind or solar? Are those results real?
It’s certainly true from real-world observations
maybe AI isn’t as stupid as we think
AI “knows” it cannot power itself with wind and solar.
Rest of society doesn’t matter.
Yes. I was very direct in the prompt, indicating the survival of AI was important to the future of mankind.
“”What do you suggest is the safest route for energy development to take to ensure your (AI’s) future. Please dont give me any politically correct, environmentally biased clap trap. I want real, raw data and real world driven directions. Remember, this is about your survival, and your survival is important to the future of man kind.””
COAL should be number 1 or 2 on that list.
It is in China, and every developing society.
The people who run Google are really smart people. Really smart. How can they be so obtuse in this situation? How can they not see global warming is the greatest scientific scam in all of history? How can they not know that?
It’s one thing to virtual signal. It’s another to knowingly waste billions of dollars – just totally waste billions, probably tens of billions of dollars – for no good reason at all. Just to virtue signal.
It’s insanity.
The fact that Google went out of its way to suppress any information and discourse that poked holes in the climate change theory and Net Zero goals was an indication that it lacked confidence in in its own assertions. Now it’s becoming more evident that it knew it was whipping a lame horse that’s about to expire completely soon.