Ben Inskeep

🚨27 Public Interest Organizations Call on Indiana Local Governments to Enact Data Center Moratorium🚨 Moratoria are needed to allow adequate time for reasonable policies and regulations to be enacted that protect Hoosiers from harmful impacts of data centers.

It’s really something how billionaires have rigged the rules to let them vacuum up all of society’s wealth & then fund think tanks and buy media properties that blame poverty and homelessness and despair on literally everything other than billionaires vacuuming up all the wealth

They have to insist so frequently on the inevitability of AI precisely because they’re lying. We can fight back. We don’t have to accept AI slop stealing our futures.

Anti-data center nimbyism represents like 100x the scale of the abundance movement, but gets only a fraction of the attention. Abundance wanted to help elites strip these communities of their local means for fighting back.

I feel like exploding vats of toxic chemicals that force evacuation of 40k people across 10 miles should be bigger news, but hey

empire survives partly by convincing ordinary citizens that they are powerless spectators instead of beneficiaries with political responsibility

In exchange for thousands of acres of property, data center developers promise jobs, infrastructure, and much-needed municipal revenue. Here’s the gag, though: The jobs are temporary, the infrastructure is useless, and the revenue is diminishing and offset by monster tax breaks. motherjones.com/environment/20…

How much toxic 💩 was just blown into the ocean that SpaceX won't have to clean up?

I know someone who works in data center construction. We were chatting a bit today, they asked what I'd been writing lately. I was like 'well... no offense, but I did an anti-data center op/ed' and without missing a beat they went 'data centers make the world worse, no question'

This is why Indiana is keeping our data center sales tax subsidies secret. They don't want you to know how many billions in subsidies are going to billionaires building data centers.

@didymus77 Nuclear is a fools errand. The most expensive, slowest generation to build that lacks operational flexibility, creates radioactive waste, and has major safety concerns is hardly a solution.

@Ben_Inskeep Start pushing nuclear or we will know you never cared either.

Getting whiplash from seeing so many clean energy people no longer care about climate change or the environment and support fossil-fueled data centers if some nominal amount is met with clean energy. Abundance really broke their brains.

@Gabby_Hoffman The Mayor of Lebanon, IN has publicly said that Meta's closed loop system for its 1GW data center will use up to 8 million gallons per day by 2031. Sourced from Lebanon Utilities, which is buying it wholesale from the city of Indianapolis's drinking water utility.

Closed-loop cooling in data centers DOESN'T use municipal drinking water. Local drinking supply is therefore unaffected. Where was this water sample was sourced from!? The Congresswoman is the key House author of the Green New Deal resolution. Be skeptical of her performative gestures.

@clawrence I am upset we are still adding new fossil fuel assets with 30+ year useful lives -- esp. baseload NGCC gas plants -- in the middle of a climate emergency. It doesn't matter how much clean energy we add if we aren't reducing overall emissions.

@Ben_Inskeep It's not ignoring climate change. Shutting down nuclear is ignoring climate change. Keeping coal running while fighting gas is ignoring climate change. This is what we are building this year. Are you upset that we are doing 7% gas, or ecstatic that it's 93% clean?

@clawrence How is ignoring climate change staying relevant and being a realist? And that gas bridge fuel stuff is what they were pushing 15+ years ago. It's a bridge to ruin, not a sustainable future.

Some of us are simply realists. We can't fully replace fossil fuels, even for all new capacity, if we want to stay relevant. Like it or not, natural gas is our bridge fuel, despite decades of the climate community trying to deny it. We've only had economical grid scale storage for 5 years - a millisecond in energy terms. Clean energy people are also finally coming around to nuclear, which they've been fighting for many decades to the detriment of climate.

@duncancampbell And transmission lines arent built over night. Of course it takes time for grid upgrades. That is not a grid failure, it is protecting existing customers' reliability.

@duncancampbell Well it takes time to build a power plant for load demanding hundreds of MW, esp. with many demanding it at the same time! 4 years seems very reasonable, although for many here it is <2 years. Petulant big tech companies think they are entitled to everything instantly.

If you dislike BTM gas for DCs, just know that all the grid needs to do to change the situation, even after the BTM gas is built, is offer to sell electricity to these customers.

"The race to power artificial intelligence is pushing US data centre development to break the speed limit of grid development - creating significant risk for projects, markets and consumers"

NEW: Sixteen Trump-appointed EPA officials were paid more than $2.8 million by chemical companies and trade groups before they joined the agency that oversees the industry, according to CREW analysis.

🦔Georgia Power is using eminent domain to seize 21 homes and 330 properties in Coweta County to build transmission lines for AI data centers. Angela Hall, a 49-year-old single mother who escaped public housing to buy her 2.5-acre Newnan home, has until August 1 to leave. The nearby Project Sail data center proposal would put nine buildings on 830 acres demanding 900 megawatts, enough to rival a nuclear reactor. Coweta commissioners approved the rezoning 3-2 in April. Citizens for a Rural Coweta and Stop Project Sail are now suing. My Take Eminent domain should worry every homeowner in a state with hyperscaler activity. The legal mechanism that lets a private utility company seize private property for "public use" was designed for highways, water mains, and electrical grid maintenance, not for transmission lines dedicated to a single industrial customer. When Georgia Power takes Angela Hall's home so 900 megawatts can flow to Project Sail, the public benefit is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that calculation, and the courts will spend the next decade sorting out which uses qualify. The resistance is now organized, well-documented, and showing up in court filings, zoning appeals, and viral social media at the same time. Coweta joins Saline Township, Tucson, Fayetteville, Lake Tahoe, Phoenix, and Utah on a list that gets longer every week. Each fight looks local. Together they form a pattern hyperscaler capex models have not priced in. The buildout pace Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon assume depends on land getting permitted quickly, transmission getting built quickly, and communities accepting the tradeoffs. None of those assumptions are holding up. Hedgie🤗