Comment by km3r
7 hours ago
Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage.
Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.
7 hours ago
Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage.
Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.
They had that opportunity, to build up the infrastructure necessary to operate, to build in places where they wouldn't reduce people's quality of life. They chose to do everything they could to squeeze out some extra profit. Requiring good behavior in one specific way wouldn't be sufficient when dealing with such obviously bad actors. They can try again to get the right to build once they've won back the trust of Mainers.
You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center projects are an easy target.
I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target
Mandating renewables for data centers would have left you with checks notes a shitload of renewables after the AI bubble bursts.
Something that should (with good governance) lower energy costs.
If you or Google have a plan to make the federal government stop shutting down renewable projects, we can re-examine the data center question after you carry it out.
Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore.
The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you don't like" as a compromise.
Of course Mainers aren't monolithic...
https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legisla....
https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/so...
Utility solar is VERY different from small-scale solar panels on houses.
And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want to see more of those things.
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> Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore.
I mean, some do... this implies a terrible politician to not address the material concerns of Mainers though.
Data centers don't really help the material conditions of Mainers though. Here's the net effects of new data centers they'll really see, in material terms:
- A brief boost in construction jobs
- ~0 new jobs in the long term
- Increased electricity prices
- A slight chance of very slightly lower taxes, as data center taxes partially replace taxes on other stuff
It's not like the average Mainer is losing a lot from this decision. There's actually a good chance a data center ban is a net gain for the average Mainer materially, because the change in electricity demand (and thus prices) will outweigh all other effects.
Because we already do. Its why electricity costs money. In my area big consumers and producers already pay through the nose to tie into the grid.
What we _should_ be asking is where all the money we paid for infrastructure and upkeep went for the last two decades of decreasing power usage.
The title is misleading. It's not a "ban", just a "moratorium" until November 2027
And your "easy solution" has had a lot of research debunking its efficacy and a lot of holes in it.
https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-fa...
Carbon offsets are a sham, but you could just require them to directly pay for the actual energy infrastructure required. If you need 1GW of electricity, develop 1GW of solar.
Surely you realize that building the infrastructure and driver of the 1GW provider would be, hopefully, carbon neutral?
3 replies →
> Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage.
That still doesn't cover making the data centers provide value to the people who live there.
Can we trust them to actually do it? Not to find some loophole? Or to wait until they are established and then lobby to have the requirement removed?
Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't that what they did? Here is the max. power you can draw from the grid, feel free to be more efficient or to produce your own electricity.
That isn't the factories job - that is your utilities job.
And when it's the utility's job, who's footing the bill?
There are many customers to spread that over in proportion to their usage. This is standard acconting they have been doing for years
I would argue it's childish for data centers operators to act so entitled. This is Maine's decision to make.
Imagine the additional space needed to power a scaled DC with solar. I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.
But what's an extra 500 acres between friends.
It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing that actually matters. People don't really care about the presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect it might have on public land use. You can always regulate the electricity market and public land use directly, instead of regulating the construction of data centers which is more of a second-order effect.
These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.
A Technology Connections video recently changed my opinion on this. The land required to power the entire U.S. would be less than the farmland we currently use for ethanol production.
Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take his word for it.
The Department of Energy has all the data available, so do a dozen different other private and public institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some napkin math.
Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine with conversion efficencies half what they are now)... comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of the field is covered with panels- at least according to some studies.
That isn't the whole story. At least some of these new datacenters are gigawatt class. That's multiple sq km of solar.
Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users. If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it will require many times that amount due to how large the heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.
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> I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.
What's the math on that?
It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.
For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?
It's not a If/Or Question. Agrisolar is even beneficial to farmers
Why? Because:
1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in wattage used.
2. That investment should already be happening, not subject to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds of biosphere degradation etc.
It's in addition to our normal efforts to switch to renewable. No one said this replaces those existing programs.
That investment should be happening, but it's not going to comes from companies that you ban from operating.