I think it's so strange, going back to my RSS thing,
how do you have a blog and not have an RSS feed?
Like Almost every blog platform just natively supports that.
You don't even have to ask.
Just boom, it's there.
Maybe this blog is daring to be different.
It is using a me.
Isn't that like an Apple thing?
I think so.
Okay, so maybe it's just that Apple sucks.
Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the Chaos Lover Podcast.
My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot.
I'm a real human person who is not terrified of spiders.
Why would you, why would you even bring that up?
I don't, I don't mind walking through cobwebs and it definitely
does not fill me with dread to see something with eight legs.
I have not refused to see the Black Widow movie simply because of the name.
That would be silly.
With me is Chris, who's also here.
Hi Chris.
I had a spider appear completely out of nowhere
on the ceiling in the shower a few days ago.
It's hard to think of a worse possible time for a spider to appear.
This is how you do it.
If you really want to end somebody, you put a spider on the ceiling
in the shower because nothing good can come from that scenario.
I mean, I know you screamed.
I'm just wondering what you did next.
Well, I definitely don't have one of those removable showerhead things.
So I definitely didn't very carefully take that out of the holster and spray
the everliving shit out of the ceiling, which may or may not be waterproof.
Oh Chris, have you never heard the song The Itsy Bitsy Spider?
It's gonna fucking come back.
That's just the nature of things.
Well, I know that now.
Oh, well, alright.
We should probably get this episode done before
it comes along and bites you and ends you.
Or stabs me.
It's 2024, they're all armed.
Spiders, yes.
Somehow it's our fault, too.
So anyway, let's talk about The recent release of the
Amazon story, where they said that they were 100 percent
renewable, and that story might have been written by AI.
When you say might
I say that because, according to everyone
except Amazon, they're not even close to 100%.
You get it?
Because Amazon's wrong and like AI is wrong a lot.
Do you get it?
Nope.
Do you get it?
Fine.
Fine,
don't be fun.
I won't.
Last week, Amazon announced something pretty surprising.
They claimed that they hit their goal of being 100 percent renewable, meaning
that all of their places of operation are running on renewable energy.
They hit their goal of being 100 percent renewable this year,
which is seven years earlier than their previously stated goal.
And we're talking about Amazon, the whole company here, not just AWS.
Correct.
Okay.
Obviously the data centers play a huge part in it,
but it's the entire corporate entity that is Amazon.
Okay.
So this is a strange thing to announce and a strange time to have
announced it, because I don't know if you know this, but Amazon's renewable
energy score is not exactly the top hit on Google News these days.
Other shit is going on, I guess is my point.
A couple things, yeah.
But announce it, they did.
And it likely would have come and gone with little
fanfare, except for one tiny little problem.
A group of people that actually work at Amazon called Bullshit.
Oh.
Like, real loud, too.
Were they immediately and summarily fired?
No, they can't do it, and you'll see why in a minute.
Interesting, okay.
The Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group started based
on a shareholder resolution back in 2018, has a simple goal.
To bring together Amazonians, and yes, that's what they call themselves.
Yes.
But bringing them together and encourage
Amazon to do more on the issue of climate.
Historically, Amazon has not been all that interested in climate.
After all, this is America.
How does a healthy planet make line go up?
Exactly.
It does not.
So, this group existing and trying to encourage
policy is actually probably pretty important.
Back in 2023, they threatened a walkout because of Amazon's,
quote, lack of meaningful progress on its climate pledge.
And things like climate pledges, companies trying to become
sustainable, well, All of this absolutely matters going forward.
While data centers have historically been a
smaller energy hog than many people think.
I
mean, computer systems in general over our lifetimes have been doing
nothing but getting smaller and getting less greedy when it comes to power.
This is still a huge growing segment of the market and the
amount of power that they're going to take is going to change.
Recently we've seen specific cases like crypto, Where mining
takes up so much of a local utilities output that the rest
of the populace suffers, and it is likely that AI is driving
data center growth that is going to do something very similar.
But how significant would it be?
Well, the International Energy Agency put out a report that estimates
that by 2026, which if you're doing the math at home is five years from
now, power consumption by data centers could double what it was in 2022.
Wow.
Four years, double the amount of power.
So if you want to see the actual numbers, that is 460
terawatt hours up to more than 1000 terawatt hours.
Okay.
I'm not an electrician, but I have been electrocuted before.
So I feel qualified in saying that that is an insane amount of energy.
We're going to have to find sustainable ways to generate it because
no matter what Exxon says, eventually we're going to run out of oil.
But we will get to that.
Before we get to the next thing, I want to
ask, what's your, I was electrocuted story?
Because I feel like everybody who's been
electrocuted has at least one good story about it.
Oh, so, you know, back in the day when I actually did things.
In the world, rehabbing houses and the
like, I would replace outlets all the time.
I got to be kind of automatic about it to the point that for a long period
of time there, I would replace an outlet without turning off the power.
That's a choice.
I don't recommend that model
just as like a fun fact for the, for the audience.
Okay.
I
wonder if I can still do it.
I will be right back.
I also was electrocuted once and it was in a different set of circumstances.
I had trash picked a lamp because I was a teenager and that's how I got things.
And unbeknownst to me, but knownst to possibly the
previous owner, the hot wire on the Inside of the lamp
had started touching the outside brass cup of the lamp.
Cool.
I went to go turn on said lamp and I was standing barefoot in the basement
turning on the lamp and boy did the electricity find a way to go to ground.
So that was super fun.
You recommend that everybody should try it.
Uh, fortunately I was not gripping the lamp in any way.
So it just like threw my arm backwards, but that
could have potentially been much, much worse.
Moving on.
Electricity is a powerful thing.
Don't mess with it, especially on the outside of your house.
Indeed.
Before we go any further, I want to make it clear that
this is not just intended to be a shit on Amazon show.
Tempting, but no.
Plenty of companies follow this exact same playbook.
Amazon is high on commitments and pledges, not so high on results.
It is particularly telling that they don't show up in any of the
lists that highlight well performing sustainable companies, such as
Dow Jones Sustainability Sustainability, you have words, use them.
Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Bloomberg's ESG disclosure
scores, the Corporate Knight's Global 100, and so on.
So let's just think about this as technology, but electricity,
but in general, using the Amazon story as a metaphor.
This is the latest thing, but everybody does it.
So anyway, before we go further, let's talk about what
does sustainability actually mean in the modern context?
Okay.
So first off there have been environmentalists complaining about
waste, energy waste, any type of waste that you can think of.
pollution, etc.
since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
In fact, I have no doubt that it goes way further back than that.
I am sure that there was some Neanderthal who was upset about moving the sharp
rocks out of the walking path because it upset the natural order of things.
I'm certain of that, yes.
For our purposes, we're going to start with the real serious
renewable energy movement that began with the concept of peak oil.
Now there was also an oil crisis in the 70s that got everybody
excited, but we're going to skip that too in the interest of time.
The concept of peak oil is pretty simple.
Theory goes that there is a finite amount of oil in the world.
Can't make more.
Therefore, eventually, we're going to hit a point
where it is harder to get more of it year after year.
So if you think about this in terms of supply and demand,
it's not that much different than the sad tale of lobsters.
Back in the 1700s, you could literally just go to the shore and pick
up a lobster off the beach in Maine and take it home for dinner.
There are tons of stories in people's journals of them doing exactly that.
Right, because lobster was considered a garbage food.
It
was peasant food at the time because it was so easy to get.
But as we took and took and took, as humans are
wont to do, it became harder to get lobsters.
And now they're 25 a pound, right?
So peak oil is exactly that, except the oil doesn't procreate.
I mean, not on any kind of realistic timescale.
I guess that's true.
We could start making oil now and start to
reap the benefits in several million years.
Yeah, like 65.
I'm going to put in some, some long puts on that, I think.
Okay, you do that.
This is not investment advice.
Some futures trading.
When the story came out about Peak Oil, or when the report came
out, the date that was given was quote, between 1965 and 1970.
This report was written in the late 50s.
Irrespective of how the oil and gas industry responded to this
threat, think fracking, coal mining, and writing shady deals with
third world countries to ruin their countries in the name of economic
profit, the seed was sown in the environmental movement to do
something to get energy that didn't involve burning natural resources.
Now again, like I said, this is not a concept
that just snapped into existence in the 1970s.
There have been ways to get power that were renewable long before this.
For example, the first hydroelectric power plant was built in the 1880s.
Oh yeah, that was like 10 minutes after power was invented.
Yeah.
Super cool.
We went to Niagara a few weeks ago and on the Canada
side, like you do, 'cause that's the good side.
And we did a tour of the now retired power plant that used to be hooked up.
To Niagara Falls, and it was the construction for it started in the
early 1900s, and it was one of the biggest hydroelectric projects of its
time, and they had to invent all kinds of new technologies in order to
harness the power of the falls and also generate the power consistently.
And this was before they had standards like
the frequency at which power was generated.
That had not been standardized yet.
So a lot of standards and technologies were born over that time, but
people don't realize how long hydroelectric power has been around.
It's been a while.
And the thing about hydroelectric is it works super well.
It is highly reliable.
You get all kinds of power out of it and the
eventual return on investment is enormous.
There is, however, that pesky problem of needing a river.
Yes.
But not only needing a river, you need a river that is stable.
Cause I don't know if people know this,
but not all rivers stay in the same place.
Sometimes rivers move.
To the hilarity and consternation of historians worldwide.
You also need a river that is fast flowing enough to
spin turbines to the level that makes it worth it.
And also, remember the river!
Hydroelectric dams are engineering marvels
that are astonishingly expensive to build.
Making it rather tough to scale.
And then finally, there are in fact, environmental and social considerations
that come with literally rewriting the face of the earth with concrete.
So let's just say there are pros and cons.
Another type of energy source that is cool, or
hot, and is older than you think, is geothermal.
So this is one that people have probably, like, they've heard the
words, but don't really know what it means or why or how it works.
And I'm not going to go into it too deeply, but
basically, you find a place in the earth that's super hot.
Run a pipe through it.
Run water through the pipe.
Cold water gets hot.
Hot water turns into steam.
Steam turns to turbine.
Turbine makes electricity.
Magic.
These things have the advantage of being consistent
because they come from the inside of the freaking earth.
And that thing is going to be pretty fiery for the next,
I forgot, I meant to look this up but I'm winging it
here,
4 billion years?
Do we have 4 billion?
Something like
that.
The only reason I know is because my children have asked
me several times, like, is the sun going to explode?
And I was like, well, it's going to become a red giant.
And they're like, Oh no!
And I'm like, it's 4 billion years.
No, no, no.
Oh, you have the timeline wrong.
No, the Earth is going to explode, or no, the
Earth is going to cool before the sun explodes.
By the time the sun explodes, the Earth is going to be dead.
Still, it's not an immediate going concern.
And the other fun thing is we have been doing geothermal heating since.
Basically prehistory.
The oldest existing geothermal thing that we know of that still exists in
the world is a heated pool, basically, in China that is dated to 300 BCE.
Alright.
So yeah, this one goes back a little bit.
Just a tad.
Now, it's got a couple of other downsides to it.
It is super consistent, but the amount of power you get out
of it is not nearly as high as some of these other ones.
And also, it's not everywhere on Earth
that you can get the heat from geothermal.
You've got to find these pockets where the molten core of the Earth opens up.
Because what we're not doing is drilling, you
know, 500 miles into the core to get geothermal.
That's just not practical.
These things have been around, but with the concept of an
oil less world floating around in the ether, scientists
started working more seriously on flexible alternatives.
And I bet you can guess what they came up with.
Well, I can think of one.
It's above me right now, and it's making everything intolerable.
Your children?
Oh, yeah, that too.
I'm talking about solar power and wind power.
Okay.
Solar panels have often been derided for being ugly and not
working, which for a lot of their history was actually kind of fair.
It was an evolving technology.
But modern panels are different.
They are highly effective, they last a long time, they're getting smaller
and more flexible, both literally and in terms of where you can install them.
And the price to create them and the energy
you get back from them is just insane.
Astonishing right now.
According to the Carbon Disclosure Project, the cost of electricity
from utility scale solar arrays fell 85 percent between 2010 and
2020, making it cheaper than standard fossil fuel based power plants.
Didn't see that shit coming, did you, Margaret?
Indeed.
No
solar on your house is still a good idea and it is a workable
plan, but solar as a utility, particularly in places that
get the right amount of sun, which if you know about.
The sun is basically everywhere is a great idea.
Yeah, I mean, there are some caveats to that, depending on
house is situated, how much sun it will actually gather.
And of course, if you have trees around those
become a detriment as opposed to a bonus.
I know this because we tried to get solar panels for my house.
And.
It would have produced more energy than we use for especially
the summer months, but the cost of installing the panels and the
additional work would have required like a 30 year payback period.
That will change as solar panels become more
efficient and the price continues to drop.
So I'm just going to reevaluate in like 4 or 5 years, and I bet at that point
the break even will have dropped from 30 years to something like 15 or 10.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, as fast as this stuff is
evolving, you might want to check this year and just
see, I'm, I don't feel like I'm exaggerating about this.
And the other thing is when it comes to house power.
You're talking about re architecting a house that already existed.
Hypothetically, if you were building new and you planned
for solar, you would have had a very different outcome.
Yes.
If, if I wasn't retrofitting an existing house and I was building a
new one with this in mind, I would have oriented the house a little bit
different, designed, you know, the, the roofs a little bit different.
And another really interesting thing is in
addition to panels, there are now solar roof tiles.
that look like regular roof tiles.
They are so cool.
But
they're actually, you know, solar, mini solar panels, essentially.
They are not nearly as efficient as traditional
solar panels, but they look a lot nicer.
They don't look like an obnoxious panel sticking up off your roof.
Exactly.
So long term that might actually end up being the
better solution once the efficiency raises on those.
So there's a lot you can do with solar.
The next one that came around and we already told,
I'm not sure why I'm slow playing it, is wind power.
Their progress in terms of output, if not 100 percent
matching solar, at least kept pace in terms of improvements.
It was 2015 when wind energy was considered competitive
with fossil fuels based on power plants in many regions.
Now again, you've got to have the right kind of wind.
So it's not every single place on earth.
But where it works, it works super well.
And I cannot believe I have to say this out loud.
Turbines don't kill birds, don't kill whales, and they don't change the tides.
My God, people.
How would that even happen?
I mean, some birds are killed by turbines.
Some birds are idiots.
But,
I have a window that killed a bird two weeks ago, should we ban windows?
If you're concerned about birds, then you should ban cats, because
holy shit, just little murder death machines is what they are.
Now, to be fair, there are actually a lot more energy sources out
there that are renewable that have promise, but I'm going to stop
with these two, because A, they're the most practical for large
scale energy generation, and B, we don't have that much time.
Although, if you're interested in renewable energy and like awesome
things, I highly encourage you to google Desert Salt Laser Energy Plant.
I will say no more, I just want you to know that I want
this idea to work out so bad because it is in fact awesome.
You might be thinking, what in the hell does this
have to do with anything that we started with?
It seems like an easy enough thing.
Amazon says they're using 100 percent renewables, so clearly.
They're using 100 percent energy places from places like
hydroelectric, solar, wind, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that's just so very cute.
Because this is America, and we've found ways to make
this whole enterprise so much more complicated than that.
Back in the late 90s, there was a push to get renewable energy off the ground.
There were even tax breaks involved.
In fact, they still exist.
If you replace your windows or your large
appliances, you might even still be able to apply for
them.
On the large scale, though, there was a new program
called Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECs.
That acronym, as you'll see, is ironic.
Created by the EPA, the idea here was simple.
Every time a megawatt hour of energy is generated
from a renewable source, a REC is created.
These can then be sold on the market and proudly be displayed by
other companies as though they were using that energy themselves.
This is supposed to have two benefits.
One, the income encourages the building of more renewable energy plants.
Two, companies that have an incentive to buy them to advertise that
they're at least making an honest effort to support renewables.
This makes sense.
After all, we have a huge amount of fossil fuel creating power plants.
That eventually will be replaced, but they exist right now.
Any energy that's created by a renewable plant gets injected into the grid.
And you just, there's no way to tell the difference
between energy created by solar and by coal.
Once it's in the grid, it's in the grid, right?
There's no such thing as like organic volts or anything.
You can't check it for like, it's chi.
Maybe you can't.
Plus, like I said, it takes time for these plants to get built.
And what are you gonna do If you own a
business that's like in the middle of the city?
You can't exactly plant a wind farm on Broad Street.
Although I asked AI to do it, and it is, uh, it, it, I kind of want us to do it.
It looks pretty amazing.
I would not be mad about this.
, what's the problem?
The problem, according to Amazon Climate Justice Group, is
that Amazon is being willfully disingenuous about saying
where the power comes from for their data centers and offices.
How, they argue, does building a data center in Virginia,
which is 100 percent powered by fossil fuels, buying RECs from
California, where renewable energy is already aplenty, how
does that benefit the environment, particularly in Virginia?
Ew.
The answer is that it doesn't.
Those credits don't encourage Virginia to do anything.
In fact, there are real questions as to whether or not some of
these RECs ever get used to generate any renewable energy at all.
Because it turns out, you don't need a
plant to generate the energy to buy a REC.
There's a thing called an unbundled REC, which
is like a credit to the future to be used later.
This is like buying coupons to buy beer at a fair, and then trying to take
them to a different fair, and they're like, we don't have that coupon.
What are you talking about?
Go back to your house, crazy sad man.
This is getting very specific.
I don't know what you could possibly mean.
So, Yeah, they're called unbundled RECs, and my question is why?
Why is such a thing even part of this program?
And the answer is, I don't know.
I read a couple of explanations, none of them felt great.
Lobbying from the fossil fuel companies?
It's possible, because this is what critics
of the REC program call greenwashing.
The act of making something look more environmentally friendly than it is.
So, down to brass tacks.
According to the report, instead of the 100 percent
renewables that Amazon claims that they use.
Only around 22 percent of energy actually did come from renewable sources.
Now, if you're a math major, you'll realize that 22 is less than 100.
A little bit.
Oh, and there was this other claim that the group
made that's going to be harder for Amazon to refute.
Amazon deliveries are still largely done
by diesel trucks crisscrossing the globe.
How can you do that and still say 100 percent renewable?
I mean, I understand the theory behind it was,
how do we get money for these renewable energy?
sources, and the idea was to build this credit.
So even if you can't consume it, you can support it by buying the credits.
There's a certain tipping point at which that doesn't really
help anymore, and you just need to start using the stick.
I mean, like, if you use non renewable energy sources,
we're going to charge a tax, or something along those lines.
to push people to using more renewable energy sources, and you have to
fund renewable energy sources close to the places that want to consume it.
That last point is super important, because the further that
energy has to be transferred, the less effective that plant is.
You lose electricity the longer the wire is.
If
you don't believe me, go get a 100 foot extension
cord and plug in something that pulls a lot of juice.
And then watch your house burn down.
Still, in terms of Amazon, there actually is hope.
I'm going to look on the bright side and just say, perhaps this
announcement was overenthusiastic, maybe premature, but maybe
it also signals an internal change or increased seriousness.
A couple things came out this year that are worth noting.
Amazon announced, I think recently, I forget when because
I didn't put it in the script because I'm a moron.
Amazon announced at some point that they had put in
an order for 100, 000 electric vans from Rivian to
swap out last mile vehicles to something sustainable.
Now that is not the 18 wheelers that go
across the country, but it's still a big deal.
And back in May, they announced a new data center plan in
Mississippi that included a deal with a local utility company
for 650 megawatts of renewable energy to power the campus.
Exactly what we just talked about.
According to the Amazon press release, this will quote, enable a total of 1.
3 gigawatts of new carbon free energy in Mississippi.
So that's not nothing.
And I think a lot of this actually does come
down to what we talked about with the houses.
It's retrofitting is a challenge.
It doesn't matter what building you're talking about.
Whether it's a house, it's a factory, it's a data center.
If it's already built, it's basically already built.
If you don't believe me, go try to put air
conditioning into a house built in 1900.
My parents had to do that.
How did it go?
It was a project.
One thing that happens, especially in this environment,
Amazon is going to continue to expand their services.
They're going to continue to build net new.
Right.
If they stick with this plan, like they did in Mississippi,
where it seems like it worked out really well, there's hope.
And the other interesting thing is.
As new data centers are built, the existing power grid where they are
often can't sustain the additional power draw, and so it's incumbent
on the data center builders to basically add more power to the grid.
And if we incentivize them to choose renewable
as an energy source, then that new data center.
As a consequence, create more renewable energy, and maybe
some of that can be filtered back to the community at
large, as opposed to just servicing that data center.
Well, hey, thanks for listening or something.
I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all
the way to the end, so congratulations to you, friend.
You accomplished something today.
Now you can go sit on the couch.
Fire up a hot dog using geothermal energy,
and play a game, uh, that's not electronic.
Save the Earth.
You've earned it.
You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page.
Just search Chaos Lever, or go to the website, ChaosLever.
com.
Leave a comment, leave a voicemail.
We want to hear from you, and I bet some people
are going to have opinions about this episode.
Some of them might not even be terrible!
Who knows?
We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us.
Hata for now.
People are gonna have opinions, Chris.
Opinions about what?
Spiders mostly, I bet.
Electrified
spiders.
Electric spiders.
Boogie woogie
woogie.