It’s worth understanding that Google’s underlying strategy has always been to match renewables. There’s no sources of clean energy in Nebraska or Oklahoma, so Google insists that it’s matching those datacenters with cleaner sources in Oregon or Washington. That’s been true since before the more recent net-zero pledge and it’s more than most datacenter operators will commit to doing, even if it’s not enough.

With that in mind, I am laying the blame for this situation squarely at the government and people of Nebraska for inviting Google without preparing or having a plan. Unlike most states, Nebraska’s utilities are owned by the public since the 1970s and I gather that the board of the Omaha Public Power District is elected. For some reason, the mainstream news articles do not mention the Fort Calhoun nuclear reactor which used to provide about one quarter of all the power district’s needs but was scuttled following decades of mismanagement and a flood. They also don’t quite explain that the power district canceled two plans to operate publicly-owned solar farms with similar capacity (~600 MW per farm compared with ~500 MW from the nuclear reactor), although WaPo does cover the canceled plans for Eolian’s batteries, which I’m guessing could have been anywhere from 50-500 MWh of storage capacity. Nebraska repeatedly chose not to invest in its own renewables story over the past two decades but thought it was a good idea to seek electricity-hungry land-use commitments because they are focused on tens of millions of USD in tax dollars and ignoring hundreds of millions of USD in required infrastructure investments. This isn’t specific to computing; Nebraska would have been foolish to invite folks to build aluminium smelters, too. Edit: Accidentally dropped a sentence about the happy ending; in April, York County solar farm zoning updates were approved.

If you think I’m being too cynical about Nebraskans, let me quote their own thoughts on solar farms, like:

Ag[ricultural] production will create more income than this solar farm.

[York County is] the number one corn raising county in Nebraska…

How will rotating the use of land to solar benefit this land? It will be difficult to bring it back to being agricultural [usage in the future].

All that said, Google isn’t in the clear here. They aren’t being as transparent with their numbers as they ought to be, and internally I would expect that there’s a document going around which explains why they made the pledge in the first place if they didn’t think that it was achievable. Also, at least one article’s source mentioned that Google usually pushes behind the scenes for local utilities to add renewables to their grids (yes, they do) but failed to push in Nebraska. Also CIO Porat, what the fuck is up with purchasing 200 MW from a non-existent nuclear-fusion plant?

But wait I thought the reasoning AIs were going to come up with fantastical sci-fi solutions to all our global warming problems! Maybe we didn’t shovel enough coal at them?