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New nuclear power for New York

July 9, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Nuclear power has been around since the 1950s, but it has fallen out of favor in recent decades, in part due to a couple of traumatic disasters at nuclear power plants. In fact, only two new nuclear power plants have been built in the US in the past 30 years, and they took a very long time and an enormous amount of money to build.

However, in recent times there has been a great deal of developmental work on nuclear power. Such newer technologies as small modular reactors, molten salt reactors, light water reactors, and more hold promise for safer, less expensive, and higher performance nuclear power.

In late June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she has instructed the New York Power Authority to develop and construct a zero-emission advanced nuclear power plant in Upstate New York. The plant is to produce 1 GW of power, about half of what the decommissioned Indian Point Power Plant produced when it provided significant amounts of power to New York City residents.

Renewed interest in nuclear power has emerged in part because of the soaring electricity demand from AI data centers. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all begun investing in nuclear power for this reason.

NYPA is instructed to begin evaluating technologies, business models, and locations for the new power plant and will seek to secure key partnerships needed for the project. As things stand, it is not known what technology the plant will use, where in Upstate New York it will be located, how much it will cost to build, who will pay for it, and how long it will take to build.

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New York Again Embraces Nuclear Power With Plans to Build New Plant

Photo courtesy of Constellation Energy.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Investing in carbon capture

January 22, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The interests of billionaires seldom seem to coincide with our own. In fact, they often seem to be quite the opposite. But there are a number of billionaires who are trying to help the world combat climate change. Yes, they want to make money doing it, but doing it is nevertheless in everyone’s interest.

A group headed by Bill Gates that included some of the wealthiest people from around the world met last summer in London to evaluate companies working to mitigate the effects of climate change. These included companies developing carbon dioxide removal technologies. Stripping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is an obvious way to deal with the fact that we continue to dump too much of it into the atmosphere – obvious, but extremely difficult to do at any scale that makes a difference.

Companies working on carbon capture have raised more than $5 billion since 2018. There are hundreds of companies working on it and investors include billionaires, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and major corporations. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and United Airlines have committed billions of dollars to purchase removal credits: payments to companies for removing carbon dioxide.

There are only a few dozen carbon removal facilities operational today and together they only capture a tiny fraction of the carbon dioxide humans release into the atmosphere. The hope is that such facilities will scale up in size and number so that they will make a real dent in the problem. But it will take many years at best, and the planet doesn’t have that much time. To make a difference, carbon emissions must be reduced as quickly as possible.

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The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky

Photo, posted April 19, 2020, courtesy of Greg Rubenstein via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A giant solar project for Google

November 21, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

One of the largest solar projects in the US has recently come online in Texas. Three solar farms built side-by-side in Buckholts, Texas by SB Energy can provide 875 megawatts of electricity, nearly the size of a typical nuclear power plant. The project will supply the largest solar energy purchase ever made by Google and the electricity generated will be used to power its new operations in the area. Google will use about 85% of the project’s solar power for data centers in Ellis County and for cloud computing in the Dallas Region.

In total, Google has contracted with clean energy developers to bring more than 2,800 megawatts of new wind and solar projects to Texas. Google expects to spend $16 billion through 2040 to purchase clean energy for its global operations.

According to the International Energy Agency, data centers’ total electricity consumption could reach more than 1,000 terawatt-hours in 2026, which is more than double the amount used in 2022. One terawatt-hour is enough energy to power 70,000 homes for a year. So, it is not surprising that large technology companies are investing heavily in energy technologies.

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have all recently announced investments in nuclear energy to power data centers. These companies all have made commitments to seek sources of carbon-free electricity to power their data centers and their increasing efforts in artificial intelligence. Because of the rise of artificial intelligence, the large companies are not meeting their commitments to reduce their carbon emissions and are needing to greatly increase their efforts to obtain clean power.

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One of the largest solar projects in the US opens in Texas, backed by Google

Photo, posted March 27, 2016, courtesy of Ben Nuttall via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Big Tech and emissions

September 23, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Most of the well-known largest technology companies have established ambitious clean energy goals. They are on record for achieving net-zero emissions for all their operations and supply chains in many cases by 2030. As a result, they have been investing heavily in renewable energy in various ways. Despite these lofty goals and sincere efforts, many of them are struggling to reduce emissions. The reason is simple: big data.

A good example is Google, which started investing in renewable energy in 2010 and since 2017 has been purchasing renewable energy on an annual basis to match the electricity consumption of its global operations. However, Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased nearly 48% since 2019. This is primarily a result of data center energy consumption.

The expanding use of artificial intelligence technology is consuming large amounts of electricity. For example, a single ChatGPT query uses nearly 10 times as much electrical energy as a traditional Google search.

Google is by no means unique in having this problem. Microsoft’s carbon emissions have risen by nearly 30% since 2020. Amazon is struggling to reach net-zero across its operations by 2040.

All of these companies are entering into large power agreements with renewable energy companies all across the country. The AI arms race for more and more computational power is driving a race to install more and more large-scale renewable energy. Power purchase agreements for solar power, wind power, and even geothermal power are becoming a major activity for most of the largest tech companies.

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Can Google gobble up enough renewables?

Photo, posted February 12, 2023, courtesy of Geoff Henson via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

The largest carbon removal plant

June 11, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Direct air capture (DAC) is process that removes carbon dioxide out of the air and stores it away where it can no longer trap heat in the atmosphere. It is intended to be a way of getting rid of the greenhouse gases that have built up in the atmosphere. In principle, it’s a great idea. In practice, it is a huge challenge.

In 2017, a company called Climeworks became the first company to take carbon dioxide out of the air and sell it as a product for use in carbonated drinks and in greenhouses. In 2021, the company opened a DAC plant called Orca in Iceland that captures CO2 and permanently stores it underground. Clients like Microsoft pay Climeworks for doing this as a way of offsetting their own emissions.

Recently, Climeworks has started operating a new plant called Mammoth – also in Iceland – that will be able to capture about 10 times more carbon dioxide than Orca. Iceland is a prime location for DAC technology because its abundant geothermal energy makes powering it cheap and environmentally friendly.

Mammoth, when fully operational, will remove about 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, the largest DAC system in the world. But there is a long, long way to go. Microsoft alone emits nearly 13 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.

There are multiple DAC projects in development including several in the United States being funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The four DAC hubs being developed under the program are each supposed to have the capacity to capture at least a million metric tons of CO2 a year.

Whether DAC can make a real difference remains to be seen.

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The world’s largest carbon removal plant is here, and bigger ones are on the way

Photo credit: Climeworks

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Old-School Companies And Renewable Energy

April 12, 2016 By WAMC WEB

The biggest Internet companies have been embracing renewable energy for years now. The company that bought the largest amount of clean energy last year was Google, which has three times the renewable capacity of the next biggest user. Other familiar names in the top ten companies in total wind and solar capacity include Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. These companies have been ahead of the pack in looking for sustainable ways to meet their substantial energy needs.