Climate Goals Go Up in Smoke as Us Datacenters Turn to Coal

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

rntn

8 points

3 comments

theregister.comTechstory

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DatacentersEnergy ConsumptionClimate Change

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Datacenters

Energy Consumption

Climate Change

US datacenters are increasingly relying on coal power, undermining climate goals, with commenters questioning the accuracy of the report and highlighting the complexity of energy sourcing.

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01Story posted
Oct 10, 2025 at 10:06 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Oct 11, 2025 at 11:12 AM EDT
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Discussion (3 comments)

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billy99k

3 months ago

1 reply

The activists of the 70s made it so we were never able to really innovate Nuclear energy. If they instead supported it, we might not even have any climate issues today.

bigyabai

3 months ago

Untrue, no idea where you got this idea from. The nuclear energy research pipeline is entirely decoupled from the challenges and protests of deploying it.

toomuchtodo

3 months ago

While unfortunate due to bad policy and poor governance outcomes, these coal plants are uneconomical, and will continue to drag themselves to retirement or closure. New gas turbine pipeline is ~5-10 years long (only three companies in the world build them, and they are output constrained due to labor and supply chain limitations), so they are not an option luckily. Renewables and battery manufacturing and deployment flywheels continue to spin up. "Sucks to suck" but this problem is temporary, and the AI bubble will deflate eventually (destroying some component of this data center power demand).

China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...

Gas-Turbine Crunch Threatens Demand Bonanza in Asia - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-07/gas-tu... | https://archive.today/z4Ixw - October 7th, 2025

China electrotech exports are surging. Here's what's at stake for U.S. - https://www.axios.com/2025/10/06/china-clean-energy-export-s... - October 6th, 2025

Planned retirements of U.S. coal-fired electric-generating capacity to increase in 2025 - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64604 - February 25th, 2025

Nowhere to go but down for U.S. coal capacity, generation - https://ieefa.org/resources/nowhere-go-down-us-coal-capacity... - October 24th, 2024

US Coal Plant Map Retirement Tracker - https://www.sierraclub.org/coal/coal-plant-map

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ID: 45539249Type: storyLast synced: 11/17/2025, 11:13:43 AM

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