[jillesvangurp]

> The social media company will buy all the “clean energy attributes” of Constellation Energy’s Clinton Clean Energy Center, a 1.1 gigawatt nuclear power plant in central Illinois, starting in June 2027.

Creative bookkeeping is a thing when it comes to carbon neutrality. They are still using electrons produced with gas power. But others in a place where Meta doesn't require much power get to use nuclear power now.

It's interesting that they feel like they need to spend on carbon offsets. But I don't think carbon offsets are a long term solution. The core issue for companies like Meta is that they need to get their hands on large amounts of preferably clean power.

Another interesting thing here of course is that this nuclear plant is hopelessly dependent on subsidies to stay operational. That's quite common with aging nuclear plants. It's apparently a deeply unprofitable business to be in. There's no such thing as a profitable nuclear plant that doesn't get heavily subsidized. Plenty of people in the nuclear sector are getting rich but very few under their own power (pun intended).

[myrmidon]

I think this example illustrates the biggest problem with carbon credits very clearly: Basically, Meta subsidises all the electricity consumers near that plant to take the blame for the emissions that their datacenters cause.

This achieves almost nothing: Emissions stay the same, no additional clean power is generated and there is no reduction in power consumption either.

The only notable result is that Meta is now "blameless" on paper.

As long as you can get carbon credits cheaply from peers that don't really need/profit/care about them, the whole scheme is rather useless.