Featured Elon Musk's xAI, the EPA and air pollution with temporary generators.

From my reading - some of the generators (out of ~2 dozen) are in fact still permitted to continue running. But what's intriguing is - that burning natural gas? that's causing a pollution problem? California Disney runs Natural Gas forklifts throughout there indoor warehouses, & (both in Ontario as well as Anaheim) their stringent EPA as well as calOSHA doesn't seem to give a hoot.

 

The epa has so many loopholes and often fines are so low that people simply break the law and pay the fine when caught.

It appears that xAI was rushing to build out, perhaps to sell servises to the US government (which recently happened). The company building the generators according to an article said that utility conforming pollution controls were not on most of the turbines. The loophole said they could call them non road use and get permintted. EPA just correctly closed that loophole, one of the few good things it has done in the last year. Bottom line is xAI probably had plans for some more permanent natural gas generators with proper pollution controls. They have $20B, and a ccgt power plant costs around $700M and produces electricity at a lower cost over the long run. If AI really takes off we need more of these efficient power plants, and if it doesn't we should shut down the older less efficient plants.

My concern with grok is all of a sudden it was in my car and enabled. The faking of photos and videos with clothes removed is the latest scandal. Grok "corrected it" by only allowing the "feature" for paying customers. I am not thrilled with grok but trying to keep up with the AI progress.

 

The thing is that they did it fast and cheap; without proper permits - when they realized that the power company couldn't deliver enough electricity for their hungry servers. Since it wasn't permitted, they bought the cheapest dirtiest generators they could find to install. That means no scrubbers, just an engine cooling system and generator. It was their own incompetence for dropping a server farm someplace, where they couldn't get enough power to run it....... You would think that would be on their requirements list when surveying locations to place that server farm. On top of all this; senior management lied to officials - claiming that only one or two generators were running and the rest was just backup. Reporters took a sensor to the fence line and showed all generators to be running.
I wouldn't want to be living down-wind of that server farm; especially if you have respiratory issues. With constant exposure, you may even develop respiratory issues.
FWIW; Memphis is home to St Jude medical center.