Tony Dutzik

Assoc. Director and Sr. Policy Analyst, Frontier Group, part of @TPINNetwork. Transport, energy and climate policy, mostly.

[Tony Dutzik @FrontierTony]

Our 8th annual State of Renewable Energy dashboard w/@EnvAm is live! Check out how your state ranks in adoption of wind, solar, electric vehicles and more. https://t.co/QoeaG0WhmF

[David Wallace-Wells @dwallacewells]

Amazing chart. Energy *importers* have invested about 5x as much in renewables and nuclear as in fossil fuels since 2022. Energy *exporters* have invested about twice as much in fossil fuels as in renewables and nuclear.

[molly taft @mollytaft]

i don’t think people realize how insane the produced water situation has become out in the permian

[Dustin Mulvaney @DustinMulvaney]

The permits came much faster than that! SunZia is a perfect example of a developer going against the guidance of a federal agency, proposing their own route and then getting stuck for years because of bad choices and later having to redo it. SunZia is the most poorly told story in the history of transmission siting.

[Dustin Mulvaney @DustinMulvaney]

The National Environmental Policy Act has been so thoroughly weakened over the past few years that it’ll be much harder to stop the mine this time around.

[Tony Dutzik @FrontierTony]

@jaeporeon I’m curious what you mean - like, an example?

Difficult issues sometimes clarify what people think is really important. Makes you have to decide.

[molly taft @mollytaft]

btw, regulators confirmed to us this morning that the 19 new turbines (and the 27 already on site) are not part of an air permit granted in March, meaning xAI has more than 1 GW of unpermitted gas power at Colossus 2 right now

[molly taft @mollytaft]

NEW: xAI appears to have added more than 500 MW (!) of unpermitted gas turbines to its Colossus 2 campus in a matter of weeks, according to internal emails between the company and regulators

[Travis Kavulla @TKavulla]

My goodness there is a lot of happy talk about data centers *lowering* customers' rates. It hearkens back to gentler times when there was still juice to squeeze and the glass wasn't full.

From my forthcoming essay @AmericanAffrs -->

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

Huge. A Brookfield-backed datacenter company is pulling out of a major project in Virginia, that they had been working on for years, due to growing political opposition https://t.co/fdlDPUYky8

[Zak Accuardi @zaccuardi]

We can't afford to pour tax dollars down the drain like this: "The irony is that the interim state route [37] project, slated to cost over $500 million, will be underwater within two decades of completion, due to sea-level rise it helped cause."

- @TransForm_Alert, in @SFGate

[Tony Dutzik @FrontierTony]

@CtheLala So, again, I'm not necessarily a moratorium guy, but there's at least a chance that, if you're hopeful about AI, "pause" may be a better option to get where you want to go than the permanent toxification of the issue in the public mind. Which seems to be where things are headed.

[Tony Dutzik @FrontierTony]

@CtheLala Or even, in the most extreme case, whether to proceed at all. Any "democratic" governance is downstream of a societal dialogue that has barely gotten started and is emerging at a time when much of the public sees itself as under threat.

[Tony Dutzik @FrontierTony]

@CtheLala It does, but my larger point is that actual democratic governance (as opposed to a "democratic" veneer on technocratic governance that decides which "offers" are made) could very well, in this case, deliver very different results than those you envision.

[Tony Dutzik @FrontierTony]

@CtheLala I appreciate all that but I don't think you're answering my question. Opinion polling shows deep, broad concern both about AI in general and issues related to data center location. Wouldn't actual "democratic" governance (if it were to be democratic) reflect that?

[Brendon Slotterback @bslotterback]

Don’t forget, this didn’t just happen. Mandates work!

[Jesse Peltan @JessePeltan]

This is actually ridiculous.

[Environment America @EnvAm]

New research released for #EarthDayEveryDay finds that despite the rapid growth of renewable energy usage, the even-more-explosive growth of data centers is delaying the transition to a cleaner grid in ways that could harm the air we breathe. https://t.co/VZFumiDlH1