Advocacy group says the firm has doubled the number of methane gas burning turbines it’s using without permits

KeShaun Pearson took a seat in front of the Shelby county board of commissioners in Memphis, Tennessee, on Wednesday morning. In the gallery behind him, a small group of people held up signs that said “Our air = our lives” and “Our water, Our future.” With a manner-of-fact demeanor, Pearson addressed the commissioners.

“I’m here because today we’ve learned that xAI is using 35 methane gas burning turbines,” said Pearson, who is the director of the advocacy group Memphis Community Against Pollution. “They have submitted a permit to our Shelby county health department for 15, yet they are using double that amount with no permit.”

It’s been known that xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, has been using around 15 portable generators to help power its massive supercomputer in Memphis without yet securing permits. But new aerial images obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center show that number is now far higher. The group says these gas turbines combined can generate around 420MW of electricity, enough to power an entire city.

“xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities,” Amanda Garcia, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement. “These dozens of gas turbines are doing significant harm to the air Memphians breathe every day.”

      • PineRune@lemmy.world
        19·
        3 days ago

        And when the penalty for breaking the law is only a fine, it means it’s only illegal for the common folk.

    • foggy@lemmy.world
      131·
      3 days ago

      Tell that to the Germans, who are still weeding through old WWII era documents to account for every last living Nazi before they reach the escape of death.

      • PineRune@lemmy.world
        171·
        3 days ago

        The Nazis, while in power, said what they were doing was legal. The Holocaust, according to those Nazis, was a perfectly legal thing to do because they changed and abused their laws to make it that way.

        • foggy@lemmy.world
          12·
          3 days ago

          That did not stop the Nuremberg trials from prosecuting them.

          Nor has it stopped Germany from continuing to prosecute people who were “just following orders”.

          Theyve convicted two people over the age of 100 in the last decade.

        • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
          3·
          3 days ago

          Both the German Federal Constitutional Court and the Federal Court of Justice have applied Radbruch’s formula numerous times. Its first court appearances were in cases concerned with National Socialist crimes. The defendants in those cases argued that, according to Nazi statutes valid at the time of their acts, those acts had been legal. The courts used Radbruch’s formula to argue that some statutes were so intolerable that they had not been law in the first place and consequently could not be used to justify the acts in question.

          This is the current interpretation of the meaning of “law” in Germany. Laws which are entirely unjust must be disobeyed.

          Though this is different from an administration ignoring the rule of law. In that case it’s fairly obvious that violations of laws can be prosecuted by any following administration.

  • FrankFrankson@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    3 days ago

    Think how terrible it would be if someone went to Costco and picked up a bunch of the largest cans of baked beans they could get and filled up as many of those turbines as possible.

  • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
    8·
    3 days ago

    I gotta think those generators are pretty suseptible to object that penetrate them. Someone might be “hunting” in the area and miss the animal… ooops.

      • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
        6·
        3 days ago

        There were a bunch of cases where power substations got damaged a while back. If I recall correctly they never found the errant “hunter” except in a case where they did it multiple times or something.