What it means is that they only pay for generation that's renewable and the energy company assures them by contract that they'll only be paying for renewables.
The rest of us, who might be on green tariffs usually get a commitment that on average almost all our energy comes from renewables. When supply is short then I'm the one who's paying for gas generation rather than the company who has committed to greenwashing. But that also drives investment in renewable generation, in the UK renewables have gone from 2% of power generation in 1991 to around 50% now.
It comes in about 0.2-0.3 people per MW, but as the size rises the number of people per MW reduces.
So, a 100MW DC will have about 20-30 people and a 1GW campus will be 200-300 people.
Those numbers can be boosted if the site has a significant non-operational support staff such as security and cleaning. But a significant part of security us heavily automated, to the point where when Meta had a major network failure they couldn't get on-call support staff into the facilities to fix the issue because the security doors were linked to the main network.
Corn ethanol is a weird carbon subsidy that shouldn't exist.
It's a weird carbon offset for the fuel industry that isn't effective and it diverts huge amounts of farm land away from food crop usage. It ties farms to industry rather than supplying food, binding their profitability to the price of oil far more and that only exists because the US Gov mandates the ethanol blend.
It's supposed to be because it's renewable/sustainable using a biological product, but the industry is heavily dependent on synthetic fertilisers which come from refineries.
There are a great many reasons to get rid of the ethanol mix. Lower food costs being the biggest. Now that EVs are practical the need for trying to whitewash combustion fuel is overbaked.
There was a black and white fantasy TV show called "Adam Adamant Lives!" from the 60s. The BBC always wanted to re-release it but the original contracts for the show were written when no one ever considered re-runs and physical releases. The BBC didn't have rights from the original actors for anything other than the original broadcast. And one of the actors who appeared in a few episodes didn't want it to be shown again, even if they were paid, the BBC didn't want to release a box-set without all the episodes. Eventually they just waited until that actor died and they were then able to release it.
I'm lead to believe that in music there are some similar contractual issues. The rights for some artists were for radio, and physical media, but no one considered streaming or downloads because those things didn't exist. So they have to go back and tidy up the contracts to cover their asses. And it doesn't just have to be the headliner on the recording, you may need to get every performer/contributor.
