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At what point does this become a problem? They're using the naturally cool sea water to regulate the temperature in the container, but that heat needs to go som
by alexghr 8y ago
At what point does this become a problem? They're using the naturally cool sea water to regulate the temperature in the container, but that heat needs to go somewhere... it heats the water.
If this becomes a popular alternative to classic server farms, at what point does it start to increase the temperature of the sea? I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data.
- Keres 8y ago> Microsoft's Ben Cutler insists the warming effect will be minimal - "the water just metres downstream would get a few thousandths of a degree warmer at most" - and the overall environmental impact of the Orkney data centre will be positive.
- sushid 8y agoWell you're making it sound as if the data centers being cooled somehow wouldn't happen otherwise. Seeing as how the alternative is to cool using A/C, surely it's the case of causing less harm than the alternative? Of course you could argue that the lower cost of this cooling method will create a larger demand for cheaper servers/data storage, which increases net harm, for which I have no answer.
- fwdpropaganda 8y ago> Of course you could argue that the lower cost of this cooling method will create a larger demand for cheaper servers/data storage, which increases net harm, for which I have no answer. That argument doensn't apply here: demand isn't currently being constrained by us being affraid of the environmental impact of datacenters.
- adrianN 8y agoedit: nevermind I can't read
- fwdpropaganda 8y agoYou don't believe demand isn't being constrained in the way I described? So you believe that people are looking at cats on facebook, and stop because they're worried about the environmental impact of facebook's datacenters? You're joking...
- lclarkmichalek 8y agoFWIW, your local FB datacenter is likely powered by 100% renewable energy :)
- sushid 8y agoSure it does. If the costs of these datacenter operations were extremely high (say, by a factor of 100), you bet we'd have lower bitrate for Youtube, fewer GB allowances on Office 365, Dropbox, Gmail, etc. Conversely, if it became literally free to operate, you can imagine we'd have a higher demand for data, storage, etc. It's like how center pivot irrigation reduced the water usage rate per acre but increased demand for water usage in various areas because costs were lowered as well.
- icebraining 8y agoThe overall heat increase is the same, but the localized effects mights not be: fewer beings live in the atmosphere, and air displaces that heat faster than water, reducing the local concentration.
- Maybestring 8y ago>The overall heat increase is the same That's not the case if you're comparing with AC. You have to use energy (generating more waste heat) to pump heat up a temperature gradient.
- grkvlt 8y agoWait, is that true? Fewer organisms in air versus water? Is that due to the huge amount of e.g. zooplankton maybe? Curious...
- FLUX-YOU 8y ago>which increases net harm, for which I have no answer. Find a desert under the sea and drop them all there. Some place that's basically water and dirt. It's probably going to be large enough that you could dump all of humanity's data centers there for the next 100 years and still have room to spare.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoThere'll also be a lot less energy consumed in the cooling process - A/C is probably grossly inefficient compared to moving water around.
- bjpbakker 8y agoI was wondering the same thing. >> "Microsoft's Ben Cutler insists the warming effect will be minimal - "the water just metres downstream would get a few thousandths of a degree warmer at most" - and the overall environmental impact of the Orkney data centre will be positive." It's not like we've heard that before about carbon dioxide emissions and other environmental pollution. Companies have mostly a different interests than the protection of our environment, from past experience. I'm very interested to see what scientists and researchers think of this.
- fwdpropaganda 8y ago> At what point does this become a problem? They're using the naturally cool sea water to regulate the temperature in the container, but that heat needs to go somewhere... it heats the water. Makes as much sense as the people who think that windfarms will eventually stop the wind, or people who worry that smoking is contributing to global warming.
- seszett 8y agoIf my calculation is correct, the total annual electricity production in the world (I used 20 279 PWh) would heat up the oceans (1 347 000 000 km³ of water) by 0,0129°C. It's rather easy to calculate because one calorie is the energy required to heat up one gramme of water by one degree Celsius, the rest is just unit conversions, but I could have messed up anywhere of course. Even if I'm off by a few orders of magnitude I'm confident that datacenters won't be noticeably heating up the sea for a long time.
- azeirah 8y agoI understand that this is just a back-of-the-napkin calculation, but I feel like the heating will have a more noticeable impact on the local environment (think 5km³), rather than considering all of our planet's oceans all at once.
- fwdpropaganda 8y ago> I understand that this is just a back-of-the-napkin calculation, but I feel like the heating will have a more noticeable impact on the local environment (think 5km³), rather than considering all of our planet's oceans all at once. You're not putting all of the planet's datacenters within 5km^3 either. The calculation is fine.
- iKSv2 8y agohowever will these values change depending upon the depth and hence more pressure?
- cbcoutinho 8y agoYou can't assume that the ocean is perfectly mixed. For example, desalination plants dump highly saline water into the ocean that can have adverse effects on local ecosystems, even though their effect on the entire ocean may be negligible.
- akerro 8y ago>(I used 20 279 PWh) would heat up the oceans (1 347 000 000 km³ of water) Your calculation is stupid because you dont need to heat up whole ocean, heating up small areas it will be butterfly effect, enough to badly affect bigger areas. Look at this: >As the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises due to emissions of fossil fuels, more of the gas is dissolving in the ocean. That is lowering the pH of the water, or making it more acidic, which can make it harder for reef-building organisms to construct their hard skeletons. Minor change in CO2 changed pH of water, which kills organism in wider area. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160321-coral-bleaching-great-barrier-reef-climate-change/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160321-coral-ble... There are also closed seas like Baltic that need over 100 years to fully mix sea water with ocean water, it's much less salty than other seas and warmer, also much more polluted from toxins that were sinked there during and after WW2.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- donquichotte 8y agoThis will never become a problem. Take the mediterranean for example, a relatively small ocean. It has a volume of 3.75e15m3, with a mass of 3.75e18kg. We need 4kJ/kg/K to heat up water. To heat the whole mediterranean by 1K, we need an energy of 1.5e19kJ, or 4.16e6 TWh. In 2008, total worldwide primary energy consumption was 1.32e5 TWh, 31x less energy than needed to heat the mediterranean by 1K.
- masklinn 8y ago> I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data. Meh. The biggest data center (ChinaTel's Inner Mongolia Information Park) consumes about 150MWe, assuming all of it becomes waste heat it's basically nothing: a nuclear reactor (each plant has 2~8) releases 2Wt for each We it produces, and they're usually sized between 800 and 1300MWe. Hell, earth averages 160W/m^2 from the sun, oceans cover 360m km^2, so oceans get 10^16 watts from the sun. Not to say that it can't have a significant local effect, nuclear plants are strongly regulated to avoid heating their rivers too much (especially in warm summers), and again we're dealing with orders of magnitude more heat dumping heat waste in a very finite (though moving) amount of water.
- Moter8 8y agoEven Greenpeace at least doesn't think that it's a bad idea: "Experimental underwater data centres could be more sustainable if connected to offshore wind power, but Microsoft must focus more on investing in new renewable energy now. [...]" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35472189 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35472189
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- becomingknown 8y agoThat's kind of a clever idea to promote renewable energy.
- gascan 8y agoCoupling an undersea datacenter with an offshore windfarm just sounds all-around clever.
- reaperducer 8y agoUntil a hurricane destroys it.
- adrianN 8y agoAll the big power plants use rivers for cooling. It doesn't seem to be a terribly big problem unless there is a drought.
- blattimwind 8y agoOr summer is a bit hotter than anticipated, in which case fish are free to go ahead and die.
- larkeith 8y agoThermal pollution can cause significant ecological impact [1] when left unchecked; however, thermal discharge is regulated under the Clean Water Act [2], hence the usage of cooling ponds [3] and towers [4]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution [2] https://www3.epa.gov/region1/npdes/merrimackstation/pdfs/ar/AR-338.pdf https://www3.epa.gov/region1/npdes/merrimackstation/pdfs/ar/... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_pond https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_pond [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower
- petre 8y agoIt cools back down when the water evaporates. But it doesn't do the oceans any good anyhow because thea heat also fuels algae blooms. I doubt it will become popular because it involves waterproofing the enclosures, complicates maintenance staff access, and also carries the risk of water getting in and damaging the equipment. There are other alternatives to AC. Using a cooling tower is a much better alternative to submerging the whole datacenter.
- hvidgaard 8y agoThis is mostly aimed at large cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. They can use units like this and take them up for scheduled maintenance every x years. What happens to some of the individual servers between maintenance is of less importance. The infrastructure can handle the failures and they can just turn off the affected servers if they cannot fulfill any role.
- aalleavitch 8y agoIf the heat becomes enough, couldn’t we recycle it?
- jakobegger 8y agoNo, because you can not convert heat alone into energy. You need a heat difference (something hot and something cold). And the efficiency of the conversion depends on the temperature difference.
- Double_a_92 8y agoYou could use it to heat something up that you actually want to be warm.
- aalleavitch 8y agoRight, but if you’re putting it in a place that is naturally cold, you’re going to have a temperature differential you can then work with to recycle the heat, wouldn’t you? Obviously you’re going to be losing heat still, but you could reclaim some of that energy.
- jakobegger 8y agoYes, in theory you could do that, but the efficiency depends on the temperature difference. The higher a temperature difference you have, the better. The theoretical maximum efficiency of a heat engine is (Tmax-Tmin)/Tmax (temperature in Kelvin). So a few degrees is not going to result in anything usable. So to reclaim the energy, we need a large temperature difference. But since the goal is to cool the datacenter, we want the temperature difference to be as small as possible. Reclaiming energy from waste heat usually only pays off in industrial settings. If you have very hot steam, you can use it to power a steam turbine and generate electricity. But at lower temperatures, the efficiency is too low.
- tzahola 8y agoNo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency#Carnot_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency#Carnot_effi...
- csomar 8y agoI'm guessing it is less than a drop in the ocean given that the ocean makes up 3/4 of earth. Also don't forget that the earth core is hot as hell. I don't have exact number but my guess will be much less than a drop in the ocean if all datacenters were pushing heat to the ocean.
- keithnoizu 8y agoTime for outerspace data centers with ultrafast space elevator strato-cable connections.
- dmurray 8y agoCounterintuitively, cooling is really difficult in outer space. It's cold, but there's no air or water circulating to remove the waste heat by convection. Instead you have to rely on radiating the heat away, which is much less efficient.
- gorn 8y agoNever thought of that. Nice point!
- whatsstolat 8y agoThat's why the sun lasts so long?
- perl4ever 8y agoI have the impression "cold" is kind of ambiguous in space, because while there are very few particles, the ones that are there are moving quickly, which could be seen as a high temperature. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosphere
- richmarr 8y agoWe're already heating the sea (and everything else) by running the air conditioners to cool the datacentres, and generating the electricity to power the air conditioners that cool the datacentres. This is more a lot more efficient. Perhaps there might be a localised effect, but I doubt the effects would be as severe as the carbon emissions saved.
- tiredwired 8y agoHow much of a problem than all the lava flowing into the ocean from the Hawaiian volcano?
- triggercut 8y agoNot a subsea engineer, but having worked in the space previously I can tell you that we already have giant man made heaters sitting at the bottom of the ocean. Subsea Oil and Gas wells take advantage of the steady temperature at those depths to dump excess heat form the production fluid (sometimes up to 120F for straight crude, much higher for oil and gas mix) whilst and before it rises up to the platform. Sometimes using active or passive cooling on the ocean floor. Then there's natural geothermal vents doing that, but probably an order of magnitude more, since before humans were around. The ocean is a pretty big thermal mass.
- Sami_Lehtinen 8y agoWouldn't it be much smarter to recycle that heat energy? "Our goal is to recover and reuse all the heat produced." - https://www.telia.fi/yrityksille/english/telia-helsinki-data-center https://www.telia.fi/yrityksille/english/telia-helsinki-data...