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Interesting they’re talking about colocating it in EEA countries. I see the rationale for Iceland and Norway, but why specify them as EEA? Is there a post-Brexi
by dtf 7y ago
Interesting they’re talking about colocating it in EEA countries. I see the rationale for Iceland and Norway, but why specify them as EEA? Is there a post-Brexit strategic angle to this? (considering the large sum of public money involved)
- ivanbakel 7y agoThey are not specified as EEA countries. The EEA is specified as the constraint for the supercomputer's location - Iceland and Norway are given as two possibilities, but after that constraint. How would you phrase that part of the article if indeed any EEA country could be the location of the new computer, and you wanted to include Iceland and Norway as two candidate countries?
- tgflynn 7y agoIf the goal of the remote location is access to stable renewable energy wouldn't a South European location make more sense ?
- adamcharnock 7y agoI haven’t researched this, but I imagine the reasoning goes something like this: Iceland has geothermal, and Norway has hydro. Both will need less storage than solar (perhaps none?). Other more political thoughts are: Southern Europe looks like Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Perhaps Iceland and Norway seem more politically stable? And maybe this will mend some fences with Iceland after the UK seized it’s banks assets under the terrorism act (although that’s going back a little bit now). Edit: Typo
- justincormack 7y agoSpain, and much of southern Europe, has good solar, but not that much renewable at night I think. The setup for wind is better in slightly more northern europe. Iceland has geothermal that never fails, and Norway has hydro.
- renaudg 7y agoThe article says "easy sources of clean energy" : that doesn't actually fully equate to "renewable energy". Assuming that "clean" really means "low carbon", then only majority nuclear/hydro/geothermal electricity grids can currently achieve that. Wind/solar on the other hand are intermittent, and always need to be complemented with "dispatchable" energy sources to handle the base load. That can either be hydro/geothermal if you were blessed with the right geography (like Iceland or Sweden), nuclear if you weren't but are pragmatic about it (like France), or coal/gas if you got scared of nuclear but still have a large country to power (like Germany). I'm stressing the latter because, even as Germany is rightfully praised as a renewables champion that invested billions to be 70% wind/solar powered on a very good day, that's all in vain when it comes to climate change : coal/gas is so bad that their average carbon intensity of electricity production is still mediocre (see http://electricitymap.org/ http://electricitymap.org/) So, renewables doesn't always mean low carbon. If that's the primary concern for the location, France is probably their best bet (nearly as low carbon intensity as Iceland, and much closer to the UK)
- tgflynn 7y ago> Wind/solar on the other hand are intermittent, and always need to be complemented with "dispatchable" energy sources to handle the base load. I've seen people claim here that battery storage already represents a good solution to that problem. Elon Musk's battery storage project in Australia seems to be successful and powering a supercomputer would probably require a much smaller installation.
- mkj 7y agoLatency would be too high outside of Europe