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“A server hall draws as much electricity as half a nuclear power plant creates”
- namsral 6y agoIn the Netherlands locals were appalled when locally produced green energy was pretty much all taken by a new foreign datacenter. Can’t help but think big tech is becoming a burden on society and the environment.
- pkaye 6y agoCan't the government refuse to allow foreign datacenters?
- shajznnckfke 6y agoThe government did ban the data from being stored in foreign datacenters - that’s why the local datacenters are being built.
- umeshunni 6y agoIt's almost like poorly thought out government intervention has second order effects.
- shajznnckfke 6y agoIMO, when your quality of life gets high enough, your lizard brain will find the most obscure problems to freak out about. From trying to avoid being eaten by lions to caring which continent the computers with electrons representing us digitally resides physically. What an amazing species we are.
- smartbit 6y agoLocal Dutch municipalities are fighting for large datacenter. They promise them green energy
- jbroman 6y agoThe alternatives would seem to be "data center powered by non-renewable energy" and "no data center", no?
- Skunkleton 6y agoOr perhaps a bunch of less efficient small data centers.
- graeme 6y agoHow would that help? Reducing the number of data centers doesn’t reduce the demand for them.
- drchickensalad 6y agoEfficiency of scale is very real for datacenters
- graeme 6y agoWhoops I wrote this backwards. I meant to write reducing the size of datacenters. The proposal I replied to would probably increase data center energy usage on balance.
- sargun 6y agoA lot of technologies only work “at scale”. Some things can be scaled down, but I don’t think that’s trivial.
- epistasis 6y agoSadly, the question is "are they part of my tribe or not?" I see it over and over again in my city in coastal California. Car dealership, gas stations? A-OK, they help me out. Instead let's go do a climate protest of a bank, an Amazon office, and a software as a service company, since they have Big Oil as clients. And let's conveniently forget the massive oil and car infrastructure from our city design, which creates huge amounts of demand for emissions. As long as the enemy is one- or two-degrees away in terms of connection, it's a target to be attacked.
- shajznnckfke 6y agoIt would be interesting to compare big tech’s total carbon output to other major industries and find out. Also neat would be environmental impact per economic output.
- georgebarnett 6y agoBig tech are installing datacenters to service users. Servers have to go somewhere - would you prefer it to be on dirty energy far away from you so it both pollutes and provides poor service? Datacenters are rediculously efficient (bigger ones even more so) compared to alternatives.
- gridlockd 6y ago> Datacenters are rediculously efficient (bigger ones even more so) compared to alternatives. Only if you ignore the alternative of not doing something. Parkinson's law tells me there's a lot of strictly unnecessary things running on there as a means unto itself.
- the8472 6y agoIsn't that a good thing? It means there's demand and money for more renewable plants.
- disport 6y agoI think this speaks to the profound duplicity found inside humans. As if they just don't like the consequences of their actions waved in their face. In a lot of jurisdictions, data HAS to be stored locally, for privacy law reasons. So the data center has to go somewhere in the country, and the data center has to draw power from some local source. Given this reality, you just want the power to be clean. An analogy would be that "locals are appalled when they discover that eating meat requires killing animals". Given this reality, you just want the killing to be ethical. Maybe, like meat, put the data centers in some sparsely populated outskirts, out of sight and out of mind, and don't talk about it, sounds like that's what people really want here.
- GordonS 6y agoI'm not sure I understand the complaint - if power is going to be consumed regardless, what does it matter who/what consumes power from a particular source?
- loosescrews 6y agoIn many cases big tech companies are financing green electrical generation capacity. I don't know about this specific case, but in many cases the local green energy capacity is specifically built to power the data center.
- namsral 6y agoMy main complaint is that foreign big tech companies, or rather their shareholders, often exploit local resources like green energy, sparse living space, people’s privacy to generate large profits and take it home. Often avoiding responsibility by not paying taxes. It’s business as usual, different industry, same shit.
- stabbles 6y agoIf the big tech firms vanished, and instead there would only be many tech dwarfs, we still would have big data centers that needed the same capacity.
- mottosso 6y agoThis rings true. The title should really be "Tech consumption in Sweden needs half a nuclear plant". What else is new?
- mathgladiator 6y agoWouldn't we need more due to more overhead due to less economies of scale?
- Avamander 6y agoVery likely. Public transport vs. a car type of thing I suspect.
- sargun 6y agoYeah, I think the best example is S3. Only when you have to hat much data with a Pareto access distribution can you do things like oversubscribe I/O a ton, or do clever encoding / compression schemes that wouldn’t make sense at the scales of an individual organization.
- sargun 6y agoThere’s also trickle down economics at work here. The rest of the industry got brotli and zstd for free. Every dwarf benefits.
- paxys 6y agoIt really depends on what the capacity is being used for. From my experience, everything user facing (including all web serving, storage etc.) comprises a very tiny fraction of overall costs. The real $$$ (both input and output) is from big data/analytics/ML pipelines. Start a company that doesn't do any of that, and you'll have an infinitely better energy footprint.
- geogra4 6y agowell, better nuclear than coal I guess
- trhway 6y agoa bit of the current nuclear FUD - Lithuania considers giving out iodine to population to be prepared in case that new Belarusian nuclear power plant gets issues (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7383941/Lithuania-prepares-radiation-disaster-four-million-iodine-tablets.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7383941/Lithuania-p...), and Armenia/Azerbaijan conflict this time seems to be going into full blown war, with things not going great for Armenia (Turkish drones have been proving themselves very effective there) which does have a nuclear power plant (giving the level of hate between Armenia and Turkey/Azerbaijan i'd not bet that, even if the direct war zone wouldn't reach the plant, the strategic chance to plunge your enemy's whole country into darkness would be passed by, especially if sabotage or strike can be made to look like an accident) .
- redblacktree15 6y agoAs a Lithuanian I can tell that a lot of what Lithuania does with regards to the nuclear plant in Belarus is just fearmongering. The most active critics come from political parties which don't want that plant due to political reasons. Having a nearby nuclear plant effectively controlled by an ally of Putin is not a good thing and I agree with that, but this has nothing to do with safety. It's all political play. Ironically, a decade ago the same political parties which now oppose the Belarusian nuclear plant wanted to build a nuclear plant here in Lithuania. What's more ironic was that the chosen location was just a couple of kilometers from the border of Belarus. Personally I'm happy that Belarus managed to build the nuclear plant. In the end of the day, every new nuclear plant results in one less coal power plant somewhere.
- trhway 6y agoI myself originally from Russia from around those places and have family in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Lithuania. >Belarus managed to build the nuclear plant it is very easy. You just let Russia/Putin to come and finance and build the power plant. The question of course is why Russia does it. >every new nuclear plant results in one less coal power plant somewhere. Germany right near by have excess of renewables which they probably would be happy to sell, and coal these days is out-competed by all other energy sources. So nuclear vs. coal is pretty artificial.
- Apocryphon 6y agoMaybe this is the sort of incentive that will force them to toss a few billions for investing in fusion moonshots.
- epistasis 6y agoGoogle is aiming for 24/7 carbon free energy by 2030: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-pledges-24-7-carbon-free-energy-by-2030 https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-pledges-... It takes more than a decade of construction time to build a fission nuclear reactor in the US and Europe. Though Google does mention nuclear as one of many technologies that may help decarbonize, I don't think fusion is going to have much of a chance to be part of the solution.
- dane-pgp 6y agoActually Microsoft has promised to go further, namely being carbon negative by 2030 and removing even historical carbon emissions by 2050: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...
- epistasis 6y agoNice, I had missed that! I'm actually super impressed with Walmart's commitment too: https://www.axios.com/walmart-climate-plan-zero-carbon-emissions-3ffb8fcc-cc39-41a7-a989-1d2ac48d8193.html https://www.axios.com/walmart-climate-plan-zero-carbon-emiss... They have huge amounts of refrigeration, and will act a a buyer that forces refrigeration supply chains to start using refrigerants with less global warming potential, which can often reach into 1000x or more of CO2. (CO2 can be used as a refrigerant, but requires instead conditions that pit a lot demand onto materials...). And Walmart is going to require these to be super cost effective. MS and Google have lots of slack in their budgets, so if DC energy costs go up by 30%, no big deal. Walmart will be forcing the tech to be cheap, meaning that everybody can adopt it once Walmart does. When Walmart it more ambitious than an entire political party in the US, our politics are completely messed up. Walmart should not have to pull along the word, we should be pushing Walmart. It's ridiculous.
- jeffbee 6y agoI read this via Google's cache, ironically. The words "Facebook" and "Google" appear only in the title. AFAIK neither has any presence in Sweden. So, clickbait, essentially. The aggregate capacity of global datacenters has gone up by a factor of 5 since 2010 but the energy consumption has increased by only 10%. This is because taking a workload out of your ridiculous corporate server room where the PUE is 5.0 and moving it into the cloud where the PUE is 1.1 is just about the greenest thing you can do.
- Cederfjard 6y agoFacebook has a data center in Luleå. I don’t think Google has any in Sweden though.
- zyberzero 6y agoFacebook do have presence in Sweden, in Luleå. Amazon also have precence. Microsoft have bought some areal in Sweden. Google, however does not have any data centers (to my knowledge) here but they do have in Finland (one of our neighbouring countries).
- SahAssar 6y agoFacebook has a sizable datacenter in Luleå: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/inside-facebooks-lulea-data-center/ https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/inside-facebooks-lulea-d... and it also has a somewhat official facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/LuleaDataCenter https://www.facebook.com/LuleaDataCenter Google does not seem to have built anything yet but have perhaps acquired land: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-acquires-109-hectares-of-land-in-rural-sweden/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-acquires-1...
- dang 6y agoWe've changed the title now. (Submitted title was "Amazon, Google, Facebook in Sweden needs half a nuclear plant by themselves".) Submitters: Please follow the site guidelines, which ask you to "use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cblconfederate 6y agoI blame javascript. Though most of the power consumption must be video streaming. I wonder if it would be greener if it was distributed via peer-to-peer networks. Any studies on that?
- ronaldj 6y agoYou blame a client side programming language for data center power usage?
- cblconfederate 6y agoisnt it very popular server side too?
- ronaldj 6y agoSure. Do you know of any studies that analyze the power consumption of different languages on the backend? I'd be curious to see how they compare.
- cblconfederate 6y agoseems there are a few, though not sure if their results are applicable to server-based programs https://jaxenter.com/energy-efficient-programming-languages-137264.html https://jaxenter.com/energy-efficient-programming-languages-... https://stefanos1316.github.io/my_curriculum_vitae/GKS17.pdf https://stefanos1316.github.io/my_curriculum_vitae/GKS17.pdf https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01496266/document https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01496266/document
- loosescrews 6y agoI don't think Amazon, Google, or Facebook do on any significant scale.
- mrep 6y agoSome teams may use it at the big companies and I myself have used lesser performant languages at some of the big companies but only for smaller stuff. For the widely used stuff which big companies do a lot of, you need high efficiency and javascript ain't gonna do that. One of my co workers worked on a 5 person project for half a year that just refactored a core algorithm for a heavily used product and that halved the 5 million dollars a year in hardware costs and that's not expensive public cloud cost but the highly efficient internal data center costs and all of the code was in C++. Writing any of that code in javascript would just be wasting money.
- ummonk 6y agoTech uses a minimal share of power considering how big a portion of the economy it is.
- darawk 6y agoThis is really the correct measure. Power to GDP ratio.
- sargun 6y agoI’m not sure that it’s just that. In some ways, you have force multipliers that have multiple order effects. I’ll give two examples. One, food preservation. Food preservation has made it so we need to go to the grocery store far less. It’s also made food borne illness much less of a thing. This in turn leads to a more efficient economy, and removes overheads like food waste. Although freezers take a ridiculous amount of power, a similar standard of living would be much more expensive. I realize that the hole in this argument is “don’t eat that kind of food”. On the other hand, telecommuting. The infrastructure to run gmail and hangouts is minuscule in terms of its carbon emissions to buildings and cars. I believe in economics, these are called externalities.
- user5994461 6y agoAh nice coincidence. I was trying to estimate how much power was wasted in our compute grid due to poor memory allocation from linux malloc() and came around 1-2% of a nuclear power plant. For those who wonder how come? Poor allocation and fragmentation have a small performance impact that appear to get significant across thousands of cores running the same tasks. That'd make a nice blog post I guess.
- telotortium 6y agoGuess what function performance engineers at Google work on all the time :)
- moldavi 6y agoAnything I can read up on why fragmentation is so expensive? My naive brain keeps saying "why not use a hash map of lists, by size" but I know I'm missing something.
- spaetzleesser 6y agoHow will this go in the future if more and more complex things are done with computing? Will we run out of energy at some point?
- neonate 6y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20201006205521/https://tekdeeps.com/a-server-hall-draws-as-much-electricity-as-half-a-nuclear-power-plant-creates/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201006205521/https://tekdeeps....
- Arelius 6y agoI'm not sure what a "server hall" specifically is. Is that referring to a single data-center or a whole set of data-centers (limited to a geographic area perhaps)? There is some interesting ideas here but with my limited domain experience I can't really make much sense of what's going on other than simply that we spend a lot of power on servers.
- aaron695 6y agoThis is machine translated blog spam, based on spam, based on - https://archive.is/1ND9U https://archive.is/1ND9U Not sure what the faux outrage here would be, Sweden is pretty cool so should use less power. And if it's nuclear then that's pretty clean. Technically it's a interesting and exciting infrastructure project though!
- cipher_system 6y agoThe debate and outrage have been about whether this is a good deal for Sweden or not. Proponents claim that we've created a new base industry with new jobs. In parts of Sweden there is good access to clean power and the cool climate makes these centers relatively energy efficient. Opponents claim that, excluding the temporary build phase, very few jobs are created. Since power isn't limitless and these centers use a lot there is now no space left for other industries that create a magnitude more jobs per MWh. These centers also pay low taxes on the electricity so their overall contribution to society is minuscule compared to the resources they consume.
- sargun 6y agoAt least in the states, most power companies require a commitment when you are using more than a megawatt of power. The idea is that you use this money to build infrastructure to support the customer (high power distribution usually). I’m surprised they wouldn’t build storage capacity as part of that which can then be used all over the entire grid.
- llarsson 6y agoThis piece has been automatically translated and the original source is a right wing news outlet called "Fria Tider". Just pointing out these two facts and encourage readers to make their own judgement calls on whether this affects how they interpret the message in the article.