16 ms·

The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the cloud

214 points by _Microft 5y ago

jeffbee 5y ago
Pretty much exactly as accurate as you'd expect from an ethnographer holding forth on datacenter thermodynamics. "Today, power-hungry computer room air conditioners (CRACs) or computer room air handlers (CRAHs) are staples of even the most advanced data centers." False. The absence of CRACs is, in fact, the defining characteristic of "the most advanced data centers". "In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage." That might be true if the statement is weighted improperly, but for advanced large-scale cloud data centers, the figure is more like 8%. "Virginia’s “data center alley,” the site of 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic" This author has no idea what they are talking about.
- rp3 5y ago
  The stat about Virginia receiving 70% of all internet traffic seems to be often repeated: https://www.vedp.org/industry/data-centers https://www.vedp.org/industry/data-centers I can’t find where that stat comes from, however. As for everything else you said, it would be great to have sources. As far as I know, cooling is one of the major costs of running a data center. It would be illuminating to know why that’s now false.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    The 70% thing came from a business development official in Loudoun County, a person whose job is to promulgate misleading boosterism. It doesn't make even a sliver of sense to someone who thinks it over for a moment. Cooling is a major data center cost, but it's not 40% any more. All of the major datacenter operators claim a PUE of 1.11 or less. Facebook has been the most open and vocal about how they achieve this, for example at https://tech.fb.com/hyperefficient-data-centers/ https://tech.fb.com/hyperefficient-data-centers/ (scroll down to "Systems").
  - mr_toad 5y ago
    > I can’t find where that stat comes from, however. Similar statements were pretty common in the 90’s. If it was ever true it’s way out of date.
- mmmBacon 5y ago
  Yep. The amount of power that can be pulled to a building is a difficult thing to change. So the biggest cloud companies try to maximize the amount of power used for compute. There is a metric for this called Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). It’s the ratio of totally energy usage to energy used for compute. Most modern cloud companies have PUEs <1.3. Here’s a great link showing Google’s PUE. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/ The data centers in Ashburn, Virginia are mostly leased facilities and these kinds of facilities are more of the traditional raised floor air conditioning type facilities. However these facilities are also quite efficient with PUEs in the 1.6 range. https://sustainability.equinix.com/environment/energy-efficiency/ https://sustainability.equinix.com/environment/energy-effici... Digital Realty Claims to have some sites with PUE <1.12 https://sustainability.equinix.com/environment/energy-efficiency/ https://sustainability.equinix.com/environment/energy-effici...
deleted 5y ago
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floodle 5y ago
This is besides the actual topic, but the typesetting on this website is just beautiful. It's a pleasure to read; almost like a print magazine.
- _Microft 5y ago
  Off-topic but I said [0] a similar thing about another website not long ago. Maybe you like that too: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/walmart-but-for-space https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/walmart-but-for-... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30321310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30321310
  - floodle 5y ago
    I do! Thank you.
waynecochran 5y ago
I live near the Columbia River where Google, Facebook, Microsoft all have data centers that rely on hydroelectric power. The dams produce clean energy, provide waterway for barges, prevent flooding, allow for recreation, and can back up water at night when demand for electricity is low. As the salmon fisherman will tell you, the salmon have adapted to the fish ladders and are spawning in the Columbia’s tributaries. Yet there are still political forces that want to breach these dams. Nothing is ideal, but hydroelectric energy is about as close as you can get to ideal in the Pacific Northwest.
- golemotron 5y ago
  Consumption really can lead to the development of clean energy sources. People need to develop a growth-mindset on this issue.
  - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    This logic is really no different from stupid Bitcoiner logic that PoW induces demand for cheap clean energy.
    - tejohnso 5y ago
      Doesn't civilization itself induce demand for cheap clean energy given the environmental forcing of unclean energy? I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases.
      - golemotron 5y ago
        Or even "the cloud."
      - giantrobot 5y ago
        > I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases. Because Bitcoin literally is designed to waste electricity on proof of work. The Ethereum network has the processing power of a Raspberry Pi and wastes fantastic amounts of electricity to deliver that paltry power. Bitcoin alone uses more power than all of Google's operations. I doubt that the total power used by the world's yachts and private jets per year is even half the power the Bitcoin network literally wastes.
georgeoliver 5y ago
Sure you can document the ecological impact, but who's measuring the economic/cultural/social impact (positive and/or negative)? How do I measure an airline-sized carbon impact against a billion cat videos? Is there even a framework for that kind of accounting? Until there is I think no amount of documentation is going to change people's behavior in the large. IMO the article is much better when citing specific impacts like noise pollution and water rights abuse.
novok 5y ago
What previous resource intensive activities are these data centers replacing although? We used to ship far more paper around by parcel, and store them in temperature controlled rooms and shops in dispersed locations be it books, legal documents and more. Things that used to be air flights are now video calls. Videotapes, DVDs and video stores replaced by efficient streaming. Photographs stay on digital media instead of paper media. We fell trees and had 'paper' data centers in the form of pulp mills, which are also resource intensive industrial plants in remote locations. Yes we still have paper and lots of it, but now it's significantly reduced. When you look at the internet and the telephone compared to what we replaced it with, the internet comes out far, far ahead in environmentally friendliness.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  I am not sure paper usage is down. Overall, humanity is using more than ever. As for video calls, they don't need massive data centres since it's supposed to be p2p for all sorts of reasons. I am struggling to get where you come from. The actual content is so wrong, that it seems satirical, yet it's presented in a very serious, almost patronising way
  - Retric 5y ago
    Overall humanity is much larger and richer than it was 40 years ago. Paper use includes packaging, plates, toilet paper, etc so it’s hard to get actual numbers as it relates to IT. Especially when recycling initiatives have resulted in new uses for lower grade paper products. That said, personally I am way down due to IT not just replacing forms but also physical books, newspapers, and even bills.
  - roca 5y ago
    P2P can't work once you have more than a few participants.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      This is only true due to bad protocols and network infrastructure. As long as ISPs have incentives to make Netflix go fast and the connection to your actual neighbors go slow, P2P can't take off. Also multicast networks could easily outperform cloud infrastructure in many setups, but something something business incentives.
globalise83 5y ago
A lot of the time people watching cat videos aren't travelling by car or airline, so the net impact is quite subtle.
- rossjudson 5y ago
  NFTs close the crypto loop back to cat videos. So now it's really cat videos all the way down.
- culi 5y ago
  What? It's not like people are cancelling their flights so they could stay at home and watch a cat video? I think more often a carbon consumptive habit (like watching a cat video) is replacing something non-consumptive like sitting on the toilet alone with your thoughts instead of obsessively checking how many likes your Instagram photo got.
Shadonototra 5y ago
bad software and slow code should be heavily taxed
- ozfive 5y ago
  How do you suggest doing that? Measure all VM usage and if CPU memory usage to service ratio is too high it would be taxed?
- TOMDM 5y ago
  The "tax" is already baked in, it costs more to run poorly optimised code. What we need is a carbon tax, then wasteful use of electricity can funnel back into paying for its impact.
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    > paying for its impact The rationale of a carbon tax is to make prices account for the externality, so that people use carbon-emitting energy where it's still worth it, and stop where it's not. (And over time encourage everyone to find better ways to do things.) You might see this as a quibble, but there's so much misunderstanding. E.g. the #1 objection is about the expense to poor people, but if all this tax revenue went straight back to a UBI it would not affect the above logic. The objection does have force if it's "funneled back into paying for its impact" instead.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      >the #1 objection is about the expense to poor people It amazes me when people who have no interest in the plight of the poor suddenly start spouting this. Even more so when you consider that the poor aren't creating this problem, their carbon emissions are minimal. In many ways they stand to gain from changes to reduce emissions (improved provision for walking and cycling, better public transport, etc). The poor really don't give a shit if your flight across the Atlantic gets more expensive.
      - abecedarius 5y ago
Animats 5y ago
Especially in Virginia’s “data center alley,” the site of 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic in 2019. Too much internet infrastructure is optimized for wiretapping. There's no other good reason for so much near CIA HQ.
- bombcar 5y ago
  It’s also a patently absurd statistic by any possible measure.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Proximity to HQ doesn’t inform the CIAs ability to wiretap. They can just use the Internet and their ability to influence lawmakers. CALEA says every telco has to wiretap their own infrastructure. The CIA built a giant data center in Utah in the previous decade.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- andbberger 5y ago
  that's ridiculous. you might equally say too much internet infrastructure is optimized for adjacency to neuroscience. there's no other good reason for so much near HHMI Janelia
- imgabe 5y ago
  The NSA handles the wiretapping, not the CIA and they're over in Ft. Meade, MD. The NSA's datacenter is in Utah, though.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    Ah, right, I was thinking of the NSA datacenter. Still, the fact remains, the CIA is not geographically constrained to Virginia, or even the east coast of the United States.
- lanstin 5y ago
WalterBright 5y ago
I've often wondered if a "slow" datacenter could be created, that used low power processors. Amazon, for example, could offer a cheaper AWS tier that used the low power datacenter. Not everything needs to be fast. I'm perfectly happy with many jobs on my computer taking all night.
- mirekrusin 5y ago
  Or just use arm instead of intel frying pans.
  - colpabar 5y ago
    They were touting their graviton (arm) powered instance types a lot at last year's reinvent. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
- bonzini 5y ago
  The tiny (non-dedicated) instance types on AWS probably multiplex hundreds of guests on a single host.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Why not hundreds on a single low power host?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Because lower power machines can't run as many guests? I'm nothing like an expert in data center power consumption and relative efficiencies, but the last I had heard was that it was generally more efficient to cram a lot of users on high-end hardware rather than trying to run everybody on enough low end hardware to match the same overall throughput.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        But this is not a scheme to match overall throughput. It's supposed to be slower.
rodgerd 5y ago
Something near and dear to my heart - it's painful watching NZ shift its compute footprint from local hydro sources to coal-fired in NSW.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  I assume you are talking about New Zealand and New South Wales here?
  - rodgerd 5y ago
    Yes
- roca 5y ago
  AWS and Azure opening data centres here should help.
nemo44x 5y ago
Update for today: “We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to compute! We wanna be free to run our virtual machines without being hassled by The Man. And we wanna get bitcoins. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do. We are gonna have a good time. We are gonna have a LAN party.”
- bloopernova 5y ago
  And now I need to listen to Loaded by Primal Scream. Thank you :)
  - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
    Surely you mean Mudhoney's "In 'n' Out of Grace" (or even The Wild Angels, since that's where both sampled it from).
open-source-ux 5y ago
What about calculating the ecological impact of the programming languages running on those 'cloud' servers? Some of the most popular languages are the least performative (we all know which ones), but they make life easier for developers. Thankfully, newer languages take performance seriously: Rust, Go, Nim, Crystal. A typed, compiled language gives you good performance for free and a smaller memory footprint (and the reduced computing resources that implies). When you consider the millions of servers in use, that additional language efficiency adds up to a substantial saving in electricity use. In the computing field, we readily encourage throwing cheap hardware at a performance problem until a program runs fast. It's embarrassing that the "hardware is cheap" attitude is so widespread among developers. Imagine if a manufacturer said that they were going to make energy-guzzling fridges/washing machines or other appliances without regard to energy-efficiency. In programming, everything is for the ease and comfort of the programmer and anything else takes a back seat - the user, energy use and ultimately the environment. Aside - If you think programming language energy usage a ridiculous topic, consider the follow: The creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, calculated potential CO2 savings due to speed improvements in PHP 7: fewer servers, smaller memory use and reduced CPU activity. (And remember this is an interpreted language.) You can watch a segment from his presentation below where he talks about the calculations he made of potential CO2 savings: Rasmus Lerdorf – "PHP in 2018" (extract from the 15 min mark): https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s
- throwaway17_17 5y ago
  Here are two papers on this topic. In particular, the first is the shorter version (with a better/more journal friendly layout) and second is basically the technical report for the research. It does show some support for your hypothesis compiled languages are more energy efficient. C ranks in at #1 and Python is last at #15. There is also a paper that I can’t find (I’m on my phone) that was done in conjunction with a Google researcher that reaches similar conclusions. 1 - https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/sleFinal.pdf https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/sle... 2 - https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf
dfdz 5y ago
>Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions So The Cloud, arguably the peak of human technology, uses contributes a tiny fraction of our total carbon emissions. Is curbing this technology in in any major way a productive way to reduce our emissions? These emissions are all electricity usage converted to carbon emissions. Would it not be more productive to focus on transitioning all power generation to solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, etc?
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Same way I feel when someone here tells me I should dither my PNGs or something to save the planet. Not eating a single steak would offset my entire life of using the internet.
  - nanidin 5y ago
    > Not eating a single steak would offset my entire life of using the internet. This appears to be hyperbole - from what I could find, one steak has a carbon footprint of 15.5kg [0] and one Google search has a carbon footprint of 7g [1]. That makes one steak equal to 2214 Google searches. Over a lifetime, 2214 searches seems low. In my browser history, I found evidence of 776 searches in the last 3 months. Moving away from searches, apparently 1GB of data transfer produces 3kg of CO2 [2]. That makes one steak equal to 5.16GB of data transfer over the internet - or less than one hour of 4K content streamed from Netflix [3]. [0] https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/beef https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/beef [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-one-Google-search https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-one-Go... [2] https://www.emergeinteractive.com/insights/detail/does-irresponsible-web-development-contribute-to-global-warming/#:~:text=And%20according%20to%20the%20Department,in%203kg%20of%20CO2%20emissions https://www.emergeinteractive.com/insights/detail/does-irres.... [3] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Given that just recompressing images on the homepage of some sites I’ve worked on has cut page load size down by megabytes it sounds like it makes a difference.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
> Steven Gonzales Monserrate is an anthropologist and a PhD candidate Maybe this person should stick to studying skull sizes or whatever it is an anthropologist studies these days. I'm sorry to say, but what a load of horse shit. Yes, data centers use energy. Essentially all of the big cloud providers have committed to carbon neutrality, most of them are pretty far done with getting there, and essentially all of them already source the vast majority of their power from renewables at this point. That's not just because it is greener, but also because it is cheaper. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. each maintain nice web pages on how far they are with these plans. - Amazon is shooting for 2025 for 100% carbon neutral energy. https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud?energyType=true https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud... - Microsoft plans for carbon negative by 2030: 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... - Google claims to have been carbon neutral since 2007 and plans to be carbon free by 2030 as well: https://sustainability.google/commitments-europe/ https://sustainability.google/commitments-europe/ That's a trend with many other manufacturers as well. E.g. lots of automotive manufacturers. If there's a deep conspiracy where these companies are lying about what they are doing, that would be news worthy of course. But, I suspect that most of these companies are simply getting very good at managing absurdly high degrees of energy and water efficiency and cost. Kind of counters the message of the article / the author's world view of course. So, instead this author is dragging in all sorts of things: waste problems, hypertension in people, "computational whir of data centers is not merely an annoyance, but a source of mental and physical harm". I mean, what the actual F** is he going on about here?! What's the point here? Modern technology is bad? Is there a point at all?
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > If there's a deep conspiracy where these companies are lying about what they are doing, that would be news worthy of course. But, I suspect that most of these companies are simply getting very good at managing absurdly high degrees of energy and water efficiency and cost. Believing in a deep conspiracy is probably violating Occam's razor, but I think believing in companies getting very good at gaming metrics and regulators not finding it in their interest to look too closely at positive results on metrics doesn't require too much conspiratorial thinking—everyone's happy in the short term.
kixiQu 5y ago
* The Jevons paradox seems really relevant but there's no analysis done. The predecessors to the cloud seem important to look at if you're being honest about analysis of efficiency, but... * "While in technical parlance the “Cloud” might refer to the pooling of computing resources over a network, in popular culture, “Cloud” has come to signify and encompass the full gamut of infrastructures that make online activity possible, everything from Instagram to Hulu to Google Drive." Okay, so we're using a definition of "the 'Cloud'" that extends to the services that run on it. Tricky to evaluate cost-benefit if you're doing that, but okay, sure. "Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions." Sorry, what? So you don't actually mean cloud computing when you say "the Cloud", you mean everything connected to the Internet? * All of the stuff about the wastefulness of protection against failure seems pretty sketchy to me, especially when considering that the preceding systems had all of the redundancy of every business that needed compute having its own physical servers scaled for peak. But again, there's no consideration of "what did we use to have" or "what would we need if we didn't have this"... * Putting in a quote like "It festers in his mind, clawing at his thoughts, probing his sanity, poisoning him with a constant spell of dread and anxiety." to color the locals' objection to noise is pretty dramatic, so there must be good evidence for how awful it is, right? "Over the course of my fieldwork with the communities of Chandler and Printer’s Row, I learned that the “noise” of the Cloud uniquely eludes regulatory schemes. In many cases, the loudness of the data centers, as measured in decibels (dB), falls below the threshold of intolerance as prescribed by local ordinances. For this reason, when residents contacted the authorities to intervene, to attenuate or quiet their noise, no action was taken, because the data centers had not technically violated the law, and their properties were zoned for industrial purposes. However, upon closer interrogation of the sound, some residents reported that the monotonal drone, a frequency hovering within the range of human speech, is particularly disturbing, given the attuned sensitivity of human ears to discern such frequencies above others. Even so, there were days when the data centers, running diesel generators, vastly exceeded permissible decibel-thresholds for noise." .... So I'm supposed to read "uniquely eludes regulatory schemes" as... "isn't as loud as the limits for the relevant zoning." Cool. How elusive of them. What are the limits supposed to be? How often are they being exceeded? Why should I give credence to "some residents" on the importance of the frequency -- shouldn't there be studies about that? I live in an area with noise pollution so I am fully willing to take this issue seriously, and I can believe that the existing regulation isn't catching what it should, but this doesn't read like someone being serious about presenting the issue! * "Historian Nathan Ensmenger writes that a single desktop computer requires 240 kilograms of fossil fuels, 22 kilograms of chemicals, and 1,500 kilograms of water to manufacture. The servers that fill the halls of data centers are dense, specialized assets, with some units valued in the tens of thousands of U.S. dollars." So the implication slithering between these sentences are that servers are worse than desktops vis-a-vis environmental impact of physical production, and desktops are really bad... but that's not actually shown by the fact that servers are expensive. * "Even with these sustainability initiatives in place, environmental organizations like Greenpeace estimate that less than 16 percent of the tons of e-waste generated annually is recycled." Yes! This is a huge problem! Only... what percent of that is consumer-level and what percent industrial? Is cloud computing less efficient re: e-waste? The author seems to be saying that we should leave things in use until they break, but, well, in practice that's kind of all those standards codify anyway. Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. I really care about the environmental impact of data centers and computing, and I want more people to care, but I want them to have better material to work with than this suggestive hand-wavey piece that isn't even compelling from an anthropological perspective.
halayli 5y ago
I wonder how much lower it would be if data centers strictly ran on ARM cpus. Sure there are plenty other components and factors that come into play but it would be interesting to look at such a graph nonetheless.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > Sure there are plenty other components and factors that come into play but it would be interesting to look at such a graph nonetheless. Not saying switching to ARM CPUs in servers would be bad but it's all of the other shit in a server that's using a significant amount of power. Even if an ARM CPU is more efficient per unit of computation a server still needs lots of fast RAM, various peripheral controllers, and storage. Replacing the CPU would likely reduce system power usage by several percent but not cut it in half.
  - halayli 5y ago
    Agreed. I wouldn't expect a 50% difference. Cloud services offer powerful GPUs, and other capabilities that can consume a lot more than a typical Intel xeon level cpu. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of power consumption in current data centers.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The move from spinning rust to SSDs everywhere has probably reduced power consumption noticeably (though it’s likely just been sucked up by the cpu).
jtsiskin 5y ago
What is the conclusion/take away here? Not sure what the call to action here is. Purely “ecologically”, I’m pretty sure staying home and binging YouTube is better for the environment than ordering a book online or even a short drive to a local library.
samatman 5y ago
Pains me to say it over a link which resolves to MIT, but the 'staggering' in the headline is the sort of purple adjective which lowers the quality of discussion, and should be removed.
anm89 5y ago
It seems like these things come up when someone has a axe to grind. Why do we use energy for anything? Because we want to do things. How much energy do we use to farm sugar, junk oils, grapes for wine, hops for beer that only serve to make people unhealthier. How much energy do we expend to make junk fast fashion. How much energy does the US educational system consume in districts where the average kid can't read. How much energy does it take us to bomb civilians in the middle east and maintain the bases to maintain the capability to bomb civilians in the middle east. And the answer is a very clear "we generally don't care" until someone has an axe grind. I'm not justifying these things, just pointing out that I don't buy that these articles are just written out of a genuine interest in understanding and improving global energy consumption. The problem doesn't seem like that people use a lot of cloud services. That's probably not going to change and probably shouldn't. Maybe we should stop shutting down all the nuclear plants and build new ones and get the problem dealt with if this is such a big problem.
2snakes 5y ago
What we may need instead are artificial lake-tiver-dams that are amenable to -pumped hydro- so as to solve the circadian rhythms of solar/wind. By pumping in the day and letting it run downstream in the night we can solve the capacity issue with a natural battery.
- tenuousemphasis 5y ago
  Pumped hydro probably isn't the answer to energy storage. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ You need a large reservoir at the top, another at the bottom, and as much vertical separation as possible. There aren't all that many places in the world that offer the geography necessary. It can be a good solution in places that do have the correct geography, though.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Meh these "feel guilty" articles don't really convince me. We have nuclear power which solves basically all of this. I guess I'll keep streaming porn on my iphone 13 as the ship goes down although the guys in charge of the ship know what the solution is and how we can patch the hole. Embrace the absurdity.
- nine_k 5y ago
  We have some nuclear power stations built long ago, a regulatory quagmire, loss of production expertise, and Toshiba / Westinghouse atomic power division bankrupt [1]. I'm afraid that making new nuclear power viable will take quite some effort. I hope that this effort will eventually be exerted. [1]: https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/after-crippling-12b-loss-toshibas-westinghouse-nuclear-division-files-for-bankruptcy https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/after-crippling...
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    The world is dying, don't come at me with things that we can overcome with effort and ingenuity, when the stakes are "some high costs" vs. the end of human civilization. I get your point but I would hope you know that even the average supporter of nuclear power knows it won't be cheap or easy.
potatoman22 5y ago
" Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions."
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage. Assuming the only power usage in a DC is actual compute and cooling, that would mean 100 kWh of power used would be 60 kWh compute and 40 kWh cooling, or a PUE of 100/60 = 1.67. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness#Notably_efficient_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness#Nota..., this was already far from the truth in 2008. Hard to take the article seriously after making claims like that. (Others are also correctly pointing out that the alleged "power usage per hour of video" numbers that this and similar articles like to cite simply don't make any sense.)
knorker 5y ago
The average CPU use of a cloud server is vastly higher than noncloud. Pre cloud people had a cople of DNS servers running at about 0% CPU utilization, 24/7. Cloud actually uses the machines we manufacture.

214 points by _Microft 5y ago

Pretty much exactly as accurate as you'd expect from an ethnographer holding forth on datacenter thermodynamics. "Today, power-hungry computer room air conditioners (CRACs) or computer room air handlers (CRAHs) are staples of even the most advanced data centers." False. The absence of CRACs is, in fact, the defining characteristic of "the most advanced data centers". "In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage." That might be true if the statement is weighted improperly, but for advanced large-scale cloud data centers, the figure is more like 8%. "Virginia’s “data center alley,” the site of 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic" This author has no idea what they are talking about.

rp3 5y ago
The stat about Virginia receiving 70% of all internet traffic seems to be often repeated: https://www.vedp.org/industry/data-centers https://www.vedp.org/industry/data-centers I can’t find where that stat comes from, however. As for everything else you said, it would be great to have sources. As far as I know, cooling is one of the major costs of running a data center. It would be illuminating to know why that’s now false.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The 70% thing came from a business development official in Loudoun County, a person whose job is to promulgate misleading boosterism. It doesn't make even a sliver of sense to someone who thinks it over for a moment. Cooling is a major data center cost, but it's not 40% any more. All of the major datacenter operators claim a PUE of 1.11 or less. Facebook has been the most open and vocal about how they achieve this, for example at https://tech.fb.com/hyperefficient-data-centers/ https://tech.fb.com/hyperefficient-data-centers/ (scroll down to "Systems").
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > I can’t find where that stat comes from, however. Similar statements were pretty common in the 90’s. If it was ever true it’s way out of date.
mmmBacon 5y ago
Yep. The amount of power that can be pulled to a building is a difficult thing to change. So the biggest cloud companies try to maximize the amount of power used for compute. There is a metric for this called Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). It’s the ratio of totally energy usage to energy used for compute. Most modern cloud companies have PUEs <1.3. Here’s a great link showing Google’s PUE. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/ The data centers in Ashburn, Virginia are mostly leased facilities and these kinds of facilities are more of the traditional raised floor air conditioning type facilities. However these facilities are also quite efficient with PUEs in the 1.6 range. https://sustainability.equinix.com/environment/energy-efficiency/ https://sustainability.equinix.com/environment/energy-effici... Digital Realty Claims to have some sites with PUE <1.12 https://sustainability.equinix.com/environment/energy-efficiency/ https://sustainability.equinix.com/environment/energy-effici...

deleted 5y ago

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floodle 5y ago

This is besides the actual topic, but the typesetting on this website is just beautiful. It's a pleasure to read; almost like a print magazine.

_Microft 5y ago
Off-topic but I said [0] a similar thing about another website not long ago. Maybe you like that too: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/walmart-but-for-space https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/walmart-but-for-... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30321310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30321310
- floodle 5y ago
  I do! Thank you.

waynecochran 5y ago

I live near the Columbia River where Google, Facebook, Microsoft all have data centers that rely on hydroelectric power. The dams produce clean energy, provide waterway for barges, prevent flooding, allow for recreation, and can back up water at night when demand for electricity is low. As the salmon fisherman will tell you, the salmon have adapted to the fish ladders and are spawning in the Columbia’s tributaries. Yet there are still political forces that want to breach these dams. Nothing is ideal, but hydroelectric energy is about as close as you can get to ideal in the Pacific Northwest.

golemotron 5y ago
Consumption really can lead to the development of clean energy sources. People need to develop a growth-mindset on this issue.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  This logic is really no different from stupid Bitcoiner logic that PoW induces demand for cheap clean energy.
  - tejohnso 5y ago
    Doesn't civilization itself induce demand for cheap clean energy given the environmental forcing of unclean energy? I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases.
    - golemotron 5y ago
      Or even "the cloud."
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      > I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases. Because Bitcoin literally is designed to waste electricity on proof of work. The Ethereum network has the processing power of a Raspberry Pi and wastes fantastic amounts of electricity to deliver that paltry power. Bitcoin alone uses more power than all of Google's operations. I doubt that the total power used by the world's yachts and private jets per year is even half the power the Bitcoin network literally wastes.

georgeoliver 5y ago

Sure you can document the ecological impact, but who's measuring the economic/cultural/social impact (positive and/or negative)? How do I measure an airline-sized carbon impact against a billion cat videos? Is there even a framework for that kind of accounting? Until there is I think no amount of documentation is going to change people's behavior in the large. IMO the article is much better when citing specific impacts like noise pollution and water rights abuse.

novok 5y ago

What previous resource intensive activities are these data centers replacing although? We used to ship far more paper around by parcel, and store them in temperature controlled rooms and shops in dispersed locations be it books, legal documents and more. Things that used to be air flights are now video calls. Videotapes, DVDs and video stores replaced by efficient streaming. Photographs stay on digital media instead of paper media. We fell trees and had 'paper' data centers in the form of pulp mills, which are also resource intensive industrial plants in remote locations. Yes we still have paper and lots of it, but now it's significantly reduced. When you look at the internet and the telephone compared to what we replaced it with, the internet comes out far, far ahead in environmentally friendliness.

beebeepka 5y ago
I am not sure paper usage is down. Overall, humanity is using more than ever. As for video calls, they don't need massive data centres since it's supposed to be p2p for all sorts of reasons. I am struggling to get where you come from. The actual content is so wrong, that it seems satirical, yet it's presented in a very serious, almost patronising way
- Retric 5y ago
  Overall humanity is much larger and richer than it was 40 years ago. Paper use includes packaging, plates, toilet paper, etc so it’s hard to get actual numbers as it relates to IT. Especially when recycling initiatives have resulted in new uses for lower grade paper products. That said, personally I am way down due to IT not just replacing forms but also physical books, newspapers, and even bills.
- roca 5y ago
  P2P can't work once you have more than a few participants.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    This is only true due to bad protocols and network infrastructure. As long as ISPs have incentives to make Netflix go fast and the connection to your actual neighbors go slow, P2P can't take off. Also multicast networks could easily outperform cloud infrastructure in many setups, but something something business incentives.

globalise83 5y ago

A lot of the time people watching cat videos aren't travelling by car or airline, so the net impact is quite subtle.

rossjudson 5y ago
NFTs close the crypto loop back to cat videos. So now it's really cat videos all the way down.
culi 5y ago
What? It's not like people are cancelling their flights so they could stay at home and watch a cat video? I think more often a carbon consumptive habit (like watching a cat video) is replacing something non-consumptive like sitting on the toilet alone with your thoughts instead of obsessively checking how many likes your Instagram photo got.

Shadonototra 5y ago

bad software and slow code should be heavily taxed

ozfive 5y ago
How do you suggest doing that? Measure all VM usage and if CPU memory usage to service ratio is too high it would be taxed?
TOMDM 5y ago
The "tax" is already baked in, it costs more to run poorly optimised code. What we need is a carbon tax, then wasteful use of electricity can funnel back into paying for its impact.
- abecedarius 5y ago
  > paying for its impact The rationale of a carbon tax is to make prices account for the externality, so that people use carbon-emitting energy where it's still worth it, and stop where it's not. (And over time encourage everyone to find better ways to do things.) You might see this as a quibble, but there's so much misunderstanding. E.g. the #1 objection is about the expense to poor people, but if all this tax revenue went straight back to a UBI it would not affect the above logic. The objection does have force if it's "funneled back into paying for its impact" instead.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >the #1 objection is about the expense to poor people It amazes me when people who have no interest in the plight of the poor suddenly start spouting this. Even more so when you consider that the poor aren't creating this problem, their carbon emissions are minimal. In many ways they stand to gain from changes to reduce emissions (improved provision for walking and cycling, better public transport, etc). The poor really don't give a shit if your flight across the Atlantic gets more expensive.
    - abecedarius 5y ago

Animats 5y ago

Especially in Virginia’s “data center alley,” the site of 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic in 2019. Too much internet infrastructure is optimized for wiretapping. There's no other good reason for so much near CIA HQ.

bombcar 5y ago
It’s also a patently absurd statistic by any possible measure.
mulmen 5y ago
Proximity to HQ doesn’t inform the CIAs ability to wiretap. They can just use the Internet and their ability to influence lawmakers. CALEA says every telco has to wiretap their own infrastructure. The CIA built a giant data center in Utah in the previous decade.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
andbberger 5y ago
that's ridiculous. you might equally say too much internet infrastructure is optimized for adjacency to neuroscience. there's no other good reason for so much near HHMI Janelia
imgabe 5y ago
The NSA handles the wiretapping, not the CIA and they're over in Ft. Meade, MD. The NSA's datacenter is in Utah, though.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Ah, right, I was thinking of the NSA datacenter. Still, the fact remains, the CIA is not geographically constrained to Virginia, or even the east coast of the United States.
lanstin 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

I've often wondered if a "slow" datacenter could be created, that used low power processors. Amazon, for example, could offer a cheaper AWS tier that used the low power datacenter. Not everything needs to be fast. I'm perfectly happy with many jobs on my computer taking all night.

mirekrusin 5y ago
Or just use arm instead of intel frying pans.
- colpabar 5y ago
  They were touting their graviton (arm) powered instance types a lot at last year's reinvent. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
bonzini 5y ago
The tiny (non-dedicated) instance types on AWS probably multiplex hundreds of guests on a single host.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Why not hundreds on a single low power host?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Because lower power machines can't run as many guests? I'm nothing like an expert in data center power consumption and relative efficiencies, but the last I had heard was that it was generally more efficient to cram a lot of users on high-end hardware rather than trying to run everybody on enough low end hardware to match the same overall throughput.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      But this is not a scheme to match overall throughput. It's supposed to be slower.

rodgerd 5y ago

Something near and dear to my heart - it's painful watching NZ shift its compute footprint from local hydro sources to coal-fired in NSW.

Gigachad 5y ago
I assume you are talking about New Zealand and New South Wales here?
- rodgerd 5y ago
  Yes
roca 5y ago
AWS and Azure opening data centres here should help.

nemo44x 5y ago

Update for today: “We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to compute! We wanna be free to run our virtual machines without being hassled by The Man. And we wanna get bitcoins. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do. We are gonna have a good time. We are gonna have a LAN party.”

bloopernova 5y ago
And now I need to listen to Loaded by Primal Scream. Thank you :)
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  Surely you mean Mudhoney's "In 'n' Out of Grace" (or even The Wild Angels, since that's where both sampled it from).

open-source-ux 5y ago

What about calculating the ecological impact of the programming languages running on those 'cloud' servers? Some of the most popular languages are the least performative (we all know which ones), but they make life easier for developers. Thankfully, newer languages take performance seriously: Rust, Go, Nim, Crystal. A typed, compiled language gives you good performance for free and a smaller memory footprint (and the reduced computing resources that implies). When you consider the millions of servers in use, that additional language efficiency adds up to a substantial saving in electricity use. In the computing field, we readily encourage throwing cheap hardware at a performance problem until a program runs fast. It's embarrassing that the "hardware is cheap" attitude is so widespread among developers. Imagine if a manufacturer said that they were going to make energy-guzzling fridges/washing machines or other appliances without regard to energy-efficiency. In programming, everything is for the ease and comfort of the programmer and anything else takes a back seat - the user, energy use and ultimately the environment. Aside - If you think programming language energy usage a ridiculous topic, consider the follow: The creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, calculated potential CO2 savings due to speed improvements in PHP 7: fewer servers, smaller memory use and reduced CPU activity. (And remember this is an interpreted language.) You can watch a segment from his presentation below where he talks about the calculations he made of potential CO2 savings: Rasmus Lerdorf – "PHP in 2018" (extract from the 15 min mark): https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s

throwaway17_17 5y ago
Here are two papers on this topic. In particular, the first is the shorter version (with a better/more journal friendly layout) and second is basically the technical report for the research. It does show some support for your hypothesis compiled languages are more energy efficient. C ranks in at #1 and Python is last at #15. There is also a paper that I can’t find (I’m on my phone) that was done in conjunction with a Google researcher that reaches similar conclusions. 1 - https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/sleFinal.pdf https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/sle... 2 - https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf

dfdz 5y ago

>Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions So The Cloud, arguably the peak of human technology, uses contributes a tiny fraction of our total carbon emissions. Is curbing this technology in in any major way a productive way to reduce our emissions? These emissions are all electricity usage converted to carbon emissions. Would it not be more productive to focus on transitioning all power generation to solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, etc?

Gigachad 5y ago
Same way I feel when someone here tells me I should dither my PNGs or something to save the planet. Not eating a single steak would offset my entire life of using the internet.
- nanidin 5y ago
  > Not eating a single steak would offset my entire life of using the internet. This appears to be hyperbole - from what I could find, one steak has a carbon footprint of 15.5kg [0] and one Google search has a carbon footprint of 7g [1]. That makes one steak equal to 2214 Google searches. Over a lifetime, 2214 searches seems low. In my browser history, I found evidence of 776 searches in the last 3 months. Moving away from searches, apparently 1GB of data transfer produces 3kg of CO2 [2]. That makes one steak equal to 5.16GB of data transfer over the internet - or less than one hour of 4K content streamed from Netflix [3]. [0] https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/beef https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/beef [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-one-Google-search https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-one-Go... [2] https://www.emergeinteractive.com/insights/detail/does-irresponsible-web-development-contribute-to-global-warming/#:~:text=And%20according%20to%20the%20Department,in%203kg%20of%20CO2%20emissions https://www.emergeinteractive.com/insights/detail/does-irres.... [3] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Given that just recompressing images on the homepage of some sites I’ve worked on has cut page load size down by megabytes it sounds like it makes a difference.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

> Steven Gonzales Monserrate is an anthropologist and a PhD candidate Maybe this person should stick to studying skull sizes or whatever it is an anthropologist studies these days. I'm sorry to say, but what a load of horse shit. Yes, data centers use energy. Essentially all of the big cloud providers have committed to carbon neutrality, most of them are pretty far done with getting there, and essentially all of them already source the vast majority of their power from renewables at this point. That's not just because it is greener, but also because it is cheaper. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. each maintain nice web pages on how far they are with these plans. - Amazon is shooting for 2025 for 100% carbon neutral energy. https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud?energyType=true https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud... - Microsoft plans for carbon negative by 2030: 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... - Google claims to have been carbon neutral since 2007 and plans to be carbon free by 2030 as well: https://sustainability.google/commitments-europe/ https://sustainability.google/commitments-europe/ That's a trend with many other manufacturers as well. E.g. lots of automotive manufacturers. If there's a deep conspiracy where these companies are lying about what they are doing, that would be news worthy of course. But, I suspect that most of these companies are simply getting very good at managing absurdly high degrees of energy and water efficiency and cost. Kind of counters the message of the article / the author's world view of course. So, instead this author is dragging in all sorts of things: waste problems, hypertension in people, "computational whir of data centers is not merely an annoyance, but a source of mental and physical harm". I mean, what the actual F** is he going on about here?! What's the point here? Modern technology is bad? Is there a point at all?

JadeNB 5y ago
> If there's a deep conspiracy where these companies are lying about what they are doing, that would be news worthy of course. But, I suspect that most of these companies are simply getting very good at managing absurdly high degrees of energy and water efficiency and cost. Believing in a deep conspiracy is probably violating Occam's razor, but I think believing in companies getting very good at gaming metrics and regulators not finding it in their interest to look too closely at positive results on metrics doesn't require too much conspiratorial thinking—everyone's happy in the short term.

kixiQu 5y ago

* The Jevons paradox seems really relevant but there's no analysis done. The predecessors to the cloud seem important to look at if you're being honest about analysis of efficiency, but... * "While in technical parlance the “Cloud” might refer to the pooling of computing resources over a network, in popular culture, “Cloud” has come to signify and encompass the full gamut of infrastructures that make online activity possible, everything from Instagram to Hulu to Google Drive." Okay, so we're using a definition of "the 'Cloud'" that extends to the services that run on it. Tricky to evaluate cost-benefit if you're doing that, but okay, sure. "Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions." Sorry, what? So you don't actually mean cloud computing when you say "the Cloud", you mean everything connected to the Internet? * All of the stuff about the wastefulness of protection against failure seems pretty sketchy to me, especially when considering that the preceding systems had all of the redundancy of every business that needed compute having its own physical servers scaled for peak. But again, there's no consideration of "what did we use to have" or "what would we need if we didn't have this"... * Putting in a quote like "It festers in his mind, clawing at his thoughts, probing his sanity, poisoning him with a constant spell of dread and anxiety." to color the locals' objection to noise is pretty dramatic, so there must be good evidence for how awful it is, right? "Over the course of my fieldwork with the communities of Chandler and Printer’s Row, I learned that the “noise” of the Cloud uniquely eludes regulatory schemes. In many cases, the loudness of the data centers, as measured in decibels (dB), falls below the threshold of intolerance as prescribed by local ordinances. For this reason, when residents contacted the authorities to intervene, to attenuate or quiet their noise, no action was taken, because the data centers had not technically violated the law, and their properties were zoned for industrial purposes. However, upon closer interrogation of the sound, some residents reported that the monotonal drone, a frequency hovering within the range of human speech, is particularly disturbing, given the attuned sensitivity of human ears to discern such frequencies above others. Even so, there were days when the data centers, running diesel generators, vastly exceeded permissible decibel-thresholds for noise." .... So I'm supposed to read "uniquely eludes regulatory schemes" as... "isn't as loud as the limits for the relevant zoning." Cool. How elusive of them. What are the limits supposed to be? How often are they being exceeded? Why should I give credence to "some residents" on the importance of the frequency -- shouldn't there be studies about that? I live in an area with noise pollution so I am fully willing to take this issue seriously, and I can believe that the existing regulation isn't catching what it should, but this doesn't read like someone being serious about presenting the issue! * "Historian Nathan Ensmenger writes that a single desktop computer requires 240 kilograms of fossil fuels, 22 kilograms of chemicals, and 1,500 kilograms of water to manufacture. The servers that fill the halls of data centers are dense, specialized assets, with some units valued in the tens of thousands of U.S. dollars." So the implication slithering between these sentences are that servers are worse than desktops vis-a-vis environmental impact of physical production, and desktops are really bad... but that's not actually shown by the fact that servers are expensive. * "Even with these sustainability initiatives in place, environmental organizations like Greenpeace estimate that less than 16 percent of the tons of e-waste generated annually is recycled." Yes! This is a huge problem! Only... what percent of that is consumer-level and what percent industrial? Is cloud computing less efficient re: e-waste? The author seems to be saying that we should leave things in use until they break, but, well, in practice that's kind of all those standards codify anyway. Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. I really care about the environmental impact of data centers and computing, and I want more people to care, but I want them to have better material to work with than this suggestive hand-wavey piece that isn't even compelling from an anthropological perspective.

halayli 5y ago

I wonder how much lower it would be if data centers strictly ran on ARM cpus. Sure there are plenty other components and factors that come into play but it would be interesting to look at such a graph nonetheless.

giantrobot 5y ago
> Sure there are plenty other components and factors that come into play but it would be interesting to look at such a graph nonetheless. Not saying switching to ARM CPUs in servers would be bad but it's all of the other shit in a server that's using a significant amount of power. Even if an ARM CPU is more efficient per unit of computation a server still needs lots of fast RAM, various peripheral controllers, and storage. Replacing the CPU would likely reduce system power usage by several percent but not cut it in half.
- halayli 5y ago
  Agreed. I wouldn't expect a 50% difference. Cloud services offer powerful GPUs, and other capabilities that can consume a lot more than a typical Intel xeon level cpu. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of power consumption in current data centers.
- bombcar 5y ago
  The move from spinning rust to SSDs everywhere has probably reduced power consumption noticeably (though it’s likely just been sucked up by the cpu).

jtsiskin 5y ago

What is the conclusion/take away here? Not sure what the call to action here is. Purely “ecologically”, I’m pretty sure staying home and binging YouTube is better for the environment than ordering a book online or even a short drive to a local library.

samatman 5y ago

Pains me to say it over a link which resolves to MIT, but the 'staggering' in the headline is the sort of purple adjective which lowers the quality of discussion, and should be removed.

anm89 5y ago

It seems like these things come up when someone has a axe to grind. Why do we use energy for anything? Because we want to do things. How much energy do we use to farm sugar, junk oils, grapes for wine, hops for beer that only serve to make people unhealthier. How much energy do we expend to make junk fast fashion. How much energy does the US educational system consume in districts where the average kid can't read. How much energy does it take us to bomb civilians in the middle east and maintain the bases to maintain the capability to bomb civilians in the middle east. And the answer is a very clear "we generally don't care" until someone has an axe grind. I'm not justifying these things, just pointing out that I don't buy that these articles are just written out of a genuine interest in understanding and improving global energy consumption. The problem doesn't seem like that people use a lot of cloud services. That's probably not going to change and probably shouldn't. Maybe we should stop shutting down all the nuclear plants and build new ones and get the problem dealt with if this is such a big problem.

2snakes 5y ago

What we may need instead are artificial lake-tiver-dams that are amenable to -pumped hydro- so as to solve the circadian rhythms of solar/wind. By pumping in the day and letting it run downstream in the night we can solve the capacity issue with a natural battery.

tenuousemphasis 5y ago
Pumped hydro probably isn't the answer to energy storage. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ You need a large reservoir at the top, another at the bottom, and as much vertical separation as possible. There aren't all that many places in the world that offer the geography necessary. It can be a good solution in places that do have the correct geography, though.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Meh these "feel guilty" articles don't really convince me. We have nuclear power which solves basically all of this. I guess I'll keep streaming porn on my iphone 13 as the ship goes down although the guys in charge of the ship know what the solution is and how we can patch the hole. Embrace the absurdity.

nine_k 5y ago
We have some nuclear power stations built long ago, a regulatory quagmire, loss of production expertise, and Toshiba / Westinghouse atomic power division bankrupt [1]. I'm afraid that making new nuclear power viable will take quite some effort. I hope that this effort will eventually be exerted. [1]: https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/after-crippling-12b-loss-toshibas-westinghouse-nuclear-division-files-for-bankruptcy https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/after-crippling...
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  The world is dying, don't come at me with things that we can overcome with effort and ingenuity, when the stakes are "some high costs" vs. the end of human civilization. I get your point but I would hope you know that even the average supporter of nuclear power knows it won't be cheap or easy.

potatoman22 5y ago

" Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions."

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

> In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage. Assuming the only power usage in a DC is actual compute and cooling, that would mean 100 kWh of power used would be 60 kWh compute and 40 kWh cooling, or a PUE of 100/60 = 1.67. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness#Notably_efficient_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness#Nota..., this was already far from the truth in 2008. Hard to take the article seriously after making claims like that. (Others are also correctly pointing out that the alleged "power usage per hour of video" numbers that this and similar articles like to cite simply don't make any sense.)

knorker 5y ago

The average CPU use of a cloud server is vastly higher than noncloud. Pre cloud people had a cople of DNS servers running at about 0% CPU utilization, 24/7. Cloud actually uses the machines we manufacture.