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Microsoft to build energy efficient, heat-producing data centre in Finland
- hutrdvnj 5y ago
- quotehelp9128 5y agoWhy is it worth mentioning over a discussion on article about Microsoft, energy efficiency and data centres?
- pooper 5y agoSorry for the naive question but is it likely that the EU members will do nothing if Finland, a member of the EU, is under attack? If Germany decides to engage, it will most likely be in consultation with the US, right?
- trashtester 5y agoIf an individual country intervenes directly in a war, it doesn't trigger article 5, since they are the ones declaring the war. If, let's say, Germany does so, it may find itself in a war with Russia and may have to fight it without the support of the rest of Nato. Now, if Russia escalates a conflict and tries to occupy Germany directly, or especially if they use nukes, that could be seen as grounds for invoking article 5, even if Germany initiated the hostilities. But simply fighting a war over a neighbour such as Ukraine or Finland may not be seen as enough qualification. Consdier 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (second war). After 9/11, article 5 was invoked, and the USA was receiving support from most of Nato when invading Afghanistan based on that. On the other hand, when they invaded Iraq, that was not seen as covered by Article 5, so only the closest allies joined. Of course, Germany, a country with 2x the GDP of Russia and a huge manufacturing sector _could_ have chosen to have a military powerful enough to resist Russian aggression even with most of Nato staying out of the fight, but until now, it seems that Germans have been more afraid of future German aggression than future Russian aggression. This may have changed, though. At this time, Russia is bleeding enough in Ukraine that they probably don't want to add a front against Finland. If they fail in Ukraine, they may stay discouraged for a long time. However, if Putin does achieve his goals in Ukraine, he may want repeat his strategy over countries like Finland or Moldova, or even try to intimidate the Baltics or Poland. If Germany (and other Central or Northern European Nato countries) restore their militaries to about cold war levels, that will change these equations significantly. Suddenly a limited conventional war against just a few neighbours may become a much greater risk, or even unwinnable for Russia. Until then, I'm afraid that it actually IS a concern for investors that Finland is not a Nato member
- vimacs2 5y agoDon't worry, if it ever came to that, Bill Gates himself will swoop in to protect his beloved Microsoft with his futuristic super yacht that is transformable into a giant battle mech[1]. 1. I made it up.
- perlgeek 5y agoJust the other day I learned that my employer is planning the same in Germany (though much smaller scale): https://www.noris.de/wp-content/uploads/NRS1PI817_Rechenzentrum-fuer-Metropolregion-FrankfurtRhein-Main-geht-in-Planungsphase.pdf https://www.noris.de/wp-content/uploads/NRS1PI817_Rechenzent... (PDF, German).
- knolan 5y agoIBM Zurich did something similar a few years ago. Recognising the limitations of the Carnot efficiency when trying to scavenge energy from data centres, they opted to recognise the economic value of warm water for district heating. https://www.edn.com/made-in-ibm-labs-ibm-hot-water-cooled-supercomputer-goes-live-at-eth-zurich/ https://www.edn.com/made-in-ibm-labs-ibm-hot-water-cooled-su...
- hulitu 5y agoFinally a good use for microsoft software: heating. If there is something Microsoft does good, that is heating. Teams might be slow and full of bugs, excel might be terrible but hey, the laptop is warm and this is all that counts.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoYes, and if they have a particularly cold night then can turn on Windows update.
- vimacs2 5y agoI love shitting on M$ as much as the next neckbeard but how is Excel terrible? It is still the world standard when it comes to GUI spreadsheet software and all of the other competitors are at best acceptable facsimiles up till they reach a certain cell count that Excel is capable of far exceeding. No argument from me on Teams though. That is a dumpster fire.
- glogla 5y agoExcel is a good spreadsheet, good data exploration tool, passable data wrangling tool, horrible data interchange format, and a completely terrible application platform. When people are hating on Excel, they typically hate the latter two, not the former three.
- vimacs2 5y agoNo argument from me there. People should stick to using Excel for it's intended use though I would argue it's in some ways a massive credit to it that despite all of it's obvious shortcomings in many other usecases, non-programmers find it so intuitive that they try to use it as a general purpose programming platform.
- bil7 5y agoi think another common assumption is that excel is for normal people, and programming is for smart people. A lot of people don't see making formulas as programming.
- throw0101a 5y agoAren't all data centres "heat-producing"? :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoBut few capture that heat to be usable, instead of just venting it
- cute_boi 5y agoCan you expound a bit? What can they do with those heat? For rotating turbines, I think they will require steam, so it is not helpful here. There might be other applications heating nearby homes. But, that's extremely unlikely. It is just like bitcoin argument where one party says they can use those waste heat to heat the home. Correct me if I am wrong.
- Sharlin 5y agoThe heat is transferred to the existing district heating system by a heat exchanger. District heating is by far the most common mode of heating in Finnish urban areas.
- saeranv 5y agoWaste heat can be recovered by a heat pump in various ways, then recirculated either within a building (this is just typical HVAC heat recovery) or between buildings (district heating system) as supply system heating.
- deodorel 5y agoIn my country during the communist times many cities that had some industry nearby were heated with the excess heat from those factories.
- dijonman2 5y agoMay I ask what country that is?
- ARandomerDude 5y agoIn Soviet Russia, factories work you.
- Symbiote 5y agoYou can see a few examples on this page, it mentions Sweden, Austria and Finland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
- Sharlin 5y agoNone of which have ever been communist, however.
- nisa 5y agoGDR had it in a lot of places (only german: https://www.prenzlauerberg-nachrichten.de/2011/06/07/kleine-geschichte-der-fernen-waerme https://www.prenzlauerberg-nachrichten.de/2011/06/07/kleine-...) these isolated pipes are still quite common in eastern germany. The cause was there was no gas and most energy came from coal burning and having centralized heating was more effective - also often industries supplied heat.
- ubermonkey 5y agoYears ago I did some process and project management consulting for a big powertrain manufacturer in Maryland. They used to be (part of) an American company, but as time passed the became a unit of a Swedish one. Power train manufacturers have, by necessity, something they called test cells. They're rooms where an engine can be attached to a dummy shaft and run to evaluate changes to design, or test assumptions, or any of a million other things. In Maryland, no attempt was made to capture the work done by these engines, nor was any attempt made to get value from the (hot!) exhaust. At a similar facility in Sweden, though, the test cell engine output was tied to a power generation and storage setup, and the exhaust was captured to heat the building. They were built at the same time. It's always baffled me.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoAlmost certainly due to different regulatory regimes. One would have accounted for the pollution and costs and the other wouldn't basically instructing the corporation to be wasteful and pollute unless it wanted to lose money by doing so.
- cormacrelf 5y agoThis isn’t a very deep observation. We haven’t even been told that the Swedish plant’s test-engine-heater wasn’t saving them money. Maybe the Swedes are just smart and good at spotting opportunities to reuse heat? If it was due to regulation, what regulation?
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoI thought the commenter was indicating that both plants were built at the same time by the same Swedish company, in two different regulatory regimes. So I feel my take is plausible in this specific instance as well as generically.
- cormacrelf 5y agoI don't think that was implied, only that the Maryland plant came to be owned later by the Swedes, who then owned both plants. I would have been interested to hear "Swedish regulation of waste heat is highly stringent and nearly every spare joule is used for generation or directly for heating. This is due in part to their climate" or whatever. Your comment was like answering "why are M1 chips faster than Intel at some very specific task" by saying "they come from a different manufacturer".
- ksec 5y agoI am more interested in how are they doing it. Heat loss during transfer? How much Economic value coming out of it ( heating )? How far are those homes from the Data Center? And if something similar being done in Iceland?
- doikor 5y agoIceland has easy access geothermal heat so bothering to save the heat from data centers is just stupid. The heat is moved into the already existing district heating system. So basically Fortum can burn less coal or gas during the winter with this.
- hannob 5y agoThis is so obvious the real question is why this isn't the default everywhere. Heating is one of the bigger challenges regarding the energy transition, and a big user of fossil gas (and sometimes oil, coal and talking about Finland even peat, which is really one of the dirtiest energy sources imaginable). Datacenters generate lots of "waste" heat. It requires some planning, e.g. datacenters need to be built with connections to heat grids. But given how many new datacenters get built basically everywhere, this should be a no-brainer.
- Sharlin 5y agoI believe district heating is unfortunately not very common outside Northern, and to an extent, Central Europe, so there's not often anything to connect the heat output to.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoI'm guessing heating demand elsewhere is a bit less than as it would be in Finland. Also, Finland has a lot of infrastructure for heating in the form of city and district heating. So, it's pretty easy to connect to that and start dumping heat in it. That's not true everywhere and often the best places for data centers are not necessarily that close to population centers with district heating. For example in the Netherlands, Google and others operate data centers in a pretty remote area where wind energy is cheap and where there happens to be a major fiber optic cable coming into the country. For new data centers, being carbon neutral or negative is pretty much a standard goal at this point for quite some time. Not only is it good for the environment but it also lowers cost and high energy costs are of course a problem if you are using lots of energy. The cheapest energy happens to be also the cleanest; hence a lot of data centers would be enthusiastic adopters of anything related to cheaper and cleaner energy. Additionally, a lot of energy is transformed into heat in the process of using it, so cooling solutions are also in scope for this. Most data center operators are working towards carbon neutrality and have been for years. Many actually have web pages advertising their goals and current status for this. It's mainly their older data centers that are a problem on this front as those still rely on energy from the grid in places where that arguably isn't very green (like Virginia for example). IMHO given how rich Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are, they could spend more to speed that process up and should maybe be coerced into doing so by the countries that host them under very charitable tax conditions (like my home country the Netherlands). MS seems very pleased with themselves with this data center. But of course they are still happily burning fossil fuels elsewhere.
- tuukkah 5y agoI think the main motivation for this in both Espoo and the neighbouring Helsinki is the cities' 2030 carbon neutrality pledges. From the data center's point of view, I wonder if the price they get paid for the heat is significant. Here's the public price list for recovered waste heat in Helsinki (around 30 EUR/MWh): https://www.helen.fi/en/companies/heating-for-companies/open-district-heat https://www.helen.fi/en/companies/heating-for-companies/open... In Helsinki, I'm already buying my certified zero-emission heat from a big 100MW heat pump station that uses waste water among its inputs. In June, they are also adding heat from a Telia data center as an input to the district heating system. They give some numbers too: "Using a heat pump, the data centre can produce at least 1.3 times the heat that it consumes as electricity." https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2021/konesalien-hukkal%C3%A4mm%C3%B6st%C3%A4-hiilineutraalia-kaukol%C3%A4mp%C3%B6%C3%A4-telian-datakeskus-l%C3%A4mmitt%C3%A4%C3%A4-helsinkil%C3%A4isi%C3%A4-koteja https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2021/konesalien-hukkal%C3%A4mm%...
- IYasha 5y agoI reuse heat produced by my server room. Don't have to be M$ for this. Clean warm air is good for heating your house, drying your laundry, etc. etc. etc.