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As a Dutch person, one of my biggest concerns with this datacenter is its green energy usage; from what I understand, it’s going to use up a huge portion of all

As a Dutch person, one of my biggest concerns with this datacenter is its green energy usage; from what I understand, it’s going to use up a huge portion of all the green energy we managed to build the last years. The datacenter is huge: 166 hectares. To me, if that concern is addressed, I would be ok with it (a more suitable location would be nice though), and planting a few extra trees is not going to cut it.

hetspookjee 5y ago
Almost the entirety of Flevolands windmills would be used to power this beast, if not more.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  This data center: 160MW Windpark Noordoostpolder: 430MW
  - smartbit 5y ago
    “for a combined generating capacity of 429 megawatts” according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder. I read that sentence as “under optimal circumstances” the Windpark can deliver 430MW. Whereas the datacenter will have sustained need of Power 365x24. IMHO that it a completely different thing. Please someone explain how Facebook could manage it's datacenter on local Netherlands sustainable Energy sources?
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      I'd say that a datacenter actually has the ability to be responsive to energy market conditions more than most other kinds of loads, and no datacenter operates at its max rated power 24x7. Anyway the point is a datacenter of this size would amount to a tiny fraction of the energy load in that country. It's fine if they don't want it; it's their country, after all. But they should own the fact that they're just superficially against Facebook, and drop the stupid greenwashing argument.
      - hetspookjee 5y ago
        The fraction that you mention is not a fraction. It’s equivalent to the city of Amsterdam. In addition that 160mw number is hard to source and just a Google gives me various numbers already. The national news channels always mention the number equivalent to the inhabitants of Amsterdam, so if you’re saying that the addition of a power consumer equal to the capital is a tiny fraction than I find that rather curious. Your theory is good as a theory but in practice not. The entire power grid is currently not setup to hold a location so perfect for Facebook. If they cared about the environment and the power grid they’d put it somewhere else. As it’s currently it’s the pupation that would be paying for this addition for the grid and there are plentiful other interesting economic things to do with that kind of power use. Honestly the fact that it’s Facebook does matter but way less than you think.
        jeffbee 5y ago
        There's no way that it's accurate that this datacenter is equivalent to the energy needs of almost a million people. Not even close. A household needs ~2kW of grid capacity on average, and there are at least 400k households in Amsterdam. That's 800MW just for the domestic consumption, which excludes transport. Consider that the EIA says NL consumed 3.818 quad BTU in 2019 ... this is about 1.1e12 kW-h, or 800x what a 160MW data center would consume. This size of data center, though fairly large, would still be much less than 1% of the energy story of that country. Generally, data centers use far less energy that people suppose, compared to transport and industry.
        hnaccount_rng 5y ago
        How do you get to 2kW per household? Even the (ridiculously high) comparisons provided by German utilities don’t claim more than 4500kWh/year for electricity. That’s about 10 kWh/day so about 0.5kW per household (yeah I’m lazy sue me). So the 200 MW kind of fit (factor of 4 off from your calculation). In practice I’d be surprised if it’s even that much. The 4500kWh number is for a 4 person household, and there aren’t 400k 4 person households in Amsterdam. And city apartments tend to be newer (aka more efficient) than the rural parts that also contribute to that average, which is also quite historic. So I would be surprised if that DC doesn’t require more energy than Amsterdam (at least the population, not sure how much heavy industry is there, but probably not too much)
  - hetspookjee 5y ago
    What is your source for this?
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/dutch-town-set-approve-meta-data-centre-biggest-netherlands-2021-12-16/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/dutch-town-set-a... for the size of the FB facility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder for the size of the wind farm.
      - hetspookjee 5y ago
        Are you perhaps confusing hectares with the wattage as I read the following on Reuters: The facility, which will use 1.38GWh of electricity and cover 166 hectares (410 acres) of farmland, is expected to run on green energy and provide the local economy a boost but has been criticised by some politicians and environmental campaigners. 1.38gwh is almost trice the optimal output of Flevoland and is indeed more in line with the total power consumption of Amsterdam. And will instead reflect several percentages of the national use.
eunos 5y ago
Levy more tax and use it to expand more green energy.
- contravariant 5y ago
  That's going to be tricky until we invent windmills powered by hot air.
  - a_t48 5y ago
    Isn't that just a jet engine/gas turbine?
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Now I’m wondering what proportion of wind is itself powered by heat vs. Coriolis forces…
- lmc 5y ago
  Or, quit Facebook and avoid needing to use any natural resources at all.
  - cute_boi 5y ago
    Additionally, Facebook doesn't seem to provide that much value to humanity anyway. In fact, I would say they contribution is negative in today's society.
Bellend 5y ago
The tree planting thing is embarrassing. That needs shot down and it can't be used by any corporate body as a green credential surely!
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > The tree planting thing is embarrassing. That needs shot down and it can't be used by any corporate body as a green credential surely! Why not? If a company can credibly plant enough trees to offset, say, a century of their facilities carbon impact - that seems pretty good to me.
  - gefhfffh 5y ago
    How does that offsetting work? Facebook is going to maintain a growing forest for the next few 100k years?
    - cute_boi 5y ago
      This is one common strategy to fool people. Fool people by saying they will plant more trees etc., and when push comes to shove they will simply turn their head and probably claim for bankruptcy. These sort of Shenanigans happens so often I really don't trust big companies.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      Well, if 100k years is what is needed to offset, then obviously FB can not do that credibly. Do you have a source that that is the requirement? It's not my understanding.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Where are these trees being planted though? Are they saying they are paying to have 1 million trees planted in the Amazon where nobody can actually verify, then that's pointless. The trees should be planted in an area around where the company is located. A million trees around datacenters or fullfillment warehouses would be impressive.
Ferrotin 5y ago
What’s the point of developing green energy if not to use it?
- mrsuprawsm 5y ago
  The point is to use it for existing energy consumption, and only then start increasing energy consumption. If you add X GW of green energy to your Y GW of non-green energy, and then increase your usage by X, then the impact on the planet is the same as the status quo, i.e. not good.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Historically, economic and technological development has relied on increasing energy consumption. Green energy now offers us the possibility to increase the marketed energy supply far beyond anything imaginable with fossil fuels — 2Y, 10Y, 100Y, 1000Y — enabling currently unimaginable technological benefits. (More centralization of computation and speech under Facebook's control would not be beneficial, of course.) However, it will only become abundant and cheap if those sales are permitted and investors expect that such opportunities will continue in the future, providing them a positive ROI on building 10Y or 100Y of generation capacity. If they expect their energy sales to be capped at X+Y due to hostility from the ignorant public, they will not build. Let's opt for a solarpunk future where we pass Kardashev Type I and rapidly accelerate toward Kardashev Type II, not a post-apocalyptic dystopia.
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    > The point is to use it for existing energy consumption, and only then start increasing energy consumption. Sounds like a good idea, but why start here specifically? There does not seem to be a general ban on expanding other things, e.g. installing a new AC when you don't even have solar panels yet is not discouraged let alone prohibited. Now facebook wants to build something and we trip over each other to complain about it. I mean, yeah, it's facebook, nobody cares if they have to find a suboptimal location and we're a good country to find dwarsliggers in general, but are we doing it for the climate or are we doing it because we don't like facebook?
jeffbee 5y ago
I seem to recall doing the math on this one and finding that Netherlands’ own vehicle fleet burns the equivalent fuel that this DC would use in a year, every day. It’s a 160MW (peak) data center and Netherlands burns 180000 barrels of oil per day. This large American company is simply giving the Dutch something on which to focus their own abundant hypocrisy.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  That... is actually a crazy perspective. How much time and energy has the media, the politics, the people, especially the locals already spent on this... something about time spent vs. size of the issue. (FTR I'm Dutch so I see this constantly in news, I'm part of this wasted-time group...)
- hnaccount_rng 5y ago
  But I’d that really a meaningful comparison? For that fuel consumption you get all of normal life. For that added data center noticing will change. In other words: the benefits for the humans aren’t even on the same measurement scale (although I’m a bit skeptical regarding the numbers. Amsterdam is a significant fraction of the Netherlands and I would be surprised if burning fuel would be 3 orders of magnitude more than electricity consumption for a Western European. But I’m also too lazy to do the calculations so …)
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Liquid petroleum is a significant component of energy consumption. It can't be ignored for these purposes. https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/total-energy/total-energy-consumption?pd=44&p=0000000010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000u06&u=2&f=A&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=none&l=249--160&s=315532800000&e=1546300800000 https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/total-energy/to...
    - hnaccount_rng 5y ago
      I'm not saying it should be ignored. I'm saying I doubt it's a factor of 300 (which you claimed it to be)
MertsA 5y ago
Nobody is proposing planting trees as if that makes burning fossil fuels okay. https://tech.fb.com/engineering/2021/04/renewable-energy/ https://tech.fb.com/engineering/2021/04/renewable-energy/ Facebook's renewable energy projects are pretty impressive and if other energy usage estimates in this thread are to be believed they've added more than they consume.

hetspookjee 5y ago

Almost the entirety of Flevolands windmills would be used to power this beast, if not more.

jeffbee 5y ago
This data center: 160MW Windpark Noordoostpolder: 430MW
- smartbit 5y ago
  “for a combined generating capacity of 429 megawatts” according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder. I read that sentence as “under optimal circumstances” the Windpark can deliver 430MW. Whereas the datacenter will have sustained need of Power 365x24. IMHO that it a completely different thing. Please someone explain how Facebook could manage it's datacenter on local Netherlands sustainable Energy sources?
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    I'd say that a datacenter actually has the ability to be responsive to energy market conditions more than most other kinds of loads, and no datacenter operates at its max rated power 24x7. Anyway the point is a datacenter of this size would amount to a tiny fraction of the energy load in that country. It's fine if they don't want it; it's their country, after all. But they should own the fact that they're just superficially against Facebook, and drop the stupid greenwashing argument.
    - hetspookjee 5y ago
      The fraction that you mention is not a fraction. It’s equivalent to the city of Amsterdam. In addition that 160mw number is hard to source and just a Google gives me various numbers already. The national news channels always mention the number equivalent to the inhabitants of Amsterdam, so if you’re saying that the addition of a power consumer equal to the capital is a tiny fraction than I find that rather curious. Your theory is good as a theory but in practice not. The entire power grid is currently not setup to hold a location so perfect for Facebook. If they cared about the environment and the power grid they’d put it somewhere else. As it’s currently it’s the pupation that would be paying for this addition for the grid and there are plentiful other interesting economic things to do with that kind of power use. Honestly the fact that it’s Facebook does matter but way less than you think.
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        There's no way that it's accurate that this datacenter is equivalent to the energy needs of almost a million people. Not even close. A household needs ~2kW of grid capacity on average, and there are at least 400k households in Amsterdam. That's 800MW just for the domestic consumption, which excludes transport. Consider that the EIA says NL consumed 3.818 quad BTU in 2019 ... this is about 1.1e12 kW-h, or 800x what a 160MW data center would consume. This size of data center, though fairly large, would still be much less than 1% of the energy story of that country. Generally, data centers use far less energy that people suppose, compared to transport and industry.
        hnaccount_rng 5y ago
        How do you get to 2kW per household? Even the (ridiculously high) comparisons provided by German utilities don’t claim more than 4500kWh/year for electricity. That’s about 10 kWh/day so about 0.5kW per household (yeah I’m lazy sue me). So the 200 MW kind of fit (factor of 4 off from your calculation). In practice I’d be surprised if it’s even that much. The 4500kWh number is for a 4 person household, and there aren’t 400k 4 person households in Amsterdam. And city apartments tend to be newer (aka more efficient) than the rural parts that also contribute to that average, which is also quite historic. So I would be surprised if that DC doesn’t require more energy than Amsterdam (at least the population, not sure how much heavy industry is there, but probably not too much)
- hetspookjee 5y ago
  What is your source for this?
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/dutch-town-set-approve-meta-data-centre-biggest-netherlands-2021-12-16/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/dutch-town-set-a... for the size of the FB facility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder for the size of the wind farm.
    - hetspookjee 5y ago
      Are you perhaps confusing hectares with the wattage as I read the following on Reuters: The facility, which will use 1.38GWh of electricity and cover 166 hectares (410 acres) of farmland, is expected to run on green energy and provide the local economy a boost but has been criticised by some politicians and environmental campaigners. 1.38gwh is almost trice the optimal output of Flevoland and is indeed more in line with the total power consumption of Amsterdam. And will instead reflect several percentages of the national use.

eunos 5y ago

Levy more tax and use it to expand more green energy.

contravariant 5y ago
That's going to be tricky until we invent windmills powered by hot air.
- a_t48 5y ago
  Isn't that just a jet engine/gas turbine?
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Now I’m wondering what proportion of wind is itself powered by heat vs. Coriolis forces…
lmc 5y ago
Or, quit Facebook and avoid needing to use any natural resources at all.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  Additionally, Facebook doesn't seem to provide that much value to humanity anyway. In fact, I would say they contribution is negative in today's society.

Bellend 5y ago

The tree planting thing is embarrassing. That needs shot down and it can't be used by any corporate body as a green credential surely!

whimsicalism 5y ago
> The tree planting thing is embarrassing. That needs shot down and it can't be used by any corporate body as a green credential surely! Why not? If a company can credibly plant enough trees to offset, say, a century of their facilities carbon impact - that seems pretty good to me.
- gefhfffh 5y ago
  How does that offsetting work? Facebook is going to maintain a growing forest for the next few 100k years?
  - cute_boi 5y ago
    This is one common strategy to fool people. Fool people by saying they will plant more trees etc., and when push comes to shove they will simply turn their head and probably claim for bankruptcy. These sort of Shenanigans happens so often I really don't trust big companies.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Well, if 100k years is what is needed to offset, then obviously FB can not do that credibly. Do you have a source that that is the requirement? It's not my understanding.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Where are these trees being planted though? Are they saying they are paying to have 1 million trees planted in the Amazon where nobody can actually verify, then that's pointless. The trees should be planted in an area around where the company is located. A million trees around datacenters or fullfillment warehouses would be impressive.

Ferrotin 5y ago

What’s the point of developing green energy if not to use it?

mrsuprawsm 5y ago
The point is to use it for existing energy consumption, and only then start increasing energy consumption. If you add X GW of green energy to your Y GW of non-green energy, and then increase your usage by X, then the impact on the planet is the same as the status quo, i.e. not good.
- kragen 5y ago
  Historically, economic and technological development has relied on increasing energy consumption. Green energy now offers us the possibility to increase the marketed energy supply far beyond anything imaginable with fossil fuels — 2Y, 10Y, 100Y, 1000Y — enabling currently unimaginable technological benefits. (More centralization of computation and speech under Facebook's control would not be beneficial, of course.) However, it will only become abundant and cheap if those sales are permitted and investors expect that such opportunities will continue in the future, providing them a positive ROI on building 10Y or 100Y of generation capacity. If they expect their energy sales to be capped at X+Y due to hostility from the ignorant public, they will not build. Let's opt for a solarpunk future where we pass Kardashev Type I and rapidly accelerate toward Kardashev Type II, not a post-apocalyptic dystopia.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  > The point is to use it for existing energy consumption, and only then start increasing energy consumption. Sounds like a good idea, but why start here specifically? There does not seem to be a general ban on expanding other things, e.g. installing a new AC when you don't even have solar panels yet is not discouraged let alone prohibited. Now facebook wants to build something and we trip over each other to complain about it. I mean, yeah, it's facebook, nobody cares if they have to find a suboptimal location and we're a good country to find dwarsliggers in general, but are we doing it for the climate or are we doing it because we don't like facebook?

jeffbee 5y ago

I seem to recall doing the math on this one and finding that Netherlands’ own vehicle fleet burns the equivalent fuel that this DC would use in a year, every day. It’s a 160MW (peak) data center and Netherlands burns 180000 barrels of oil per day. This large American company is simply giving the Dutch something on which to focus their own abundant hypocrisy.

lucb1e 5y ago
That... is actually a crazy perspective. How much time and energy has the media, the politics, the people, especially the locals already spent on this... something about time spent vs. size of the issue. (FTR I'm Dutch so I see this constantly in news, I'm part of this wasted-time group...)
hnaccount_rng 5y ago
But I’d that really a meaningful comparison? For that fuel consumption you get all of normal life. For that added data center noticing will change. In other words: the benefits for the humans aren’t even on the same measurement scale (although I’m a bit skeptical regarding the numbers. Amsterdam is a significant fraction of the Netherlands and I would be surprised if burning fuel would be 3 orders of magnitude more than electricity consumption for a Western European. But I’m also too lazy to do the calculations so …)
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Liquid petroleum is a significant component of energy consumption. It can't be ignored for these purposes. https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/total-energy/total-energy-consumption?pd=44&p=0000000010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000u06&u=2&f=A&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=none&l=249--160&s=315532800000&e=1546300800000 https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/total-energy/to...
  - hnaccount_rng 5y ago
    I'm not saying it should be ignored. I'm saying I doubt it's a factor of 300 (which you claimed it to be)

MertsA 5y ago

Nobody is proposing planting trees as if that makes burning fossil fuels okay. https://tech.fb.com/engineering/2021/04/renewable-energy/ https://tech.fb.com/engineering/2021/04/renewable-energy/ Facebook's renewable energy projects are pretty impressive and if other energy usage estimates in this thread are to be believed they've added more than they consume.