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Make it a condition that they supply all their power through wind and solar on site. Can’t do it? Then no data centre for you.
by hankman86 5y ago
Make it a condition that they supply all their power through wind and solar on site. Can’t do it? Then no data centre for you.
- lucb1e 5y agoAnd/or deliver that heat to residential buildings in winter. Didn't someone say gas is bad recently?
- mschuster91 5y agoThat only works if the datacenter is built somewhere near residential units, and real estate that is near residential units is usually too expensive to build a large datacenter.
- lucb1e 5y agoI'm no energy engineer so I'm just going off what I randomly know: in Iceland they transport ~80°C water from a power plant off in the mountains (okay that makes it sound further than it really is) to Reykjavík and it loses only a few degrees along the way. Used for residential heating, hot water (it's potable but smells bad so they use heat exchangers), and even street heating against sleet. The distance is something like thirty minutes of driving on the highway if I remember correctly, so like 30km? While I see your point in general, also because servers are not typically put in oil or anything so this would be hot air (much less dense than water), I wonder if it's as simple as that. It's not like the Netherlands has spots where you are further than a handful of kilometers from the nearest buildings and, often, towns.
- MertsA 5y agoThe datacenter in question was going to deliver residual heat to the community. Not really sure how well that works with a datacenter given the relatively low temperature exhaust air but yeah, you jest, but that was apparently the plan. https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-dutch-data-center/ https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-dutch-data-center/