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If Meta were to build enough new, carbon neutral, and green energy facilities to supply triple the energy costs of their facility and sell the remainder to the

If Meta were to build enough new, carbon neutral, and green energy facilities to supply triple the energy costs of their facility and sell the remainder to the grid, I don't think anyone would have much of a problem with the facility. As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created over the past few years, purely for Facebook to... sell more ads. That's not palatable.

whimsicalism 5y ago
> As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created over the past few years, purely for Facebook to... sell more ads. That's not palatable. Why do people so strongly critique Facebook for selling ads but not businesses from buying them? For instance [0] > The story of Ramon van Meer. He runs a company that sells ramps that help wiener dogs get up and down off the couch. For years, his company reached its niche audience through targeted Facebook ads. Then Apple changed the privacy settings on the iPhone, and suddenly those Facebook ads stopped working. Why don't small & medium business owners like Ramon get critiqued for feeding the beast? [0]: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-tiny-dogs https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-ti...
- dylan604 5y ago
  How many of the stories like Ramon's are real and not Facebook PR plants? I ask because of the few small businesses that I know personally that bought ads on Facebook never saw an attributable increase in sales.
  - enaaem 5y ago
    I see a lot of medium size businesses. Im looking for furniture and I’m getting a lot of ads from smaller furniture brands on insta. Some are pretty nice. They are not as small as let’s say some local mattress store, but they are too small to be able to afford untargeted ads like tv commercials and billboards. Perhaps they could do furniture magazines, but many casual furniture buyers don’t buy magazines.
  - lethoso 5y ago
    I listened to a podcast about Ramon's story and it certainly had the ring of truth - the guy was an internet marketing specialist who bought the weiner dog ramp business as he sensed it was a good product that was failing to find its potential market. Through the use of highly targeted ads he was able to find potential customers at a cost lower than his profit on the goods - so he turned it into a successful business. Throwing money at internet marketing without a lot of thought is probably throwing it away for many businesses. Hiring a specialist to do your marketing is often not really any better because the industry is rife with shysters.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      So he's actually part of the problem as an internet marketeer. Good riddance.
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    You don't need to lie to give a false impression. Somebody could find out about it, so it's better to just select whatever facts or examples support your argument. I don't think that Facebook would have trouble finding something useful in their little stash of everything about everyone.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      I think that’s the point of dylan604 question? If you choose 1024 people to give stock tips to, telling half that a random stock will go up and the other half it will go down, then ignore the group you were wrong at and repeat the process, you’ll end up with someone convinced you’re a genius because you gave them 10 accurate stock tips in a row. Hide this inside a black box labelled “innovative machine learning” and you might even unwittingly fool yourself so it’s not even a lie.
- uncomputation 5y ago
  I don’t blame children for buying micro transactions. I blame companies for making them and designing them to be as addictive as possible. > suddenly those Facebook ads stopped working Maybe Ramon should go onto wiener dog forums, groups, subreddits, and advertise his product. List on Amazon, or partner with smaller, online pet businesses like Chewy. I guarantee these will have high conversion rates than vacuuming up search queries for “wiener dog,” cross referencing them with device identifiers, browser fingerprints, Facebook pixels, computer vision tagged photos, and IP addresses to build a psychological profile you sell to Ramon. It may be easier for Ramon to click “sell to people who have wiener dogs,” but why shouldn’t a business be in charge of their own marketing?
  - adventured 5y ago
    > I don’t blame children for buying micro transactions. I blame companies for making them and designing them to be as addictive as possible. Your example falls flat immediately: the ad buyers are not children. They're adults and should be held to adult standards of awareness and responsibility. It makes zero sense that you used children and micro transactions as the example for why blame should or should not be allocated to ad buyers.
    - FrenchDevRemote 5y ago
      adults are just children with jobs and debts
      - arbitrary_name 5y ago
        Ouch.
    - uncomputation 5y ago
      > It makes zero sense that you used children and micro transactions I somewhat expect adults to understand gambling and in-game transactions and the fact that they are somewhat manipulative [0]. I hold no such expectations for children who generally accept whatever is presented to them. Blaming a child for buying a box of digital gems or what have you will do no good. Similarly, I don’t think blaming Ramon the wiener dog ramp salesman for advertising on FB is really going to challenge FB’s market dominance and iron grip of advertising. I don’t expect Ramon to understand issues of data privacy, internet surveillance, advertising monopolies, and walled gardens, or - if he does know about them from passing - I don’t think pressuring him to follow his conscience and resist the market size of FB will do any good. “Blaming” businesses who advertise on FB without providing some alternative in the market will not succeed. Rather than blame Ramon, we should restrict FB’s ability to surveil people whether through private (e.g. Apple) or public (e.g. regulation) means. This way, as FB’s effectiveness dwindles, the market will produce some solutions as alternatives for these businesses to go. Instead, pressuring and blaming FB for their handlings of these issues will prove far more effective. We’ve already seen some limited success with this strategy, landing FB in Congress multiple times and getting the Netherlands to reconsider their huge data center, not to mention issues of GDPR, the “right to be forgotten,” etc. I chose children because just as I don’t expect them to resist loot boxes, I don’t expect business owners to resist FB advertising. I listed alternatives that Ramon should do as a good businessman if FB is not an option, and options I believe will yield more direct results and a more loyal customer base. The world is not divided into clueless children and perfectly knowledgeable and ethical adults. But rather than blame the advertisers (Ramon), we should go after the ad market (FB). [0]: That said, I still think we should blame the companies who use dark patterns and casino strategies to trigger people’s tendencies to gamble or “roll the dice” after a couple hours playing a game. You could say “players” instead of children, but this isn’t really analogous to small businesses because I still expect some adult players to know when they’re being played. I don’t expect any small business to reject FB advertising if it is presented as a way to reach a huge customer base.
- mc32 5y ago
  Dachshunds and the like are a product of people’s vanity. They would scarcely exist in nature. People created this “problem” and now they have to artificially provide additional paraphernalia for them to be able to ambulate properly. That demand should not exist.
  - asdfasdfasdf222 5y ago
    Yes. And people buy blue sweaters and many other colours when it is clear that no dye is better. Simply put, the demand for dyed clothes should not exist. Welcome to capitalism and the free world. Sometimes we just need to be tolerant of others and let them get on with it.
    - mc32 5y ago
      I'm not against viable dog breeds but Dachshunds suffer many disorders/congenital diseases that make their lives miserable just to please their owners and here we have someone further enabling this. Blue dye on wool doesn't harm anyone. Even the Soviet Union a totally non-capitalist country allowed colors, so I don't know what your point there is.
      - b112 5y ago
        You know what makes life really miserable? Not every having life, due to not being born. Maybe you should ask these dogs; would you prefer to have never experienced life at all? (Basically, I wonder how miserable they are. They seem happy when I see them.)
        mc32 5y ago
        Not being born is only a problem if you had the notion that your potential life was cut off. A potential zygote, not an exiting zygote, obviously has no cognition by definition and by determinism. So there is no suffering. Nothing is being aborted. In any event, if this "dog x" has to exist, why not a healthier crossbreed? I'm not proposing to cull the existing dogs, just not to further a breed and other breeds of dogs that suffer health problems due to our artificial breeding. There are lots of other dog breeds that do not suffer more health problems than average.
- vmception 5y ago
  Instagram ads have gotten really good lately, I've found events same-day that I'm interested in, dropped my other plans and went to them. I can't wait to cancel them in the town-crier for using a Meta ad platform to find me.
- burnished 5y ago
  Well, your point appears to be that anyone who participates needs to be held equally accountable. The scale seems to matter.
- pengaru 5y ago
  The onus is on those who control the popular information streams of the moment to be good stewards concerned with long-term consequences, exercising appropriate amounts of restraint WRT greed and moderation when selling access to their audience. The onus is not on the buyers of the access. If the steward is negligent and/or careless, there will never be any shortage of ad-space buyers who couldn't care less about the steward's reputation and/or the long-term consequences for the publication and/or audience. If FB is open to becoming a raging dumpster fire, it will happen overnight if that were profitable for someone who could afford it. A useful metaphor might be a homeowner next door who lets all-night parties attended by random assholes who trash the street and have zero respect for the neighborhood. No sane person blames the partiers, the problem is clearly the enabling, negligent homeowner.
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  I’m sorry but this is such an obviously curated cry-me-a-river story aiming to frame Facebook as a benevolent giant enabling small business to reach their audience and not as the giant vampire squid mining and extracting humanity’s attention for profit while subverting democracy and dispersing deadly poisonous propaganda for even more profit. While also doing its best to gate, control and kill the open internet wherever possible. Cry me a river, Facebook/Meta.
- hetspookjee 5y ago
  I find the critique most apt to the dealer and not the user. The user is just a weak link in the system where as the dealer is where all the misery basically starts. But yea influencers and the lot I tend to advise to stop using but well they struggle with their habits.
- infiniteL0Op 5y ago
- discordance 5y ago
  For the same reason we critique drug dealers/producers and not consumers?
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  > Why do people so strongly critique Facebook for selling ads but not businesses from buying them? I guess for the same reason people tend to criticise drug barons more than street dealers, and dealers more than addicts. Though everyone plays their part in an ugly business, there are power relationships in operation. Facebook know what they are selling and are gatekeepers to a near monopoly product. Businesses are desperately in need and find few alternatives these days. Facebook are apex predators and simply carry more responsibility and so deserve more scrutiny for their role.
- Demcox 5y ago
  My problem is that their business model is treating their resources (ie. us, common internet users (both active FB users and people not using it because shadow profiles)) unfairly compared to their profit yield. A Danish/British lawyer has filed for a collective legal action towards Meta [0][1] seeking USD 3.2 billions in damages to Facebook users. The optics is that Facebook, from a perspective of competition law, has acted unfairly. [0]https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-antitrust-facebook-idCNL1N2TT1ZZ https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-antitrust-facebook-idCN... [1]https://www.facebookclaim.co.uk/talks/interview-with-dr-liza-lovdahl-gormsen/ https://www.facebookclaim.co.uk/talks/interview-with-dr-liza...
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Because it ran the newspapers out of business
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rendall 5y ago
Thanks for giving us some background on the conflict.
flower-giraffe 5y ago
>> As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ? A quick search suggests FB consume on average about 1 gigawatt globally. The original article calls it a 200 megawatt DC. That would be 20% of facebooks global energy consumption. Given FB seem to have 18 existing Data center locations it would imply huge growth or consildation plans for that DC to consume 200 megawatts all the time. In 2020 the global renewable energy supply capacity was approximately 2500 gigawatts so facebook used less than 0.5% of that capacity. There are lots of valid reasons to oppose facebook, but it doesnt seem that monopolising the consumption of renewabel energy is a credible one. https://sustainability.fb.com/report/2020-sustainability-report/ https://sustainability.fb.com/report/2020-sustainability-rep... https://www.irena.org/publications/2020/Mar/Renewable-Capacity-Statistics-2020 https://www.irena.org/publications/2020/Mar/Renewable-Capaci...
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  0.5% globally is MASSIVE in this context.
- vanviegen 5y ago
  On a local scale monopolising the consumption of renewable energy is certainly an important consideration. Keep in mind that The Netherlands is a rather dense country. Every windmill is in someone's proverbial backyard, and has thus been fought over. Also, like in many places, the grid has trouble keeping up with the load.
- mytherin 5y ago
  Green energy production is highly location dependent. Global production is irrelevant - this is about the Netherlands. The Netherlands is a densely populated country that does not have a lot of space for renewable energy, neither does it have large mountains or water reservoirs that can easily be used for hydro power. This data centre alone was going to use 10% of all wind power capacity in the NL [1]. It is not only about this data centre either, this was merely the largest and most egregious. There have been a number of new data centre construction plans in the Netherlands by other tech giants, all planning to use government subsidised wind parks. All so that these companies can pretend to be green and put up nice websites like the one you linked, while the actual wind parks and green energy generation is paid for by the taxpayers. > Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ? This was supposed to a colossal data center, the largest data centre in Europe [2]. They bought 166 hectares of ground (23M square feet) for its construction. It consuming as much as three of their other data centres would not be terribly surprising. [1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2409557-megadatacenter-facebook-zet-extra-druk-op-al-grote-energievraag https://nos.nl/artikel/2409557-megadatacenter-facebook-zet-e... [2] https://siliconcanals.com/news/europe-largest-data-centre-netherlands-facebook-behind-it/ https://siliconcanals.com/news/europe-largest-data-centre-ne...
harryvederci 5y ago
Relevant "Zondag met Lubach" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiPoR9OvD0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiPoR9OvD0Y
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  Heh I forgot all about that video, but it’s a very good representation for why this whole deal stings. It doesn’t help that it’s Facebook, which implies it’s unlikely to have much impact in terms of enabling an ecosystem of third party users (which is unlike, say, Microsoft or Google datacenters).
misja111 5y ago
The suspension of Meta's data center had very little to do with the fact that it was for Facebook. The main reason is that NL has several of those data centers already and has become aware that they need huge amounts of energy and give very few jobs for it in return. Especially the current time of energy shortage has made those data centers unpopular.
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  - ranguna 5y ago
    > Meta will build this data center somewhere else. Good.
  - gcthomas 5y ago
    Austria is a simple train-ride away for the Dutch - it doesn't cost a long haul flight's worth of CO₂ to go skiing.
  - dang 5y ago
    Since we already warned you not to post slurs like this, I've banned the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30631047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30631047 (March 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24512955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24512955 (Sept 2020) If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

whimsicalism 5y ago

> As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created over the past few years, purely for Facebook to... sell more ads. That's not palatable. Why do people so strongly critique Facebook for selling ads but not businesses from buying them? For instance [0] > The story of Ramon van Meer. He runs a company that sells ramps that help wiener dogs get up and down off the couch. For years, his company reached its niche audience through targeted Facebook ads. Then Apple changed the privacy settings on the iPhone, and suddenly those Facebook ads stopped working. Why don't small & medium business owners like Ramon get critiqued for feeding the beast? [0]: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-tiny-dogs https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-ti...

dylan604 5y ago
How many of the stories like Ramon's are real and not Facebook PR plants? I ask because of the few small businesses that I know personally that bought ads on Facebook never saw an attributable increase in sales.
- enaaem 5y ago
  I see a lot of medium size businesses. Im looking for furniture and I’m getting a lot of ads from smaller furniture brands on insta. Some are pretty nice. They are not as small as let’s say some local mattress store, but they are too small to be able to afford untargeted ads like tv commercials and billboards. Perhaps they could do furniture magazines, but many casual furniture buyers don’t buy magazines.
- lethoso 5y ago
  I listened to a podcast about Ramon's story and it certainly had the ring of truth - the guy was an internet marketing specialist who bought the weiner dog ramp business as he sensed it was a good product that was failing to find its potential market. Through the use of highly targeted ads he was able to find potential customers at a cost lower than his profit on the goods - so he turned it into a successful business. Throwing money at internet marketing without a lot of thought is probably throwing it away for many businesses. Hiring a specialist to do your marketing is often not really any better because the industry is rife with shysters.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    So he's actually part of the problem as an internet marketeer. Good riddance.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  You don't need to lie to give a false impression. Somebody could find out about it, so it's better to just select whatever facts or examples support your argument. I don't think that Facebook would have trouble finding something useful in their little stash of everything about everyone.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    I think that’s the point of dylan604 question? If you choose 1024 people to give stock tips to, telling half that a random stock will go up and the other half it will go down, then ignore the group you were wrong at and repeat the process, you’ll end up with someone convinced you’re a genius because you gave them 10 accurate stock tips in a row. Hide this inside a black box labelled “innovative machine learning” and you might even unwittingly fool yourself so it’s not even a lie.
uncomputation 5y ago
I don’t blame children for buying micro transactions. I blame companies for making them and designing them to be as addictive as possible. > suddenly those Facebook ads stopped working Maybe Ramon should go onto wiener dog forums, groups, subreddits, and advertise his product. List on Amazon, or partner with smaller, online pet businesses like Chewy. I guarantee these will have high conversion rates than vacuuming up search queries for “wiener dog,” cross referencing them with device identifiers, browser fingerprints, Facebook pixels, computer vision tagged photos, and IP addresses to build a psychological profile you sell to Ramon. It may be easier for Ramon to click “sell to people who have wiener dogs,” but why shouldn’t a business be in charge of their own marketing?
- adventured 5y ago
  > I don’t blame children for buying micro transactions. I blame companies for making them and designing them to be as addictive as possible. Your example falls flat immediately: the ad buyers are not children. They're adults and should be held to adult standards of awareness and responsibility. It makes zero sense that you used children and micro transactions as the example for why blame should or should not be allocated to ad buyers.
  - FrenchDevRemote 5y ago
    adults are just children with jobs and debts
    - arbitrary_name 5y ago
      Ouch.
  - uncomputation 5y ago
    > It makes zero sense that you used children and micro transactions I somewhat expect adults to understand gambling and in-game transactions and the fact that they are somewhat manipulative [0]. I hold no such expectations for children who generally accept whatever is presented to them. Blaming a child for buying a box of digital gems or what have you will do no good. Similarly, I don’t think blaming Ramon the wiener dog ramp salesman for advertising on FB is really going to challenge FB’s market dominance and iron grip of advertising. I don’t expect Ramon to understand issues of data privacy, internet surveillance, advertising monopolies, and walled gardens, or - if he does know about them from passing - I don’t think pressuring him to follow his conscience and resist the market size of FB will do any good. “Blaming” businesses who advertise on FB without providing some alternative in the market will not succeed. Rather than blame Ramon, we should restrict FB’s ability to surveil people whether through private (e.g. Apple) or public (e.g. regulation) means. This way, as FB’s effectiveness dwindles, the market will produce some solutions as alternatives for these businesses to go. Instead, pressuring and blaming FB for their handlings of these issues will prove far more effective. We’ve already seen some limited success with this strategy, landing FB in Congress multiple times and getting the Netherlands to reconsider their huge data center, not to mention issues of GDPR, the “right to be forgotten,” etc. I chose children because just as I don’t expect them to resist loot boxes, I don’t expect business owners to resist FB advertising. I listed alternatives that Ramon should do as a good businessman if FB is not an option, and options I believe will yield more direct results and a more loyal customer base. The world is not divided into clueless children and perfectly knowledgeable and ethical adults. But rather than blame the advertisers (Ramon), we should go after the ad market (FB). [0]: That said, I still think we should blame the companies who use dark patterns and casino strategies to trigger people’s tendencies to gamble or “roll the dice” after a couple hours playing a game. You could say “players” instead of children, but this isn’t really analogous to small businesses because I still expect some adult players to know when they’re being played. I don’t expect any small business to reject FB advertising if it is presented as a way to reach a huge customer base.
mc32 5y ago
Dachshunds and the like are a product of people’s vanity. They would scarcely exist in nature. People created this “problem” and now they have to artificially provide additional paraphernalia for them to be able to ambulate properly. That demand should not exist.
- asdfasdfasdf222 5y ago
  Yes. And people buy blue sweaters and many other colours when it is clear that no dye is better. Simply put, the demand for dyed clothes should not exist. Welcome to capitalism and the free world. Sometimes we just need to be tolerant of others and let them get on with it.
  - mc32 5y ago
    I'm not against viable dog breeds but Dachshunds suffer many disorders/congenital diseases that make their lives miserable just to please their owners and here we have someone further enabling this. Blue dye on wool doesn't harm anyone. Even the Soviet Union a totally non-capitalist country allowed colors, so I don't know what your point there is.
    - b112 5y ago
      You know what makes life really miserable? Not every having life, due to not being born. Maybe you should ask these dogs; would you prefer to have never experienced life at all? (Basically, I wonder how miserable they are. They seem happy when I see them.)
      - mc32 5y ago
        Not being born is only a problem if you had the notion that your potential life was cut off. A potential zygote, not an exiting zygote, obviously has no cognition by definition and by determinism. So there is no suffering. Nothing is being aborted. In any event, if this "dog x" has to exist, why not a healthier crossbreed? I'm not proposing to cull the existing dogs, just not to further a breed and other breeds of dogs that suffer health problems due to our artificial breeding. There are lots of other dog breeds that do not suffer more health problems than average.
vmception 5y ago
Instagram ads have gotten really good lately, I've found events same-day that I'm interested in, dropped my other plans and went to them. I can't wait to cancel them in the town-crier for using a Meta ad platform to find me.
burnished 5y ago
Well, your point appears to be that anyone who participates needs to be held equally accountable. The scale seems to matter.
pengaru 5y ago
The onus is on those who control the popular information streams of the moment to be good stewards concerned with long-term consequences, exercising appropriate amounts of restraint WRT greed and moderation when selling access to their audience. The onus is not on the buyers of the access. If the steward is negligent and/or careless, there will never be any shortage of ad-space buyers who couldn't care less about the steward's reputation and/or the long-term consequences for the publication and/or audience. If FB is open to becoming a raging dumpster fire, it will happen overnight if that were profitable for someone who could afford it. A useful metaphor might be a homeowner next door who lets all-night parties attended by random assholes who trash the street and have zero respect for the neighborhood. No sane person blames the partiers, the problem is clearly the enabling, negligent homeowner.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
I’m sorry but this is such an obviously curated cry-me-a-river story aiming to frame Facebook as a benevolent giant enabling small business to reach their audience and not as the giant vampire squid mining and extracting humanity’s attention for profit while subverting democracy and dispersing deadly poisonous propaganda for even more profit. While also doing its best to gate, control and kill the open internet wherever possible. Cry me a river, Facebook/Meta.
hetspookjee 5y ago
I find the critique most apt to the dealer and not the user. The user is just a weak link in the system where as the dealer is where all the misery basically starts. But yea influencers and the lot I tend to advise to stop using but well they struggle with their habits.
infiniteL0Op 5y ago
discordance 5y ago
For the same reason we critique drug dealers/producers and not consumers?
nonrandomstring 5y ago
> Why do people so strongly critique Facebook for selling ads but not businesses from buying them? I guess for the same reason people tend to criticise drug barons more than street dealers, and dealers more than addicts. Though everyone plays their part in an ugly business, there are power relationships in operation. Facebook know what they are selling and are gatekeepers to a near monopoly product. Businesses are desperately in need and find few alternatives these days. Facebook are apex predators and simply carry more responsibility and so deserve more scrutiny for their role.
Demcox 5y ago
My problem is that their business model is treating their resources (ie. us, common internet users (both active FB users and people not using it because shadow profiles)) unfairly compared to their profit yield. A Danish/British lawyer has filed for a collective legal action towards Meta [0][1] seeking USD 3.2 billions in damages to Facebook users. The optics is that Facebook, from a perspective of competition law, has acted unfairly. [0]https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-antitrust-facebook-idCNL1N2TT1ZZ https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-antitrust-facebook-idCN... [1]https://www.facebookclaim.co.uk/talks/interview-with-dr-liza-lovdahl-gormsen/ https://www.facebookclaim.co.uk/talks/interview-with-dr-liza...
dr_dshiv 5y ago
Because it ran the newspapers out of business

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rendall 5y ago

Thanks for giving us some background on the conflict.

flower-giraffe 5y ago

>> As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ? A quick search suggests FB consume on average about 1 gigawatt globally. The original article calls it a 200 megawatt DC. That would be 20% of facebooks global energy consumption. Given FB seem to have 18 existing Data center locations it would imply huge growth or consildation plans for that DC to consume 200 megawatts all the time. In 2020 the global renewable energy supply capacity was approximately 2500 gigawatts so facebook used less than 0.5% of that capacity. There are lots of valid reasons to oppose facebook, but it doesnt seem that monopolising the consumption of renewabel energy is a credible one. https://sustainability.fb.com/report/2020-sustainability-report/ https://sustainability.fb.com/report/2020-sustainability-rep... https://www.irena.org/publications/2020/Mar/Renewable-Capacity-Statistics-2020 https://www.irena.org/publications/2020/Mar/Renewable-Capaci...

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
0.5% globally is MASSIVE in this context.
vanviegen 5y ago
On a local scale monopolising the consumption of renewable energy is certainly an important consideration. Keep in mind that The Netherlands is a rather dense country. Every windmill is in someone's proverbial backyard, and has thus been fought over. Also, like in many places, the grid has trouble keeping up with the load.
mytherin 5y ago
Green energy production is highly location dependent. Global production is irrelevant - this is about the Netherlands. The Netherlands is a densely populated country that does not have a lot of space for renewable energy, neither does it have large mountains or water reservoirs that can easily be used for hydro power. This data centre alone was going to use 10% of all wind power capacity in the NL [1]. It is not only about this data centre either, this was merely the largest and most egregious. There have been a number of new data centre construction plans in the Netherlands by other tech giants, all planning to use government subsidised wind parks. All so that these companies can pretend to be green and put up nice websites like the one you linked, while the actual wind parks and green energy generation is paid for by the taxpayers. > Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ? This was supposed to a colossal data center, the largest data centre in Europe [2]. They bought 166 hectares of ground (23M square feet) for its construction. It consuming as much as three of their other data centres would not be terribly surprising. [1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2409557-megadatacenter-facebook-zet-extra-druk-op-al-grote-energievraag https://nos.nl/artikel/2409557-megadatacenter-facebook-zet-e... [2] https://siliconcanals.com/news/europe-largest-data-centre-netherlands-facebook-behind-it/ https://siliconcanals.com/news/europe-largest-data-centre-ne...

harryvederci 5y ago

Relevant "Zondag met Lubach" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiPoR9OvD0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiPoR9OvD0Y

stingraycharles 5y ago
Heh I forgot all about that video, but it’s a very good representation for why this whole deal stings. It doesn’t help that it’s Facebook, which implies it’s unlikely to have much impact in terms of enabling an ecosystem of third party users (which is unlike, say, Microsoft or Google datacenters).

misja111 5y ago

The suspension of Meta's data center had very little to do with the fact that it was for Facebook. The main reason is that NL has several of those data centers already and has become aware that they need huge amounts of energy and give very few jobs for it in return. Especially the current time of energy shortage has made those data centers unpopular.

AniseAbyss 5y ago
- ranguna 5y ago
  > Meta will build this data center somewhere else. Good.
- gcthomas 5y ago
  Austria is a simple train-ride away for the Dutch - it doesn't cost a long haul flight's worth of CO₂ to go skiing.
- dang 5y ago
  Since we already warned you not to post slurs like this, I've banned the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30631047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30631047 (March 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24512955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24512955 (Sept 2020) If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.