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Whats preventing datacenters from using free solar energy? Once you produce your own clean power, electricity price becomes irrelevant.
by Euphorbium 3y ago
Whats preventing datacenters from using free solar energy? Once you produce your own clean power, electricity price becomes irrelevant.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoHas anyone done the maths on the square footage of the average data centre roof against the average power consumption of a modern-day data centre? It's either going to be disappointing relative to the cost of the panels, or very cool. I tend to be very conservative over these things, but in the right climate, probably starts to make sense for some data centres, but depends on what you're running in them. If it's mining crypto or running Xbox cloud gaming then lol, probably not. Cooling is probably the biggest pain; the sunnier the climate, the more demanding cooling is going to be.
- wtallis 3y agoSolar irradiance is 1361 W/m^2 before accounting for losses due to the atmosphere, the sun not being directly overhead, solar panels not converting all wavelengths to electricity, etc. But none of those inefficiencies matter, because 1.3kW in a square meter means that we have an upper bound of solar power generation for a footprint roughly equal to that of a server rack, and the power is roughly that of one server (for compute; storage servers can have lower power density). Since servers are in fact operated in racks, we immediately know that solar power on the roof of a datacenter will fall short by at about two orders of magnitude at a minimum.
- Ekaros 3y agoSolar does make lot of sense with data centres. But they are also run continuously so you need also other supply. Running servers only when you get decent output is not exactly very sellable idea. So at other times you still need to buy power.
- Euphorbium 3y agoYou can heat bricks and use the heat at night.