3 ms·

Most expensive if you discount reliability, longevity and persistence in energy generation. A predictable energy generation source for a predictable work load

• pfdietz 3y ago
  Nuclear fans grossly overstate the cost of dealing with renewable intermittency, especially if the load has dispatchability. Servers don't necessarily have to run 24/7.
  • tnel77 3y ago
    No, but surely Microsoft could work out a deal with local utility companies to sell any excess electricity they generate?
  • hn8305823 3y ago
    > Servers don't necessarily have to run 24/7. I'm curious, do you actually run servers for a living? I'm wondering what a typical use case is (aside from crypto mining) where powering off and on physical servers due to demand, cost, or availability of power is a thing.
    • NineStarPoint 3y ago
      In fairness, training machine learning models is definitely one of areas where only running when it’s cheap to run makes some amount of sense. It’s something you want done eventually, not something that is responding to an immediate need. In practice…yeah. The machine’s your running your models on are expensive, the people working on the model waiting extra time to check the new model are expensive, and not keeping up with your competitors because you only work half the time is not generally a wise choice for someone like Microsoft. I have worked for a smaller company that trained a model on AWS when spot instances were cheap…until they got large enough to purchase some hardware best suited to their use case that could run almost constantly, then doing everything except training their model in the cloud. So yeah I also doubt this makes sense in practice.
      • pfdietz 3y ago
        The cost of supplying the servers with renewables 90% of the time would be much cheaper than supplying them 100% of the time. The former can easily be done with some batteries; the latter requires more extensive consideration of rare dark-calm periods. Another consideration is that servers can be located in the best places for renewables, not in places with high seasonal variability and relatively low winds.
  • lkbm 3y ago
    > Servers don't necessarily have to run 24/7. The benefit of your services having 25/7 availability aside, if the capital costs are high compared to operational costs, reducing operational time to save on operation costs is a bad trade.
  • justrealist 3y ago
    "The wind is blowing! Quick, everyone run your Hadoop jobs!" -- A++ customer experience
  • calaphos 3y ago
    If you invest a lot of money into very expensive Nvidia training hardware you certainly want to run them as close to 24/7 as possible. Dispatchable load usually means oversizing the dispatchable consumer to get the same overall output. This is already uneconomical for even particularly energy intensive industries (e.g. aluminum smelting). I would assume server hardware is a lot more capital intensive than that.
    • Filligree 3y ago
      While I can’t speak to aluminium specifically, smelters in general have the problem that they’re pumping molten metal around. And the thing that keeps it molten inside the pipes is, usually, just inertia. Pausing the plant doesn’t just mean pushing a button. Safely shutting it down is a long process of draining every single part of molten metal first, and might not even be doable; almost any other factory would have an easier time.
      • pfdietz 3y ago
        Molten cryolite rather; I think the metal pooled in the bottom of a pot could be drained off or even allowed to solidify (it would still be conductive.) A related problem is that the walls of the pot cannot be allowed to get too hot. If this were not the case, they could simply insulate the pots to reduce heat losses to some arbitrarily low level.
  • sheepshear 3y ago
    What you think that will accomplish? We already schedule industrial loads for times of low demand from residential and commercial. Rescheduling those loads to coincide with high intermittent generation usually requires more transmission and distribution capacity. Debating total cost depends almost entirely on the particular grid in question. For all we know, those "nuclear fans'" estimates could be spot-on but completely irrelevant to you.