6 ms·

Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims

114 points by mitchbob 2y ago

starkruzr 2y ago
I mean yeah, that would check out. Seems like a lot of these facilities are sitting on a bit of a real estate goldmine in which installation of solar panels and storage batteries could offset a lot of that consumption (in addition to being nicely synergistic with emergency power needs when grid power is interrupted).
- jlmorton 2y ago
  Solar panels across the entire roof of a data center can't generate much more than 1-2% of the total power usage of the data center. Would need a solar farm with about 50x-100x the land area.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  I think you might be over-estimating solar or under estimating data center power usage. A quick search suggests that a data center consumes between 150W and 750W per square foot of building space. Solar is roughly 20W per square foot. Even if you assume 1 floor and a roof covered entirely in solar and the lower end of the power estimate, that's only covering 13% of the power requirements. If you look at the higher end of power estimates and assume a 3 storey data center with 50% of the roof covered, a more realistic set of numbers for a hyperscaler, that's only 0.4%. As for being synergistic for emergency power, batteries would help here, but peak power usage is probably around dusk when solar won't be that useful but when power is most likely to be disrupted.
  - phil21 2y ago
    Those solar production numbers are exceedingly exaggerated. You need to add capacity factor to the solar install. Multiply your solar production by 0.2 to 0.3 or so and you’ll be in a better ballpark range. Peak power usage for large scale facilities is not much different than off peak. Most megawatt plus builds I’ve been part of have less than 10% difference between peak and valley in terms of watts used. Perhaps the hyperscalers see a much larger difference but I have my doubts.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  If you want to see exactly the type of solar panels needed for a data center (and why they’re impractical in even ideal situations) then check out this mockup of a proposed space data center ran off solar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew
- rapsey 2y ago
  Oracle is literally planning a datacenter powered by modular nuclear reactors. The power requirements especially for AI are extreme.
  - boilingmacrto 2y ago
    [dead]
  - soco 2y ago
    Good luck getting that past NIMBY...
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
spondylosaurus 2y ago
I don't totally understand the implications of this (although clearly they're not good): The most important tools in this “creative accounting” when it comes to data centers are renewable energy certificates, or Recs. These are certificates that a company purchases to show it is buying renewable energy-generated electricity to match a portion of its electricity consumption – the catch, though, is that the renewable energy in question doesn’t need to be consumed by a company’s facilities. Rather, the site of production can be anywhere from one town over to an ocean away. The "doesn't need to be consumed by a company's facilities" part makes it sound like you can buy these credits without actually using them(?), but the "site of production" part makes it sound like you're buying credits and cashing them in, just not in the same location as your data center. So I'm not sure if the situation here is that you have a data center in Seattle, but you're buying solar power generated in Kansas City, and you may or may not have a corporate office or something in Kansas City to use it.
- Arnt 2y ago
  Close. The office in Kansas City wouldn't use it, if that office existed. Suppose you can get solar power in Kansas City, but can't transport it to Seattle, maybe due to lacking interconnect capacity, maybe lack of contracts among the power companies, it doesn't matter. What you do is buy 1GW of solar in Kansas, sell that same power as fossil power in Kansas and buy fossil power in Seattle. The Guardian thinks it's creative accounting, IMO it's a fair and good hack: When you open a new site and use that hack to buy power for the new site, the corresponding new power generation is solar. It's just solar with two additional accounting hops. There are other variants of the same hack.
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    It's a useful stepping stone, and probably better for the environment than not doing it, but ultimately the emissions still happen. The sad reality is that in some areas there is no emissions free energy to buy no matter how much you want to. Some would say not to put datacenters there, but if there are customers wanting them I understand why companies do it (even if I don't agree).
yapyap 2y ago
yup, sad shit mate. and to think of all the emissions being spent on useless AI
mrweasel 2y ago
Obviously data centers shouldn't lie about the emissions, but it would be interesting to know how e.g. Amazon compares to the on-prem setup their offerings frequently replaces. Apple and Meta is a little different, in that none of their data center capacity directly replaces anything, it's all "extra". Internally we had an interesting discussion, about travelling. Some one brought up that it might not look good that we fly to frequently, or at all. That's true, but it's also a very visible and easy to understand thing to focus on. One engineer does some quick napkin math and suggests that we optimize our code instead, as that would save more CO2 yearly, compared to us not flying. To me that's a really good indication of something that's wrong in the industry, we're not optimizing our code anymore, we're barely able to get rid of rarely used code and infrastructure, because keeping it running isn't really that expensive anymore. Again, data centers shouldn't lie about emissions, but what difference would it make it they didn't? We're the ones buying the capacity, rather than moving to on-device computing, rather than an always running cloud. We spin up way more infrastructure than we should, because it's easy, and it doesn't cost that much.
- matthiasb 2y ago
  I totally agree with you! There are so many layers we could optimize, with various level of difficulty and return in term of cost and co2 reduction. Legacy tech stack are especially wasteful: HW + OS + App running 24/7 regardless if it used or not. My intuition is that AWS claims they can reduce CO2 emissions from your onprem stack by 80% because *IF* it was rewritten into a serverless app, it would consume energy only when it runs. That's one big if! https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/mt/how-to-drive-the-discussions-around-carbon-footprint-reduction-to-support-modernization-and-migration-to-the-cloud/#:~:text=Research%20conducted%20by%20the%20international,renewable%20energy%20goal%20by%202025 https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/mt/how-to-drive-the-discussi....
  - mrweasel 2y ago
    A friend of mine is heavily into AWS. Over the past two years he moved their entire organisation off of EC2 instances. They where apparently running EC2 for everything, and the reflect my experience as well. Organisations mostly see AWS as a hypervisor in the cloud. We tried to move so many customers to some sort of container, auto-scaling EC2 (i.e. turning the instances off when not in use), Aurora, Lambda, you name it, anything that doesn't necessarily run 24/7. The customers don't like it. They don't feel safe, it's no familiar to them, they don't understand how they should manage it or make up reasons as to why they need to run MariaDB one EC2 or why EFS or S3 won't be able to replace their EC2 backed NFS share. When it's done correctly, seeing an entire business running without a single VM or physical server is really a amazing thing to see.
rizz0 2y ago
I bumped into a zine about this topic the other day. Thought it was quite good: https://emmlab.info/Resources_page/Data%20Center%20Fights_digital.pdf https://emmlab.info/Resources_page/Data%20Center%20Fights_di...
- mro_name 2y ago
  glimpsed into it, looks fancy but find it apologetic. IMO it's double-standards to campaign against "the next datacenter from being built" without reducing personal usage and demand. Individual frugality is the precondition for collective degrowth, both practically and morally. Otherwise you just open business opportunities for datacenter growth. IMO both should be pursued, make one and don't omit the other.
matthiasb 2y ago
Shameless plug: we built www.li10.com to help companies using AWS cloud measuring and reducing their cloud carbon footprint. To measure it, we use your detailed billing data and local kWh carbon intensity. To reduce it, we are offering a cloud governance tool based on Cloud Custodian to identify and remediate wasteful or/and unsecure cloud resources.
- everfrustrated 2y ago
  AWS already has a customer-specific report on emissions in their console.
  - matthiasb 2y ago
    yes, but it will give you a misleading number (close to 0 for any workload you run in US or EU). So it is useless.
slippy 2y ago
The simple answer to this: Tax the #### out of the greenhouse gas emitting energy sources. If we as a planet need to be using better sources of power so that our planet literally doesn't melt our food sources, and then us, then our governments need to make it more cost effective to use better sources. Carbon credits or energy swaps don't work to actually reduce the amount of polluting energy produced.
- rapsey 2y ago
  Or fast track building 20+ nuclear reactors like China is doing.
  - notTooFarGone 2y ago
    ah yeah the good old 10 trillion budget vs the 1 trillion for the same amount of renewables with a faster pace.
    - phil21 2y ago
      Datacenters require pretty constant 24/7 loads. You don’t get much difference at scale between 2pm and 2am. Maybe 10-20% at best. It’s about the last place you want to start using intermittent power sources. Chemical battery storage is simply not feasible today for such uses cases. If you go renewable your choice currently is to back that intermittent source with either coal or natural gas at nearly a 1:1 basis. Nuclear starts looking pretty compelling for such use cases. The dirty secret of renewables is that they are currently directly linked to natural gas peaker plants. This was obvious a decade ago, and still is just as true. My portfolio shows I was completely correct in this prediction. Chemical storage at these tens to hundreds of megawatt scale is currently a pipe dream. Current deployments are measured in single digit hours of storage. Perhaps another decade will show things have changed, but I doubt it. Nuclear is currently the best battery tech we have available. Especially considering how greenwashed methane production has been. And that’s not even getting into seasonal energy storage which we simply do not have any answers for short of hydro. Interconnections only work so long until you run out of other people’s coal or nuclear power sources. I suppose you could redesign your facility to operate the emergency diesel backup generation on a regular basis but that’s even worse. I’m very into solar and battery storage where it makes sense - even if not the most economical. I think anyone who can afford it should have a solar setup plus a few days worth of batteries installed at their place of residence. Focusing on datacenter power use is about the last thing we should be looking at after we optimize the rest. It’s like focusing on aviation as your priority for co2 reduction. Why go after the highest hanging fruit when so much low hanging fruit currently exists?
Gravityloss 2y ago
Makes sense to locate your data center in a country or area with a low emissions electricity system and then also buy clean electricity. There are lots of good choices for DC operators and electricity providers at least in EU.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  While true, the problem is that these data centers buy up the capacity of newly built clean energy systems (like windmills), instead of the renewables replacing non-renewable energy sources. The objective should not just be to add renewable energy to the grid, but to reduce consumption so non-renewables can be replaced.
  - Gravityloss 2y ago
    I think differently. The market works, and more windmills will be built as the price is good and builders know there is demand in the market. Demand will fall in the countries with dirty electricity.
tessierashpool9 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

114 points by mitchbob 2y ago

I mean yeah, that would check out. Seems like a lot of these facilities are sitting on a bit of a real estate goldmine in which installation of solar panels and storage batteries could offset a lot of that consumption (in addition to being nicely synergistic with emergency power needs when grid power is interrupted).

jlmorton 2y ago
Solar panels across the entire roof of a data center can't generate much more than 1-2% of the total power usage of the data center. Would need a solar farm with about 50x-100x the land area.
danpalmer 2y ago
I think you might be over-estimating solar or under estimating data center power usage. A quick search suggests that a data center consumes between 150W and 750W per square foot of building space. Solar is roughly 20W per square foot. Even if you assume 1 floor and a roof covered entirely in solar and the lower end of the power estimate, that's only covering 13% of the power requirements. If you look at the higher end of power estimates and assume a 3 storey data center with 50% of the roof covered, a more realistic set of numbers for a hyperscaler, that's only 0.4%. As for being synergistic for emergency power, batteries would help here, but peak power usage is probably around dusk when solar won't be that useful but when power is most likely to be disrupted.
- phil21 2y ago
  Those solar production numbers are exceedingly exaggerated. You need to add capacity factor to the solar install. Multiply your solar production by 0.2 to 0.3 or so and you’ll be in a better ballpark range. Peak power usage for large scale facilities is not much different than off peak. Most megawatt plus builds I’ve been part of have less than 10% difference between peak and valley in terms of watts used. Perhaps the hyperscalers see a much larger difference but I have my doubts.
tourmalinetaco 2y ago
If you want to see exactly the type of solar panels needed for a data center (and why they’re impractical in even ideal situations) then check out this mockup of a proposed space data center ran off solar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew
rapsey 2y ago
Oracle is literally planning a datacenter powered by modular nuclear reactors. The power requirements especially for AI are extreme.
- boilingmacrto 2y ago
  [dead]
- soco 2y ago
  Good luck getting that past NIMBY...

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

spondylosaurus 2y ago

I don't totally understand the implications of this (although clearly they're not good): The most important tools in this “creative accounting” when it comes to data centers are renewable energy certificates, or Recs. These are certificates that a company purchases to show it is buying renewable energy-generated electricity to match a portion of its electricity consumption – the catch, though, is that the renewable energy in question doesn’t need to be consumed by a company’s facilities. Rather, the site of production can be anywhere from one town over to an ocean away. The "doesn't need to be consumed by a company's facilities" part makes it sound like you can buy these credits without actually using them(?), but the "site of production" part makes it sound like you're buying credits and cashing them in, just not in the same location as your data center. So I'm not sure if the situation here is that you have a data center in Seattle, but you're buying solar power generated in Kansas City, and you may or may not have a corporate office or something in Kansas City to use it.

Arnt 2y ago
Close. The office in Kansas City wouldn't use it, if that office existed. Suppose you can get solar power in Kansas City, but can't transport it to Seattle, maybe due to lacking interconnect capacity, maybe lack of contracts among the power companies, it doesn't matter. What you do is buy 1GW of solar in Kansas, sell that same power as fossil power in Kansas and buy fossil power in Seattle. The Guardian thinks it's creative accounting, IMO it's a fair and good hack: When you open a new site and use that hack to buy power for the new site, the corresponding new power generation is solar. It's just solar with two additional accounting hops. There are other variants of the same hack.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  It's a useful stepping stone, and probably better for the environment than not doing it, but ultimately the emissions still happen. The sad reality is that in some areas there is no emissions free energy to buy no matter how much you want to. Some would say not to put datacenters there, but if there are customers wanting them I understand why companies do it (even if I don't agree).

yapyap 2y ago

yup, sad shit mate. and to think of all the emissions being spent on useless AI

mrweasel 2y ago

Obviously data centers shouldn't lie about the emissions, but it would be interesting to know how e.g. Amazon compares to the on-prem setup their offerings frequently replaces. Apple and Meta is a little different, in that none of their data center capacity directly replaces anything, it's all "extra". Internally we had an interesting discussion, about travelling. Some one brought up that it might not look good that we fly to frequently, or at all. That's true, but it's also a very visible and easy to understand thing to focus on. One engineer does some quick napkin math and suggests that we optimize our code instead, as that would save more CO2 yearly, compared to us not flying. To me that's a really good indication of something that's wrong in the industry, we're not optimizing our code anymore, we're barely able to get rid of rarely used code and infrastructure, because keeping it running isn't really that expensive anymore. Again, data centers shouldn't lie about emissions, but what difference would it make it they didn't? We're the ones buying the capacity, rather than moving to on-device computing, rather than an always running cloud. We spin up way more infrastructure than we should, because it's easy, and it doesn't cost that much.

matthiasb 2y ago
I totally agree with you! There are so many layers we could optimize, with various level of difficulty and return in term of cost and co2 reduction. Legacy tech stack are especially wasteful: HW + OS + App running 24/7 regardless if it used or not. My intuition is that AWS claims they can reduce CO2 emissions from your onprem stack by 80% because *IF* it was rewritten into a serverless app, it would consume energy only when it runs. That's one big if! https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/mt/how-to-drive-the-discussions-around-carbon-footprint-reduction-to-support-modernization-and-migration-to-the-cloud/#:~:text=Research%20conducted%20by%20the%20international,renewable%20energy%20goal%20by%202025 https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/mt/how-to-drive-the-discussi....
- mrweasel 2y ago
  A friend of mine is heavily into AWS. Over the past two years he moved their entire organisation off of EC2 instances. They where apparently running EC2 for everything, and the reflect my experience as well. Organisations mostly see AWS as a hypervisor in the cloud. We tried to move so many customers to some sort of container, auto-scaling EC2 (i.e. turning the instances off when not in use), Aurora, Lambda, you name it, anything that doesn't necessarily run 24/7. The customers don't like it. They don't feel safe, it's no familiar to them, they don't understand how they should manage it or make up reasons as to why they need to run MariaDB one EC2 or why EFS or S3 won't be able to replace their EC2 backed NFS share. When it's done correctly, seeing an entire business running without a single VM or physical server is really a amazing thing to see.

rizz0 2y ago

I bumped into a zine about this topic the other day. Thought it was quite good: https://emmlab.info/Resources_page/Data%20Center%20Fights_digital.pdf https://emmlab.info/Resources_page/Data%20Center%20Fights_di...

mro_name 2y ago
glimpsed into it, looks fancy but find it apologetic. IMO it's double-standards to campaign against "the next datacenter from being built" without reducing personal usage and demand. Individual frugality is the precondition for collective degrowth, both practically and morally. Otherwise you just open business opportunities for datacenter growth. IMO both should be pursued, make one and don't omit the other.

matthiasb 2y ago

Shameless plug: we built www.li10.com to help companies using AWS cloud measuring and reducing their cloud carbon footprint. To measure it, we use your detailed billing data and local kWh carbon intensity. To reduce it, we are offering a cloud governance tool based on Cloud Custodian to identify and remediate wasteful or/and unsecure cloud resources.

everfrustrated 2y ago
AWS already has a customer-specific report on emissions in their console.
- matthiasb 2y ago
  yes, but it will give you a misleading number (close to 0 for any workload you run in US or EU). So it is useless.

slippy 2y ago

The simple answer to this: Tax the #### out of the greenhouse gas emitting energy sources. If we as a planet need to be using better sources of power so that our planet literally doesn't melt our food sources, and then us, then our governments need to make it more cost effective to use better sources. Carbon credits or energy swaps don't work to actually reduce the amount of polluting energy produced.

rapsey 2y ago
Or fast track building 20+ nuclear reactors like China is doing.
- notTooFarGone 2y ago
  ah yeah the good old 10 trillion budget vs the 1 trillion for the same amount of renewables with a faster pace.
  - phil21 2y ago
    Datacenters require pretty constant 24/7 loads. You don’t get much difference at scale between 2pm and 2am. Maybe 10-20% at best. It’s about the last place you want to start using intermittent power sources. Chemical battery storage is simply not feasible today for such uses cases. If you go renewable your choice currently is to back that intermittent source with either coal or natural gas at nearly a 1:1 basis. Nuclear starts looking pretty compelling for such use cases. The dirty secret of renewables is that they are currently directly linked to natural gas peaker plants. This was obvious a decade ago, and still is just as true. My portfolio shows I was completely correct in this prediction. Chemical storage at these tens to hundreds of megawatt scale is currently a pipe dream. Current deployments are measured in single digit hours of storage. Perhaps another decade will show things have changed, but I doubt it. Nuclear is currently the best battery tech we have available. Especially considering how greenwashed methane production has been. And that’s not even getting into seasonal energy storage which we simply do not have any answers for short of hydro. Interconnections only work so long until you run out of other people’s coal or nuclear power sources. I suppose you could redesign your facility to operate the emergency diesel backup generation on a regular basis but that’s even worse. I’m very into solar and battery storage where it makes sense - even if not the most economical. I think anyone who can afford it should have a solar setup plus a few days worth of batteries installed at their place of residence. Focusing on datacenter power use is about the last thing we should be looking at after we optimize the rest. It’s like focusing on aviation as your priority for co2 reduction. Why go after the highest hanging fruit when so much low hanging fruit currently exists?

Gravityloss 2y ago

Makes sense to locate your data center in a country or area with a low emissions electricity system and then also buy clean electricity. There are lots of good choices for DC operators and electricity providers at least in EU.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
While true, the problem is that these data centers buy up the capacity of newly built clean energy systems (like windmills), instead of the renewables replacing non-renewable energy sources. The objective should not just be to add renewable energy to the grid, but to reduce consumption so non-renewables can be replaced.
- Gravityloss 2y ago
  I think differently. The market works, and more windmills will be built as the price is good and builders know there is demand in the market. Demand will fall in the countries with dirty electricity.

tessierashpool9 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]