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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

How those 40 megawatts of energy consumption compare to known companies? How much energy for example consumes an average cloud storage company? Or a corporation? 40 megawatts sound a lot but it would be nice to have a reference.

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After searching around, it looks about average for a large data center. This link[1] estimates Google's data centers require between 50-100MW.

50MW is enough power to supply ~14k homes from different references I've seen.

I'm curious about what normal data centers use for backup power since natural gas and diesel generators don't get much bigger than 2MW. Or maybe they just don't have backup generators.

[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-pa...

They do. Natural Gas fueled generators are practical at 50MW capacity. GE basically sells a 747 engine (CF6) driving a generator, known as the LMS6000

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000

[1] http://www.geaviation.com/marine/engines/military/lm6000/

That's probably the most awesome thing I've heard tonight.

I understand that gas turbines can produce that kind of power, in fact I used to work on some pretty large turbines and turbo generators in the 500-1000MW range. However they aren't used as backup generators where they have to be online in a minute. These are the types of generators I was referring to, https://powergen.gepower.com/products/reciprocating-engines/...

More batteries to get over the slower generator startup time, and likely quite a few smaller generators to do the best they can to keep the batteries going if the big generator is slower than expected to startup that day.

That is cool. Wonder what the efficiency of one of those will be.

40%, it's in the linked Wikipedia article.

I ran a ~10MW capable facility for a while, we had 8 2MW Cummins gensets that would run in parallel. Extra units for redundancy as sometimes units would be offline for oil changes or other routine maintenance.

Maybe want to checkout engines from Wärtsilä.

They have gas capable engines (50DF series, 50cm cylinder bore) with ratings up to 975kW/cylinders and up to 18 cylinders or 17MW per genset at 60hz.

They're not the only player in that field. Fairbanks-Morse sells the Colt-Pielstick PC2.6 line with 750kW per cylinder at 600rpm and up to 16 cylinders for 11.5 MW @ 60hz. They also sell MAN 48/60 engines that go up to 21MW and MAN natural gas 51/60 G engines up to 18.5 MW.

40MW = 40,000KW Typical power density in a colocation facility these days is approximately 5kW per full cabinet (sold as 30A @ 208V or 60A @ 120V at 80% utilization). So, approximately 8000 full cabinets at average density, which would be enough power for one of the 10 largest known facilities in the world. Most likely though, the power density is going to be much higher than typical with bitcoin mining, and could be as few as 1333 actual cabinets at the high end of density of 30kW per cabinet.

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