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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

quebec hydro is a huge reason for the location of the OVH datacenter there. margins are thin in the massive bulk hosting/colo/dedicated server business.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/17/ovhs-...

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Actually they buy supply from the hydro dam which is right beside them, at 125,000 volts they have their own substations.

There is also a windfarm about 10 minutes from there, and they also have access to the regular hydro quebec power grid.

That location in beauharnois was very strategic... cheap land, hydro dam right beside, near the hydro quebec main transmission line for US interconnect... only thing they were missing was fiber but they brought it in.

99% of the electricity in Quebec is from hydroelectric dams. This is how the costs are kept so low, and you don't really have to worry about resulting greenhouse gas emissions.

Semi-sorta. It did involve flooding huge amounts of Quebec, so there are consequences and greenhouse gas emissions due to rotting trees, but it's a different sort of equation.

Depending on when the land was flooded, some areas may me good candidates for underwater logging now or in the future. Apparently in some places this is a great source of wood for high quality musical instruments because there aren't many old hardwood trees available anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_logging

The Hydro Quebec plants are near the arctic. Some of them are near the tundra line (where trees suddenly stop growing and lichen takes over).

Don't expect much rotting that far north. It will take centuries to even start to rot. Also don't expect underwater logging either. This is the Boreal forest, not the rockies one. It's even past the northern limit for Boreal Cedar, the only mildly valuable tree you might find. After that, you get young evergreen and pine. They burn before they get old and grow slowly due to the climate.

If you compare X vs 1/10,000th X then the emissions from the second option are effectively meaningless.

Ah, apparently it's a much more significant factor in warmer climates: https://www.internationalrivers.org/campaigns/reservoir-emis...

That's a kind of an apples to baseball comparison. Methane becomes vastly more important over extremely short time frames but with a 12ish year half-life it's long term contribution is mostly as a carbon source.

Further, tiny dams produce very little power. So, if you play with the numbers you can get extremely different results.

On the other hand if you look at the annual 13,100 GWh from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._A._C._Bennett_Dam times the 49 years it's been in operation that's the equivalent of (1,000,00 kg / GWH from coal) * 13,100 * 49 = 707,573,630 short tons of CO2 which is vasly larger than all the biomass in the lake to start with. Further, you can log the land before you start minimizing the total biomass flooded.

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