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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

It seems like excessively low load would be a relatively easy problem to solve. One could heat tanks of water to boiling and vent the steam, that could probably absorb as much energy as needed.

Or just crank up the AC :)

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Huge DCs like Amazons and ours at Google are very efficient, cooling uses at most 10% of total power. So cranking up this wouldn't help. Nor wouldn't it be possible usual anyway, as these are typically using evaporation cooling, which can't really be cranked up like traditional compression cooling. And keeping a huge tank and heater ready would introduce another point of failure. The easiest is just to have your servers do some heavy calculations.

Compared to heating a water tank, it would be a much more responsible use of power to fire up some folding@home images.

Perhaps a more financially responsible solution would be to spin up a bunch of instances that mine some sort of cryptocurrency. I doubt it'd cover electricity costs, but it could offset it some.

There are load banks made for generators, just large resistive grids. A facility that I work at has one so that we can exercise the generator at operating load without actually switching over our power. So I would think a good solution for a DC might be to have load banks you could switch in when necessary.

Somewhere I have a picture of a car that was parked in the no parking area next to the dummy load for a data center generator. All of the plastic parts on the outside are melted off and the paint is a different color on the side that got the bulk of the hot air coming off the dummy load.

I had not realized it could get pretty hot there but it made sense given the energy they were dumping out.

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