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Comment by namsral | Hacker News Reader

In the Netherlands locals were appalled when locally produced green energy was pretty much all taken by a new foreign datacenter.

Can’t help but think big tech is becoming a burden on society and the environment.

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I think this speaks to the profound duplicity found inside humans. As if they just don't like the consequences of their actions waved in their face. In a lot of jurisdictions, data HAS to be stored locally, for privacy law reasons. So the data center has to go somewhere in the country, and the data center has to draw power from some local source. Given this reality, you just want the power to be clean. An analogy would be that "locals are appalled when they discover that eating meat requires killing animals". Given this reality, you just want the killing to be ethical. Maybe, like meat, put the data centers in some sparsely populated outskirts, out of sight and out of mind, and don't talk about it, sounds like that's what people really want here.

The alternatives would seem to be "data center powered by non-renewable energy" and "no data center", no?

Or perhaps a bunch of less efficient small data centers.

How would that help? Reducing the number of data centers doesn’t reduce the demand for them.

Efficiency of scale is very real for datacenters

Whoops I wrote this backwards. I meant to write reducing the size of datacenters.

The proposal I replied to would probably increase data center energy usage on balance.

A lot of technologies only work “at scale”. Some things can be scaled down, but I don’t think that’s trivial.

Sadly, the question is "are they part of my tribe or not?"

I see it over and over again in my city in coastal California. Car dealership, gas stations? A-OK, they help me out. Instead let's go do a climate protest of a bank, an Amazon office, and a software as a service company, since they have Big Oil as clients. And let's conveniently forget the massive oil and car infrastructure from our city design, which creates huge amounts of demand for emissions. As long as the enemy is one- or two-degrees away in terms of connection, it's a target to be attacked.

Big tech are installing datacenters to service users.

Servers have to go somewhere - would you prefer it to be on dirty energy far away from you so it both pollutes and provides poor service?

Datacenters are rediculously efficient (bigger ones even more so) compared to alternatives.

> Datacenters are rediculously efficient (bigger ones even more so) compared to alternatives.

Only if you ignore the alternative of not doing something. Parkinson's law tells me there's a lot of strictly unnecessary things running on there as a means unto itself.

I'm not sure I understand the complaint - if power is going to be consumed regardless, what does it matter who/what consumes power from a particular source?

My main complaint is that foreign big tech companies, or rather their shareholders, often exploit local resources like green energy, sparse living space, people’s privacy to generate large profits and take it home. Often avoiding responsibility by not paying taxes.

It’s business as usual, different industry, same shit.

Isn't that a good thing? It means there's demand and money for more renewable plants.

In many cases big tech companies are financing green electrical generation capacity. I don't know about this specific case, but in many cases the local green energy capacity is specifically built to power the data center.

It would be interesting to compare big tech’s total carbon output to other major industries and find out. Also neat would be environmental impact per economic output.

Can't the government refuse to allow foreign datacenters?

The government did ban the data from being stored in foreign datacenters - that’s why the local datacenters are being built.

It's almost like poorly thought out government intervention has second order effects.

IMO, when your quality of life gets high enough, your lizard brain will find the most obscure problems to freak out about. From trying to avoid being eaten by lions to caring which continent the computers with electrons representing us digitally resides physically. What an amazing species we are.

Local Dutch municipalities are fighting for large datacenter. They promise them green energy

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