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Comment by SQL2219 | Hacker News Reader

how do European data centers make sense in this scenario?

By buying wind and solar power capacity instead of paying spot price. That's what Google has done in the north-east of the Netherlands, Microsoft in the north-west and Facebook is now going to build in the middle. All close to wind energy parks on which they buy long term capacity.

Which on planet scale is great, because it puts all those datecenters on renewable energy which is good for everyone. But on country scale it's a problem because it consumes a huge part of the available renewable energy and requires building new wind farms to meet climate change agreements. And people don't like wind farms in their backyards.

long on renewables but short gas (eg keep buying from Russia paying spot price instead long term contracts [1]). I don’t think cost leveraging is working specially when LNG isn’t making up for demand as expected.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/10/06/eur...

AWS has ~20% higher prices for compute (EC2) in Frankfurt compared to N. Virginia, which doesn't seem that much higher.

Additionally, one of the cheapest dedicated server provider (Hetzner) has two data centers in Germany.

I wonder how economical it becomes to run their own generation at some point. I know in the US I've seen datacenters that will switch over to backup generators at peak demand times as part of load shedding agreements, but I don't have any idea on the economics (other than running your own diesel generators must be more expensive than grid power).

One thing about load shedding and backup generators... You generally want to load test your generators regularly anyways, to make sure they are a reliable backup.

So you are sorta getting paid to do your load tests. (Though load shedding might be several hours a day for 2 weeks straight, instead of a single 1 hour load test.)

Yep, generally load shedding was a few hours just for peak times. And indeed, someone asked the question if we ever tested our generators and the tech answered that we never need ed to test because they routinely kicked on for one reason or another.

In Sweden we have a surplus of electric power in the northen parts (with lots of hydro). The power grid can't handle more exports.

That said - the surplus will not last forever. We have companies moving there quickly, including facebook but also car battery manufacturers and also all-electric iron production initiatives.

Is hydroelectric generation seasonal with snowmelt?

It is in Sweden yes, but that is why you have magazines (lakes). And those are emptied during winter when the snow does not melt and the general consumption is higher. And at the end of it all you need to spend it before spring because then they star filling up again.

(Edit) Right now in Sweden the magazines are filled to 70% (or slightly lower). In april they were at 30%

https://www.energiforetagen.se/globalassets/energiforetagen/...

At the bottom there you can see how the water accumulates during different months. Area 3&4 is the southern half of Sweden, area 1 and 2 are the northen parts.

A lot of companies in Germany would not use AWS if the data centers would be not in Europe. By the way tesla in Germany uses gas turbines for energy production as far as I know. So if you are big, I guess you don't pay the 'market price'.

I'm not sure if they make the most sense for efficiency, but depending on what those data centers are used for, they may be required to be in the EU.

In germany they don't even get subsidized because "they don't produce anything", when you want the most expensive computing power you go to germany.

>Everything you wanted to know about data center design (but did not know who to ask)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-3YRUFBbrA

network latency?

Data protection laws?

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