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> Separately the HVAC systems for the DCs will have been designed for a specific climate, with margins.

Exactly right. For a Tier IV data centre that margin is ASHRAE N=20. For London City until recently that was only 34.5C (dry bulb).

Interesting rabbit hole! Does that mean the margin is defined to contain once-in-twenty-years extremes?

That’s right. However these estimates are now being regularly exceeded. Going forward, it would probably be wiser to do what the mining industry does here in Australia - still design to a reasonable extreme temp, but also specify that the equipment must run at a much higher temperature at a derated capacity. Here that’s 50C ambient.

Even disregarding climate change, a 5% chance each year that your equipment will fail to handle the weather seems lacking for a high-availability facility. (You'll factor in many other this type of figures together, so your total risk budget would be higher still).

> Secondly, within a limit of my understanding, the efficiency of a turbine system hot-to-cold is affected by the climate it operates in. The ambient temperature, humidity and pressure affects the final stage.

Usually this is only partially true. Systems have enough margin to account for such conditions (cooling pumps have to pump more water to compensate for higher temps). Also to note that the output of a turbine can be kept constant. Only the efficiency will come down slightly.

I wasn't sure about the slightly. What I read elsewhere indicated that for safety reasons, gas and coal fired steam turbines back off load when the ambient heat rises. I had assumed it was the output cool/evaporate efficiency but it might be something else.

Sounds like yet another argument for investing in that energy storage low-hanging fruit of thermal reservoirs. Datacenter cooling does not need a huge delta from ambient, the advantage of pumping against nighttime ambient over pumping against daytime ambient would be huge. Datacenter cooling should be dispatchable demand.

I feel like we could do this for homes & businesses too...

How big of a thermal battery (assume we are freezing water) would you need to store the cooling capacity of a 5 ton HVAC system running for 1 summer day?

Perhaps we could design a new generation of heat pumps with this approach in mind.

If you (as a person) can tolerate cooler temperatures well, you can already do this to some extent using the house itself as a thermal battery.

Run your A/C overnight when power is cheaper and the air conditioner is more efficient (and rolling blackouts are less likely...). Cool your house to say 4-8F cooler than you'd normally keep it (close off some vents in your bedroom if you need to, though personally I prefer sleeping in the cold). If your house is well insulated you may be able to make it through a significant portion of the next day without the air conditioner needing to cut in again.

In the grand scheme of things wood doesn't have a lot of thermal mass, but if there's a lot of it it still adds up. Even as the air begins to warm, the floor and walls still feel noticeably cooler.

Key difference: homes and small businesses buy electricity at a fixed rate, large datacenters are big enough for dynamic prices. In a market that doesn't completely abandon fixed rate prices this isn't really possible for smaller customers, because offering dynamic rates requires some trust that the consumer doesn't abuse the fixed rate by dynamically selecting whatever is cheaper at the time. This trust can only be established for consumers large enough for people checking the numbers and perhaps even the occasional audit.

This is the case now, but it wasn't always.

In Texas, we used to have residential plans where you payed wholesale rates for electricity (e.g. Griddy). I used to be on one of these plans and would constantly fantasize about being able to accumulate HVAC capacity at night when you would sometimes be paid to consume electricity.

Did the "least cost router" scenario ever come up? I'd imagine that a certain kind of people would feel very much entitled to e.g. share consumption with a neighbor, switching both houses to a shared meter on either variable or fixed rate based on time of day, and power retailers frantically balancing between chasing them looking for suspicious patterns and pretending that it never happened to avoid inspiring others.

(I do believe that switching to variable rates would be a good idea, that in even the poorest of the poor would the grand scheme of things be better off if they had to occasionally disconnect, less bad than if the alternative was the entire grid occasionally browning out, including services that might be more important to them than their home consumption. And peak prices would even be as high as they are now, if they weren't propped up by an army of fixed rate consumers who don't show any have of demand flexibility almost be definition)

> I do believe that switching to variable rates would be a good idea

Completely agree. Any time we try to control/subsidize costs we introduce instabilities and bad incentives into the marketplace.

Texas grid was about as close as you could get to reality for a while. I would much prefer a situation where everyone is impacted by the cost in the same way. At grid scale, nothing can be stored, so financial arbitrage is effectively a scam.

What does that mean? Could you expand on that?

At a guess, it'd mean building large slabs of concrete, or tanks of water, or other cheap item with large thermal inertia. Ideally you'd cool these down overnight, or at a period with cheap power, then under regular external temperatures you'd use these to reduce the need for cooling at periods of high power cost. Or, when it's very warm outside, these would work in tandem with the cooling systems to cope with a hot day, with the hope being that overnight you'd catch up, without needing to interrupt workloads.

Thirdly, there's also drought related issues - here in Switzerland, a nuclear power station had to reduce its capacity because it could not take in enough water from the local river without endangering the fish stock therein.

We’re also just under a month from the summer solstice (in N. Hemisphere: June 21). London is at 51 degrees North, so the day is pretty long at 16 hours right now.

IE: less of that relieving overnight low.

Fortunately it rained last night and the temperature dropped pretty quickly.

So many governments, agencies, orgs, etc, are getting caught with their pants down with changing climate bringing more extreme weather conditions, because capitalism favors maximizing profit and considering tolerances too wide as an expense.

It's cathartic seeing the capitalists lack of foresight burn them time again, but also sad, knowing the response to this will be just buying slightly better HVAC and other systems, which will be globally sourced no doubt and burn carbon to produce and probably damage some ecosystems in the resource gathering process. Then when temperatures get even hotter its time to buy new systems etc.

Once again capitalism favors this outcome, because it allows multiple sales opportunities over time with the potential to increase monetization at every one, versus buying one system that can handle wider temperature swings and being done with it potentially forever if its made to be repairable/upgradeable. Even if you invented such a thing and sold it out of your garage, GE or whoever your competitors would be would ensure you have difficulty sourcing necessary parts or coming to market or getting word out to your potential customer base. Investors you need to afford to grow under these conditions would expect you to play the game and start cutting costs and engage in the rat race, or be replaced.

It's going to be hard to work our way out of climate change with the degenerate, consumptive nature of capitalism mining the planet while sucking resources from the wider economy where this salvation is to be invented, to the top that will always be able to afford to hole up and hide away from whatever disasters befall the working people.

You can blame capitalism all you want, but the issue is deeper. This is a well studied market failure called tragedy of the commons. People and markets have not been paying the true cost of their consumption, which has resulted in overconsumption of fossil fuels.

Your whole premise ignores the billions of people who happily use electricity and fuel everyday and happily ignore the consequences. These same people then (literally) riot when prices go up by a relatively small amount.

People are greedy. They want more for less. We can disagree about the best form of economic association, but it’s disingenuous to ignore the reality that climate change is driven by the masses.

> but it’s disingenuous to ignore the reality that climate change is driven by the masses.

And the answer to a "tragedy of the commons" scenario is regulation: either intervene directly by banning undesired behaviors (e.g. ban flights on routes that are served by rail, such as France does) or tax it to make undesired behaviors unprofitable.

The problem with the latter is that you will always have people rich enough to simply pay whatever tax is asked and social resentment will grow as a result ("why should the lower classes bear the load of climate change and the rich enjoy three-minute flights to save a 40 minute road trip [1]?").

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniesoteriou/kylie...

Market failures are a feature of free market capitalism! Most of the solutions to market failures are some kind of regulation, restriction or tax which tend to be opposed by proponents of “pure capitalism”

> because capitalism favors maximizing profit and considering tolerances too wide as an expense.

Lack of foresight isn't exclusive to capitalism. Would socialist data centres be built to handle temperatures several degrees above the highest ever recorded temperature?

Even in a socialist economy, building systems with an excessively high tolerances would be seen as a poor allocation of resources.

It could be equally argued that capitalism favours private companies like Google ensuring their DCs are as fault tolerant as possible, to ensure they have a competitive advantage. There's also plenty of cases where companies sell unnecessary and excessive goods and services to maximise their own profit.

> and being done with it potentially forever if its made to be repairable/upgradeable

DC cooling systems are repairable and upgradable. They're a far cry from a residential split system AC unit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS The book "How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet" linked to in that article discusses many of these topics.

> Even in a socialist economy, building systems with an excessively high tolerances would be seen as a poor allocation of resources.

Huh? GDR and Soviet made machinery, vehicles, even glassware for pubs [1] was made with sometimes ridiculous margins and tolerances to ensure longevity and easy repairability and was famous for it. Even pre-reunification Western made products such as Bosch, AEG, Hilti or Siemens were famous for building stuff that sometimes outlasted the owners (such as my 80s Hilti drill, which served three generations of my family and likely will still work when I have children of my own).

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfest

> Soviet made machinery, vehicles, even glassware for pubs [1] was made with sometimes ridiculous margins and tolerances to ensure longevity

Bollocks. Soviet machinery is simple and crude, typically many decades behind their western counterparts.

Yes, but that was neither my point nor the point of the person I replied to.

"Keep it simple and stupid" is a tried and true engineering principle. The higher tolerances a design uses, the easier it is to manufacture and to repair, and the less likely it is to fail from wear and tear in the first place.

A socialist economy, where waiting for a new car could take anywhere from five to twenty years (!), definitely has to prioritize simpler, more (fault-)tolerant designs even if that takes a bit more resources to account for said tolerance. For example, a modern car heavily using fibreglass and plastic in the chassis may weigh a good load less than your average Lada or whatever that was made out of metal, but it could easily be repaired by your average farmer using tools they had in their shed.

Random side fact, this is a major cause why farmers are paying record prices for tractors nearly half a century old [1]. Or why the Russians are currently using so much ages-old stuff in the Ukraine war - modern tanks require a lot of logistics for repair and spare parts, but these old Russian clunkers? You can piss into the tank and it will probably drive on it. (Yes, I know, the Russians haven't been maintaining their tanks properly, which is a major factor in why they were not able to take Kyiw)

[1] https://www.startribune.com/for-tech-weary-midwest-farmers-4...

Simple and crude is not necessarily in opposition to robustness.

Modern capitalism does have a built-in short-term view though. Companies can try planning ahead for decades of use, but if someone comes in and designs for a shorter term, they'll be a lower bidder and thus more likely to get the job. By the time that the short-comings are discovered, the lower bidder is long gone. The stock market also provides an incentive to just aim for short term gains at the expense of the long term.

Socialism can prioritise quick fixes or long term solutions, but it depends on the wisdom of the people involved as to whether they'll build in enough capacity to allow for future climate changes.

Like most people making that commentary about "short-termism", you'd rather buy cheap clothes made in China than pay double for something local that lasts 5 times longer.

You have nothing on which to base that observation and as such, you're not even wrong as your comment is meaningless

How are non-capitalists countries dealing with extreme temperatures ?

I'd argue there are no non-capitalist countries

No Google data center issues, or melting railways in non-capitalists countries, because Google data centers or railways are the result of capitalist economies.