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Comment by jkarni | Hacker News Reader

We exclusively use Hetzner (Finland and Germany) for the servers, and they use hydropower and wind (see https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/umweltschutz/).

I've been wanting to write a blog post about what this means and how much it matters in practice, but there's a lot of research to do still. If someone here works in the area, please get in touch!

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Wow, I didn't realize there were currently any hosting providers who had managed to find 24/7 carbon-free electricity (CFE). Hydro seems like the only option right now for data centers because we don't have energy storage on the scale needed to run a data center 24/7 using only wind and solar. Nuclear may also be an option in the future if small modular reactors get on a learning curve that reduces their price/kWh to be more competitive. I always forget about nuclear as a CFE energy source even though it's like 50% of the US's carbon free energy.

David Roberts, a very wonky and wonderful climate journalist, had Google's director of energy on his podcast to talk about Google's goal of having all their data centers operate on 24/7 CFE. This podcast is why I'm surprised any hosting provider has managed to do achieve 24/7 CFE because its an order or magnitude more difficult than achieving "100% CFE".

Here is the link to that episode: https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-michael-terrell-on#det...

If you're interested in this enough to choose your hosting provider based off their energy mix I think you'd really enjoy his substack and podcast.

For other comment readers if you the difference between 100% CFE and 24/7 isn't clear, Google's blog post announcing their goal of 24/7 CFE explains the difference between the two and why 24/7 CFE is waaaay more difficult and currently only something a company with Google's resources could do.

I wouldn't really see using hydro power in Europe as being "green". Yes, it's renewable, but the installation capacities are pretty much exhausted, and have been before there was any significant share of renewables. So by cutting a deal with a hydro power supplier, you're only displacing another consumer who will possibly start using coal, and not doing anything to support the growth of renewable energies.

Smells a bit like greenwashing to me...

That's lovely! I do find myself thinking about this often, and didn't know if any providers that did that other than GCP's "carbon-free" locations. TIL about Hetzner's green-ness.

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