Free data-center heat is allegedly saving a struggling public pool $24K a year
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I asked about our local pool which has just had a boiler failure and is raising money to avoid closure.
"The key unlock for any individual project is workloads - we can't fit units and give the heat away for free without businesses using the cloud services the servers provide or hosting their own servers with us. If you have any businesses in your network, large or small, who can migrate their existing computing needs onto Deep Green Kit - we would love to speak to them."
I don't even understand who in the UK would be commissioning colo on a small, local scale like this, let alone the practicalities of working in a data centre where your server comes out wet.
Then Deep Green amalgamate these DC's into a cloud and do the part of finding customers & workloads.
DG get cheaper DC costs, Pools get heat in exchange for space.
We split atoms, to boil water, to make electricity, to run computers, to boil water.
Somewhere, someone is boiling water so you can boil water.
[I read about this somewhere on the internet. I don't remember where.]
When you put it like that...
However, with LLMs coming, I could see data center energy usage jump 10x over the next decade. At that point, re-using data center heat will be be a real industry with real profits. Imagine data center heated apartment heating, vertical farms.
I don't know how hotter regions are going to cope with the heat though. These AI datacenters could end up being entirely concentrated in the coldest regions.
At scale, this happens worldwide in shopping malls already and the loadshedding demand management in HVAC and chiller room is immensely valuable.
Sure. It's only 2%. Two percent of Musks net worth would fix homelessness in San Francisco applied annually. [edit: Actually, it's 2x too much]
2% of cost savings on inputs to a product could translate to a 50% increase in net profit. "oh well. its only 2% so why bother..."
I know this wasn't the point of your analogy. But the ill-conceived idea that money can fix homelessness in San Francisco is exactly the reason why we got here in the first place.
Richest city in the world needs more money to fix simple problems, says blameless local govt.I used the homelessness problem because it has a $cost at scale which people see as intractable. The wisdom of fixing it by throwing money at it, rather than throwing money at lawyers to overturn the stupid planning issues is a different question.
Actually, throwing $1.5b to the homeless would probably work pretty well.
Cost of a new affordable housing unit in SF ~$1.17M. [1] Number of homeless people $1.5B could house ~1,282. Number of homeless people in SF 7,754 people in 2022 [2].
So $1.5B could only solve ~16.5% of SF's housing problem or leave 84% unsolved. Which shows homelessness really is a "housing cost" problem in SF :)
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/It-now-costs-more-tha... [2]https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population
plus, solving 16% of the shortage of housing supply would be bigger than any other intervention at scale: it would probably force downward pricing in rent and sales overall.
https://sfstandard.com/public-health/homelessness/ending-hom...
...Ending unsheltered homelessness would require vast increases in housing, shelter and prevention services, according to the report from the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and homelessness consultancy firm Focus Strategies.
That would cost the city another $1.45 billion over three years. And it would take over $410 million each year after that to keep the programs running. ...
I don't remember the exact number but raising the temperature of an olympic sized swimming pool by a degree celsius takes megawatt hours of energy. that's a lot and a datacenter is perfect for this, even in hot climates.
Just a note: we are probably right now at peak inefficiency for LLMs. There are obvious improvements available but they will only be explored by organizations which have different time vs resources trade-off calculations compared to OpenAI and Google.
Right now OpenAi and Google are racing to ship products. A working training framework is more important than saving $X (where X is a very large number) because capturing marketshare is seen as vital and they have no shortage of capital.
But the massive and rapid progress seen by projects like llama-cpp show how much performance they are leaving on the table. (And yes this also applies at training time).
others are going to go onprem
I think this might already be near peak data center LLM, the use case for the most genius cloud heavy LLMs is going to be small once it gets baked into OS layer
How do these companies transport the (waste heat) via heated mineral oil to the recipient?
Presumably not every server farm could have it directly piped to the customer, as they're not all necessarily in immediate proximity to a public pool:
Is the heated water or oil then shipped in some some kind of insulated container?
The computers are submerged in mineral oil that captures heat that gets transferred into pool water with a heat exchanger. The pool still has a gas boiler to boost the water's temperature if required. Deep Green claims it's transferring about 96 percent of the energy used by its computers and reducing a pool's gas heat usage by 62 percent. Deep Green is paying the Exmouth Leisure Centre for all the electricity its data center uses, as well as any setup costs, and the Exmouth Leisure Centre gets the heat for free.
Glad to know you are not struggling financially in any way.
In a perfect world electricity would be free. It would be so abundant you wouldn’t have to worry about using it.
Of course, this implies that the energy is 100% green as well. By saying you’re glad energy is more expensive, you’re elucidating the main issue: wasting electricity is bad for the planet in many cases.