Data centres account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption
economist.com
economist.com
Indeed, even one of the greatest encyclopaedias in Norway mentions “Maslows behovspyramide” in their article about Maslow. https://snl.no/Abraham_Maslow (article is in Norwegian.)
Edit: Hmmm. According to gpt-4, the average TV would incur about .02 kg of CO2 per hour of usage, assuming a typical electrical grid mix in the US. While it estimates that driving 1 mile emits avout 0.1 kg of CO2.
If that’s the case, 5 hours of TV is roughly equal 1 mile of driving. Interesting.
Of course, if the grid has a higher percentage of renewables or the car is electric, that changes things.
Beauty and art are important for human welfare and are worth spending resources on.
Neither beauty nor art are available through Netflix's streaming platform.
I did ask why they kept the house so cold and was told "because we can". I got it: they had a really hard start off in life and were now able, through parental sacrifices etc, and their own hard work, be able to basically show off and keep their house cold in summer. I've seen the same in TX - my brother worked for EDS near Fort Worth a while back (20 years back). The attitude is the same there and again, I understand the individual stories of being able to conquer something that they could not growing up. Obviously you also get the "because we can" from multi millionaires too but for what sounds like a different reason but is really the same.
In the UK we constantly get badgered about water use. The fucking stuff falls out of the sky with monotonous regularity. The place is a series of islands. The Atlantic is off to the left and that's a lot of water. What is really wrong is our management of the stuff. There is rather a lot of technical debt in our water management system and it will need real money to fix.
Faffing about a TV isn't going to save the world - that bollocks is for politicians and fossil fuel companies to victim shame consumers instead of giving a shit.
A TV uses eleccy and that can be solar/wind/unicorn farts or good old fashioned gas or liquidised puppies.
My home's underfloor heating is eleccy and hence seriously expensive but I am told that my supplier - Shell Energy - only uses renewables to deliver it (Shell? RLY?). I originally signed up with a "green" supplier but they went bust along with a few other shyster energy suppliers hereabouts when the shit really hit the fan. Ukraine invasion nightmare. OPEC opportunistically taking the piss as usual and massive companies filling their boots post a pandemic.
I can almost feel the pain in Saudi and Shell.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/2009/sta...
I think you meant to state that Florida's energy (not electricity) expenditures are amongst the lowest in the US.
A Tesla model S has between 60-100kwH battery depending on the model.
So a TV can be powered for 1/10th-1/20th a year with one Tesla charge.
In the US, our electricity generated ~0.85lbs of carbon emissions per kWh. Some places (California) can run part of the day entirely renewably. The EPA says a gallon of gas generates 20 lbs of carbon. A single car tank of 20g generates 400lbs, while a Tesla would generate 85lbs, and a year of TV would generate 765lbs. a model s Tesla has a 400m range, while the average American car has 22mpg, so that’s why I picked a 20g tank.
If running the TV 24/7 stops 2 trips a year by making the home more pleasant, it’s a carbon positive. If those same people who like the “pretty photos” drive an electric car, each “tank equivalent” is 1/8th a year of TV.
I certainly don't have my TV on all the time, but I don't think much of my energy consumption as it is predominantly renewable and ultimately the superfluous usage is negated by any unnecessary driving due to my car's combustion engine. If anything, the larger concern is almost always expense, as prices here are roughly the same as there.
I don't have much of a point to make, just thought it was interesting to compare. My peers and I are pretty worried about the situation in the US, though.
TBH I'm not too worried. Not in the head-in-sand way, but in the optimism of the future way. The US largely has issues with coordination but tends to lurch in the right direction on things like this once momentum builds. The economics of it will inevitably lead to the healthy outcome, and enough people care to pressure big industries (slowly...). We've been rapidly converting to renewable energy lately, so we're starting to make big moves in the right direction. Thankfully we're a rich nation, and somehow have endless money to burn. It's hard to coordinate, since we have a geographically large nation to power, and an unfathomable appetite to use energy.
I'm jealous of your nation, which seems to have a sensible populace and leadership, relatively high wealth, and a relatively constrained geography with ample sources of power.
Or learning how much is that?
And fixing DC power use is easy I comparisons.
Alone google s 24/7 renewable plan puts a lot of pressure on the industry
At least for the rich westerners, that data center is quite essential for the household electricity consumption
The problem is everything, all together. All the 2%s each need to take action in their own way.
Compare private passenger cars which are ~12% of global CO2 and there are no practical ways to decarbonize that.
This is different from the layman use,for us “trivial” means “Super easy.”
"One day Shizuo Kakutani was teaching a class at Yale. He wrote down a lemma on the blackboard and announced that the proof was obvious. One student timidly raised his hand and said that it wasn't obvious to him. Could Kakutani explain?
After several moments' thought, Kakutani realized that he could not himself prove the lemma. He apologized, and said that he would report back at their next class meeting.
After class, Kakutani, went straight to his office. He labored for quite a time and found that he could not prove the pesky lemma. He skipped lunch and went to the library to track down the lemma. After much work, he finally found the original paper. The lemma was stated clearly and succinctly. For the proof, the author had written, 'Exercise for the reader.'
The author of this 1941 paper was Kakutani."
To wit, German coal plants currently emit 10 times as much CO2 as the whole French airline industry.
Okay, let's do; if you hadn't posted this comment (on HN, a social media platform), what would you have done with the time?
Perhaps because those things are not increasing at the same rate and are not projected to exceed 2% in the near term.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and...
It'll probably go to 10% in 2 decades if unchecked. The IEA analysis is completely outdated because it was made pre ChatGPT (As evidenced by the many references to crypto, which is no longer relevant).
Granted, its very easy to boost power efficiency in data centers, given the high margins and low pollution, so the industry is putting huge efforts into restraining power consumption in data centers.
Having lived much of my life without an Internet connection, I wouldn't overvalue the utility, either. My life is better, but not that much better today.
So if we wanted to estimate the global impact of data centers on CO2 emissions, that's about 0.6%. And that's not a perfect calculation as much of the new power capacity is in renewables, thus lower relative emissions. <0.5% would be a better estimate.
So 1/200th of our greenhouse gas problem is caused by data centers. I'll echo some of the other comments in this thread but - damn, that's a pretty good deal considering how much value we get out of it.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-co2-status-report-...
And consider the low lifespan of IT equipment.
But the bigger problem with the article IMO is the fact that this is degrowth. Why is the electricity consumption important? Carbon is the real metric. Big server operators (meta, aws, azure, gcp) already either are 100% zero-carbon powered or on track to be.
Regardless, if grid needs to add capacity for EVs, heat pumps, other electrification goals, why are servers (probably low impact) important?
Obviously the logic is flawed, but its not obvious to them and they are many
So the more renewable you can make your energy mix, the less waste heat you have from thermal power generation, and then the waste heat from electricity use is probably pretty negligible after that.
What we try to do here in Denmark, which is a small country and why we do this, is that we try to use the water cooling for both cooling and heating. I’m not completely sure if the correct English term is district heating, but it’s where you cook the data centres with water that is then cooled down in a long circuit where it’s used to heat nearby homes. It’s basically what we do with excess heat from fossil fuel plants and garbage burners as well (we also use the heat to generate electricity in some cities). I believe some of the data centres build by companies like Facebook and Microsoft are working on this with the local cities, but it’s mainly done because of regulation and political demands and not so much because the companies themselves want to do it by default.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
(It still potentially increases wind buildout so it can have indirect positive impact especially if wind is not competitive at the same prices with fossils)
Also the accounting is "we bought as many MWh of wind power as we used" over some time window, so in reality they are using fossil power in peaks, competing with everyone else and placing pressure to expand fossil based capacity.
These are also the reasons it's probably better to talk about the electricity used instead of trying to translate it to emissions by proxy, which is prone to being gamed due to abovementioned reasons.
(Also the number is high rather than low if you consider that all the individual slices of the emisison pie at this subdivision granularity are pretty small)
Iceland, for example, has abundant energy from various sources such as geothermal. However, that energy is not easy to send across the ocean to consumers. So, Iceland instead smelts a lot of aluminum, which takes a lot of energy, and is far easier to export cost-effectively.
So a kWh produced in Iceland is not exactly the same as a kWh produced in Germany; it's not truly fungible.
In that vein, datacenters are often placed in such areas. One at Microsoft for example is in Wyoming, near a hydro dam that is far from any dense population.
Most of the carbon emitted is in the production of equipment (around 75%) not in their use.
Naturally you should design your systems for maximum efficiency, but since operating expenses are closely approximated by power consumption you are already correctly incentivized to do so.
As you mention, DC operators are already highly incentivized to reduce energy costs, so as wind and solar power continue to drop in costs DC operators will want to fund or buy green power as often as possible.
Getting backup power to be carbon neutral will be a little more challenging in a DC, but it's a walk in the park compared to many sectors. Shelf-stable biofuel is already fairly accessible and using grid scale batteries can reduce the need to combust anything (plus open power arbitrage opportunities).
Can you prove this assertion? The first page of Google results indicates energy is a greater cost than labor, with figures ranging from 60-70 percent of total operating costs.
(i owned a small web hosting company in the early 00s, and am somewhat familiar with the per sq ft cost model of colos and datacenters in general, having had to contract for space and perform part of the buildout myself)
The general disinterest in performance/efficiency work even for large scale datacenters is a major theme of Dan Luu’s writing. I’m not sure how that applies to the rest of the industry but I can attest that my company’s performance engineering team has been zeroed in every round of layoffs we’ve ever had.
The biggest players are running highly, highly efficient software.
As long as the industry is growing (it is), the opportunity cost will be high. It seems more likely it's the opposite of a self correcting problem. My 2 cents.
That doesn't necessarily mean management doesn't care about efficiency and performance, it just means they don't value the performance team (right or wrong).
When they gave up, they concluded that AWS's core advantage was their optimization of the electricity needed for cooling. Given that my friend's company failed to design their systems to heavily optimize for this, the cost of electricity for cooling alone didn't let them get near AWS prices without incurring significant losses. He said that if they did it again, every part of the product would have a strict heat budget.
Maybe your personal experience differs because you were not operating at scale? Larger scale means better negotiating over power / colo costs.
Hyperscalers in particular currently can’t scale out very easily necessarily because many of the DCs have hit local power restrictions so compute power efficiency and density are the primary means to grow capacity. Think apartments in skyscrapers v row houses. So electricity _efficiency_ is what is being sought rather than just pure operational costs of the DCs.
I’m the northern Virginia exurbs hyperscalers have bought out so much of the land it’s now perhaps greater land use than family farms there and starting to encroach upon housing developments. Locals also complain about the noise (there’s a sort of hum from the sheer mass of air and whirring fans) from DCs impacting health. Some areas have been reporting increased rates of hearing disabilities although I can’t recall a study being conducted yet.
In popular siting locations like Ireland, the local power grid is struggling. Data centers make up 18% of Irish electricity consumption: https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/06/13/data-centres-gobbl...
In developing countries like India where the power grid is not stable, to maintain DC uptime you probably need backup generation, which is very expensive very fast.
Just the power consumption in browsers... Thanks node.
Are we really making more efficient systems if they take 100x the compute to fulfill the same transaction.
I'd rather have datacenters than entirety of britain so I think that's easy tradeoff to make.
But on serious side, what a joke of an article. I'd imagine just not driving to work gotta save far more power than average user's datacenter usage footprint.
No need to imagine, road transport is 11.9% of global GHG emissions.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect...
Also the part of now-vacant office spaces could be converted to residential, relieving a bit of pressure on the housing market.
I bet the internet could be still highly useful without all r the surveillance capitalism and use 0.5 or less emissions.
How large part of GDP produced world wide is using these data centers in one way or another (My bet is 80%+).
There isn't a single Fortune 500 company that does not have its data on computers and thus in some data center somewhere (if they are sane). Most also have moved a huge chunk of their processing there too.
Personally I can't even come up with a "serious" business that does not use data centers in one way or another. Even basic mom&pop store that does all of their inventory on a laptop locally and makes all of their products by hand uses data centers if they accept credit/debit card payments or they have a phone number.
From a climate perspective it's almost completely irrelevant how much electricity we use or what percentage is assigned to each thing.
The only thing that matters is that we keep atmospheric CO2 levels stable. We can't just reduce emissions by 50% or whatever, we have to actually just stop.
It's as if there were a water leak from the bathroom tap upstairs and people are talking about which hole in the ceiling would be the best one to plug. It doesn't matter how many holes are in the ceiling, it matters that the tap is on and the sink is overflowing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness
https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/measuring-efficie...
> When the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) was conceived, NREL set an aggressive requirement that its data center achieve an annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.06 or better. Since the facility opened, this goal has been met every year—and the data center has now achieved an annualized PUE rating of 1.036.
> Studies show a wide range of PUE values for data centers, but the overall average tends to be around 1.8. Data centers focusing on efficiency typically achieve PUE values of 1.2 or less. PUE is the ratio of the total amount of power used by a computer data center facility to the power delivered to computing equipment.
It is a metric, but not the only one.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and...
"Estimated global data centre electricity consumption in 2022 was 240-340 TWh1, or around 1-1.3% of global final electricity demand. This excludes energy used for cryptocurrency mining, which was estimated to be around 110 TWh in 2022, accounting for 0.4% of annual global electricity demand. "
The real question to ask is how does jet fuel to get people to headquarters for training fit in.
Even then, stack ‘Em high in Iceland or whatever with water and geothermal, or get coastal in the desert with PVs in the USA if geography matters.
Problem of public will to tackle entrenched interests.
Not a fucking physics problem.
[1]Chasing Carbon: The Elusive Environmental Footprint of Computing: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.02839.pdf
Planetary economies are just a different kind of organism, that at this point is a cyborg.
Thinking about the ideal energy balance devoted to planetary cognition vs planetary kinetics seems like a fascinating way to model the world. The main thing that makes humans so dominant is that we took the risk of devoting more of our energy towards cognition and as a result discovered magical ways to leverage and exponentially increase our kinetic power (e.g. bow and arrow).
What happens when we start devoting more resources towards cognition at a planetary scale?
I don't want to sound like "384kb is enough for everybody" but saying there's a fixed percentage of energy that should go towards computing is weird to me.
But you do sound like you're saying "384kb is enough for everybody". The reason to devote more resources to cognition is is precisely because we can't imagine the possibilities that exist with more clever thinking applied to our limited resources. In the same way, an ape with 10% energy allocated towards cognition (guessing) can't even begin to imagine the magic that gets unlocked by its ancestors that gambled on 20%. Hell, apes can look at us now and still can't understand us.
In this conversation, you're the ape who's blindly suggesting there's little worthwhile in expanding resources towards global computation, and I'm the ape who's blindly suggesting there probably is. Neither of us can honestly predict what might happen, good or bad.
1.5%-2.0% for something that runs a significant portion of the world's economy doesn't seem too bad.
Lots of that computational power is also used to offset other energy consuming tasks. Like video conferencing instead of office buildings or travel.
It's not clear that even 5% going to servers is an issue in that framing. What matters is the value created per person using online services.
Now, the paper has closed and we get news online. It's not quite the same as relaxing in a chair with a printed paper and a cup of coffee, but I'm guessing the per-capita resources used every day are a small fraction.
See I thought so too, I went to lookup the stats in Australia but turns out we banned them years ago (I didn't even notice) but in America: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2023/07/29/us-ban-on...
An estimated 30% of U.S. households used incandescent or halogen incandescent light bulbs in 2020
Americans are still the funniest
“I’m happy the Department of Energy is out here making sure that we can all save money because we’re too dumb to figure out how to do it ourselves,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Penn., said.
Does the DoE have the opportunity to say "you're welcome!" to Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Penn?
Should also add in: Remember to pump up your tyres! it helps save petrol!
Now that lighting is cheaper, we can have more of it at night. By properly lighting parking lots, community streets, and parks we can reduce crime while increasing economic and leisure opportunities in cities.
I don't think the 10% figure is too much. Lighting frees up spare time for leisure, study, or even business (safely). If anything, lighting is the ultimate service because it gives people more time to do what we must.
Global Electrical Consumption = 25,000 TWh Data centers @ 2% of global usage = 25,000 * 0.02 = 500 TWh Cryptocurrency estimated usage in 2022[1][2] = 100-140 TWh
Crypto uses 100 / (500 + 100) = 16% of the power usage of data centers + crypto. Surprising and disappointing.
[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco...
This paper has it's own problems with conflicts of interest, but it has gained traction recently and is worth a read to see things from another perspective.
https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/14/3/35
Could also look into the work of Troy Cross, Margot Paez, and Daniel Batten who are climate activists and pro-Bitcoin because of the incentives it provides around building out renewable energy and mitigating methane emissions.
And NY Times is notoriously anti-Bitcoin, to the point you have to ask, "do they have an agenda"?
Like most defenses of bitcoin’s carbon footprint, the paper you linked makes the case that theoretically maybe bitcoin could be carbon negative in the future if certain things happen. If you look at the actual current source of power for miners weighted by hashrate in the US, it’s mostly coal and natural gas. Among companies that don’t have to report this, such as miners in Russia and Kazakstan, it’s likely as bad or worse.
> And NY Times is notoriously anti-Bitcoin, to the point you have to ask, "do they have an agenda"?
They have also published a lot of things that have been criticized as being too pro-crypto (such as the Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto).
What’s really striking about crypto using 16% of the power usage of data centers is the population served and utility provided.
The internet has roughly 5.2 billion users, all of which utilize the cited datacenters.
Bitcoin, as one example, has an all time high of 568k daily transactions.
US adults on average do 2.3 financial transactions per day.
Bitcoin, in the busiest day on the network ever, powered enough transactions for the economic activity of a small US city.
Anyone can look at a block explorer for [pick a network] to find that, at best, the total number of worldwide crypto users is roughly 0.5% of the internet population.
So 16% of the power for 0.5% of the users - and who knows what value/utility is achieved with whatever those crypto users are doing (not much).
It’s disgusting.
Of course I think regulating the PUE is a terrible idea. This is yet another aspect of the economy that is better-regulated by a carbon tax.
> Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center. PUE is determined by dividing the total amount of power entering a data center by the power used to run the IT equipment within it. PUE is expressed as a ratio, with overall efficiency improving as the quotient decreases toward 1.0.
From https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/power...
Heat recovery from datacenters for district heating is one way to increase the efficiency; I wonder if it impacts PUE?
An example of where the PUE analysis really fails: I have two facilities, one on each American coast, and they operate in a primary-spare arrangement. This is far, far less energy efficient than if I have 20 datacenters all over the place and I am prepared to lose 2 of them at any time. In the latter architecture I am using much less energy, but enjoying much better reliability. PUE does not capture this type of architectural waste. It also fails to reflect the problem of burning megawatts because you are running your logs analysis pipeline in Perl or whatever.
Please.
Restaurants use as little salt in your food as they can manage.
That capital would be much better invested building solar farms or transmission capacity.
I guess that’s what you get for trash-talking liberalism for decades.
Of course the details need to be worked out, but if a business district had a WHN, it would make it easier for mom-and-pop datacenters to built in urban environments.
It wouldn't be that much different than the steam loops that lots of existing cities have in their downtown core.
First mode, for cold outside weather e.g. in winter is free cooling, where you just use convection or fans to bring in cool outside air, push out warm inside air (there are also variants of this like "tokyo wheel", but those are unsuitable for heat reuse). You could at best use the warm air output (~25°C) to directly heat neighboring buildings, but the air ducts you need for that will be massive. Comfort level in the buildings heated this way will be low due to high air velocity and associated noise. Also, air ducts are a fire hazard and high maintenance to keep dust and vermin out.
The other mode is water cooling (either direct or indirect) where you cool your servers directly by water or the air through water radiators. The warm water is then either cooled down with outside air, outside air plus evaporation (both possible only when it is not too warm outside) or compressive cooling (aka heat pump, the usual big MW-scale machines in the cellar). In those cases, district heating will only be possible if you can reach a sufficient water temperature somehow. E.g. directly cooling your servers uses at most 30°C intake and outputs at most 50°C. District heating usually runs at 70°C, so you would need a running heat pump to make up for the 20K difference. When the servers are indirectly air-cooled, the difference will be even larger. So you will always need those big MW-scale heatpumps running, just to make use of your waste heat, at great expense and for the uncertain benefit of maybe selling your heat to neighbors. This is deadly for mom-and-pop datacenters because of the uncertainty (maybe you can sell your heat, maybe it'll be too expensive) and the huge investment, your cooling equipment will be far larger (more and bigger heatpumps), more expensive, redundant (because in summer you will still need to have equipment to give of heat into the outside air).
All the sufficiently large customers I know of are looking to move abroad, for this reason and the astronomical cost of electricity in Germany.
I think most DC equipment should have built in coolant loops, standardized to the point where you can order all the equipment and just plug it in.
Spec that DC components can run at a much higher temperature.
The issue is that DC operators get to trade money for a natural resource (water, power) for lower up front build costs. Owner operators do a much better job, but Google still extracts billions of gallons of water from municipal supplies, often even ground water which I think should be a crime.
I'd also like to see the cost of cooling be passed on to the cloud customer. Mixing it into the hourly price causes a tragedy of the commons.
The market is very good at figuring these things out and you can push it in the right direction by putting a price on carbon.
Or you just do what Texas does and let Solar rip.
In sum, "surveillance capitalism" is costly to the environment. (Nevermind the other effects it may have on people.) Obviously those who profit from so-called "tech" companies will be in favor of maintaining the status quo. Every industry is a target for "disruption", except the so-called "tech" industry. Huh.
1. "Cloud computing, still in its early days, is growing rapidly. aws created the industry in 2006 as a way to make money from its excess storage capacity by offering to host other companies' data."
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/08/29/the-cloud-comp...
This is a ridiculous take.
Not saying we shouldn’t be invested in efficiency here. It’s possible that we need regulation and the natural incentives of cost control aren’t enough. I just honestly don’t see the alarm.
What do I do with this information? Sure, Belgium is big, but is it like, big? It turns out that it's... does the math... roughly 0.00006 times the total area of the Earth. That doesn't sound big. And if bad thing X happens every year, it would take more than 16000 years to cover the Earth, or 800 if we say 95% of the Earth is water anyway. That timeline also sounds manageable.
I'm not trying to spin disaster positively, but will someone please just start using "affected area / total potential area" or something, instead of yardsticks and football fields.
I shouldn’t be surprised that HN users would applaud this energy use in the name of value, when these same users are stockholders of the companies creating this so-called value.
These facilities are run by companies who obsess over reducing opex. If you want to reduce datacenter power consumption, figure out what drives on-prem compute and create financial incentives to drive that workload to cloud. More demand equals more capital invest and more efficiency.
Creating a vastly superior intelligence without giving it a deep rooted sense of "metaphysical good" (or itself just removing that part in time) has only one possible outcome. It will crush us and it will not care at all.
Anyways, merging into such an AGI is, hopefully, the future of humanity.