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Comment by error9348 | Hacker News Reader

I won't repeat fact that this number is low.

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?

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Electricity is fungible, so when big operators buy wind-only power from the market, the rest of the demand uses the non-green power left in the pool.

(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)

Yeah. There are lot of such “feel good”, technically true, but not logically expected reporting. The solar panels on my roof generate a lot of electricity while I’m not home, and not really using it, but I feed into the grid, and pull when I need it(when the sun is not shining). I can’t boast that my energy is so renewable that I can start mining bitcoins at home - that’d be stupid.

Electricity is a little less fungible than folks make it out to be.

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.

Some people believe any electrical use and heat consumption exacerbates the carbon issue in equal amounts

Obviously the logic is flawed, but its not obvious to them and they are many

To quantify this to put it in perspective, the research I've seen puts waste heat is in the very low single digit percentage points (I can't remember exact numbers but I think it was something like one or two percent) of climate impact - and our biggest sources of waste heat by a large margin would likely be thermal power plants, where for a coal plant for instance you dispose of more energy in waste heat than using all the electricity generated for resistive (100% efficient) heating, and that's before thinking about all the carbon and the other pollutants (and then have to deal with huge amounts of fly ash left over). After thermal power plants, the next largest sources of waste heat would likely be industrial processes.

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.

Going to have to define “waste heat” in this context, the crowd that needs to read this currently believes “energy use I don't like is generating waste”

Also, what about consideration for how much other energy is displayed by automated processes doing things in the cloud? Without the datacenter and the cloud applications, how much carbon would be created through more manual processes?

"100% zero-carbon powered or on track to be"

Most of the carbon emitted is in the production of equipment (around 75%) not in their use.

The authors seems to confuse and conflate both metrics, assuming correlation.

yes but some of this 2% require massive amount of potable wáter as cooling and this (zero-carbon initiative) only account of direct electricity use not indirect use

Why do you need potable water for cooling?

You don’t, but I’m assuming that many companies which either sell or does water cooling may still use municipal treated water because doing it differently requires quite a lot of corporation.

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.

yes you need ,sorry for being late too the the part, you don't use salt water and contaminated water source because they damage the machine faster , the only example in function was a showcase from Microsoft few years back when the put few servers running, but it was most expensive than consume the clean water from the same source we do so mostly a stunt, maybe a preview.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

They only care about computing power consumption when it is not in their control. You mining crypto on solar for world peace: Evil pollution demon. They burning 2% of all power on nuclear powered banking, military, and NSA spy rigs: The bestest environmentalists evar.

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