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Comment by hmokiguess | Hacker News Reader

Can it be both? Trying to think of a data centre themed expedition now where you go visit the robots and interact with the machines

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You know, you joke (I think?) but data center companies could genuinely at least open up for tours to try to appeal to the public, if public approval is apparently such a concern. It's funny that they haven't done it at all yet.

Think nuclear power plants in the 60s or 70s, many of them were open for tours or school field trips or such to try to make them more appealing to the populace around them. I haven't heard of a single DC doing the same thing, unless you're a potential customer. Isn't this stuff kind of basic?

That won't work when your tour guide can't even answer questions about what the computers do because theyre all running VMs that are rented out on an ad-hoc basis.

They could say anything and the visitors would have to believe it. A canyon tour guide tells me a story about why a rock formation is named the way it is. I have no clue if it’s true. But I enjoy it still.

The tour guide could just give that answer to any such question. It'd be comparable to the answer given to someone who wants to know what that new railroad which was built where there used to be fields or forest is used for: people ride it to go somewhere, freight is passing over it going places.

Having said this I do feel like these data centres should be built in such a way that waste heat is used in some way. Use it to heat structures, greenhouses, whatever. I used to live in a place where a large fraction of the block heating came from a nearby power plant with additional gas-fired heating for when the waste heat wasn't enough. The same can be done with waste heat from data centres by using heat pumps. This can work in colder climates and in the cooler seasons in moderate climates.

Waste heat from power plants isn’t always useful because it is low grade heat… but it is still much, much, much better than the 35-60C water you could get from a data center.

That is what you use the heat pumps for, to transform what you call "low-grade heat" to... "higher-grade heat"?

The COP for a heat pump doing such a transformation can be very high, i.e. for a relatively low power input you get a lot of gain.

Do the math on pumping 40C water any distance in a loop. It is hard to make it worth it. The water cools off and the pumping takes significant energy, plus the pump and all the piping cost something.

Then using a heat pump on it makes it even worse.

Low grade heat source is not a term I made up- it refers to heat sources under 100C.

Even much hotter low grade heat usually goes unused. You usually need a perfect confluence of a warmer source, very close need for building heat, and a willingness to pay more for environmental friendliness for it all to work out.

Here's an article on the subject of using waste heat from data centres and other sources for district heating. It includes the math you told me to do as well as references to other articles on the specific subject of using "low-grade heat sources" in combination with heat pumps to feed district heating networks.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...

And, again, the economics. The hypothetical Polish project cited in the paper showed a breakeven in 6.1 years... if one ignores time value of money and assumes it is delivered for the estimated cost. The annuity formula tells me that at a reasonable 10% discount rate, payback would be in 10 years. Modest overruns in cost from this naive estimation push that to never.

https://scispace.com/pdf/planning-data-center-waste-heat-re-...

And again this is a pretty idealized case-- very nearby housing, optimistic estimated costs.

Other projects analyzed in your paper had "raw" paybacks of 15 years and 17 years-- AKA never in actuality.

When we are talking about protecting the environment, efficiency and return on capital is important. You'd be better dumping those projects into generating more green energy instead of trying to reclaim the DC energy. This is why:

> > Even much hotter low grade heat usually goes unused. You usually need a perfect confluence of a warmer source, very close need for building heat, and a willingness to pay more for environmental friendliness for it all to work out.

I don't think train tracks are comparable because they're effectively one dimensional. You dont need to burn down the forest you just need about 20 feet or so on either side of the track.

WRT the environmental aspect, I think it's patently obvious that nobody who builds these things cares because there are a number of far simpler ways to reduce their footprint which dont get implemented.

Pumping waste heat out to residential heating or some hypothetical industrial application is, at best, just recycling. It only makes sense if you have to accept that the waste inevitably exists whether you recycle it or not, otherwise recycling is never the best way to do anything.

I think there's also inherent risk in building infrastructure that relies on the continual operation of this massive facility that could just as easily be shut down in a few years and written off as a fad. Trusting silly valley to support any product over the long term is never a safe bet.

In the Netherlands I visited a nuclear reactor in middle/highschool. Literally something that left such an impression that I still talk about two decades later.

Letting kids into places where science and technology happens has such an impact. We should really enable that as much as we can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_Institute_Delft

I genuinely think it was a big loss to our society that we stopped regularly doing this. I had a few such field trips in grade school, but nothing comparable to a factory or nuclear plant.

It's a combination of post-9/11 security paranoia, companies not wanting to do anything that doesn't directly make them money, and the loss of manufacturing and heavy industry in the West, all together. It's sad.

DC tours are probably a nightmare to do in a PCI-compliant (and the myriad other standards they claim compliance with) environment.

Yeah, but draconian laws aside (I jest a bit) if you can ensure safety for kids (and clumsy adults) visiting factories and NUCLEAR plants I guess you could manage the same for data centers and deal with a reasonable number of headaches.

It's not really too complicated, iirc. They already generally have visitor processes set up for customers and prospective customers.

The servers themselves are in cages, of course, and presumably the tour wouldn't actually go into those. Plus, yeah, what the other comment said.

> data center companies could genuinely at least open up for tours to try to appeal to the public, if public approval is apparently such a concern.

Do you actually find anything appealing about a datacenter? I've been to one and while it was mildly cool from the standpoint of "wow how do they manage this many machines" I didn't find anything appealing about it that would make me want it in my neighborhood.

Sure, I think they're neat. I've been inside a few smaller ones but not any true modern hyperscaler style ones. They're big buildings with cool security systems, power setups, HVAC setups. It'd be fun to see inside. Nothing on the level of a nuclear plant, of course, but about as cool as it'd be to tour any big industrial facility, I'd imagine.

Which isn't to imply I'm "pro data center" or whatever but if they're going to build them it'd at least be nice to show people inside. This seems like pretty basic PR stuff that developers of large industrial facilities (again, nuclear plants, hydro dams etc) figured out ages ago.

Or build a park on top of the datacenter as a living roof?

Maybe even use the waste heat to help grow things in cold, dark climates?

It’s pretty different; but locally they covered a good chunk of a freeway with a very nice park to mollify the residents.

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