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Comment by linksnapzz | Hacker News Reader

There are industrial bakeries that burn that much natural gas (powerwise); although the bakery probably smells better.

I can attest for the smells better. Now, I'm left wondering which smells worse, an AI datacenter or a large beer brewery. As a kid, we had a Mrs. Baird's bread bakery which was in the heart of town that students would take field trips to see (which is no longer there and is now apartments). On the other side of town is a Budweiser plant, and it's infamous for being so odorific but it is located way the hell out there.

Yeah; an industrial brewery could smell off at times. But the ppl going on about datacenters as though it’s like a pulp mill or iron foundry relocating to your neighborhood are a little much.

I used to work nextdoor to the broadcast headquarters to an old sports cable network and their satellite uplinks. They had several diesel generators on site to ensure power never went down else their entire network went dark. If power was lost, they had batteries for immediate power that lasted long enough for the generators to kick in. When the generators kicked in, it went from being a nice quiet area to being in the parking lot of a truck stop with all of the engines running. If these new datacenters are powering themselves with generators, then yeah, I'd not want them to be around me either.

I think your ire at the discussion is pointed in the wrong direction.

What bakery are you thinking of that pulls the equivalent of a mid sized nuclear power plant? Because you’re off by an order of magnitude I think. (2.2MW maybe)

I suspect the Nabisco plant in Chicago pulls about ~12 million therms worth of natural gas, at 30kwh per therm, that's pretty significant.

You "suspect", but your suspicion comes with a unit of energy, which simply does not make sense in the context. The rest of us are talking about effect.

Shrug

You asked about energy usage; but I have no idea as to how that bakery's natural gas usage affects the people surrounding it.

The smell of freshly baked fig newtons might offset the possible increased cost of gas-per-cubic-foot.

I guess we can go the long way round. How often does the bakery use 12 million therms of natural gas?

ok, but like, my stove uses some therms of natural gas, but its not at all comparable in terms of scale to a data center.

what makes this bakery comparable in terms of energy usage and pollution?

A quick google says that the entire city of Chicago draws about 3.4GW - are you saying that one bakery uses over 2/3 of the draw of the entire city?

No, he is saying that if they were to replace natural gas with electricity, it would use 2.2 gigawatts of electricity.

I don't think the conversion is as straightforward as they claimed. But they're also not claiming that they currently pull gigawatts of electricity.

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