This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The republicans are also gutting our national parks and selling them off.
Big cuts and sweeping changes have destabilized the National Park Service and its core missions.
National parks facing ‘nightmare’ under Trump, warns ex-director of service
Jonathan Jarvis claimed the agency is now in the hands of a “bunch of ideologues” who would have no issue watching it “go down in flames” – and see parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite as potential “cash cows”, ripe for privatization.
So this article is talking about the Phoenix-Metro area because most data centers and INTEL are in Chandler, AZ. They offset heating and cooling costs with the lack of natural disasters and highly predictable weather. +4° doesn’t mean s* to the metro. It’s literally built to survive +150F° (street) temps.
The Central Arizona Project (CAP) does a good job to ensure our water supply but has been corrupted by foreign “needs” like alfalfa for Saudi livestock. The great Hohokam tribes didn’t plan for this when they built the original canals 1,000 years ago and connected the Pima with the means to produce the world’s greatest cotton. Olive oil, citrus, and so many other local agro THRIVE here. We shouldn’t be dumping water into Saudi alfalfa.
Regardless, data centers, Intel, Motorola, AMEX, Raytheon, Charles Schwab… have all paid their required taxes and put all three of my kids through the best public schools our tax dollars could fund. House values are holding strong and because of how many H1B visas live here, Chandler/Tempe/Mesa has some of the best variety of foods than most places in the southwest.
We have one of the largest nuclear power plants, our solar and wind capabilities are off the charts… we just need an administration that shuns fossil fuels and will stand up against farming exports. Oddly, both go hand in hand.
I gotta wonder, given the power bill of these sites, why they're letting so much heat energy out into the atmosphere
Surely at least some of that heat could be tuned back into electricity. Yeah it's not gonna pay all the bills, but surely at a certain level of scale, there's gotta be some benefit in it just from an economical standpoint, let alone the ecological benefits of not accelerating climate change
For the same reason why they let so much water evaporate. They could convert some of that heat back into electricity, just like they could run closed-loop cooking systems, but it would cost more money than it would save. There's no financial incentive to do so....
.... Until regulators start insisting! These datacenter folks have gobs of money, we shouldn't be shy about requiring them to not ruin the local environment.
It would be best to do it on a national level, otherwise these folks will just shift the development to someplace without the regulations.
why they’re letting so much heat energy out into the atmosphere
Surely at least some of that heat could be tuned back into electricity.
To harness useful energy from heat, you have to let heat flow from hotter areas to colder areas, to permit entropy to increase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. "High" entropy means that energy is more disordered or dispersed, while "low" entropy means that energy is more ordered or concentrated.
They might be able to harness energy from the flow from warmer to cooler areas, but whether or not they do that, at the end of the day, they have to let the heat go, just like a power plant that uses water-evaporation-assisted cooling. If they're near the ocean, they can maybe stick it into the water instead of the air, and maybe to some degree, you can stick heat into groundwater. But they can't just take a unit of heat and convert it into a unit of useful work and not have that unit of waste heat.
You can, in areas that have a use for heat, make use of that waste heat. For example, district heating can make use of the waste heat from a power plant
you pipe steam or something from the power plant that you want to be cooler to homes that you want to be warmer.
District heating (also known as heat networks) is a system for distributing heat generated in a centralized location through a system of insulated pipes for residential and commercial heating requirements such as space heating and water heating. The heat is often obtained from a cogeneration plant burning fossil fuels or biomass, but heat-only boiler stations, geothermal heating, heat pumps and central solar heating are also used, as well as heat waste from factories and nuclear power electricity generation. District heating plants can provide higher efficiencies and better pollution control than localized boilers. According to some research, district heating with combined heat and power (CHPDH) is the cheapest method of cutting carbon emissions, and has one of the lowest carbon footprints of all fossil generation plants.
If you live somewhere where that works, it's basically "free" heating from an energy standpoint, which is cool. Much of the US isn't well-suited to residential district heating, because we tend to have residences in low-density suburban areas that are pretty spread out and where it's a pain to transport heat around, but we do have some district heating in city cores. Manhattan, which is one area where we do have high density, famously uses steam heating.
Today, Con Edison operates the largest commercial steam system in the world (larger than the next nine combined).[4] The organization within Con Edison responsible for the system's operation, known as Steam Operations, provides steam service to over 1,700 commercial and residential customers in Manhattan from Battery Park to 96th Street uptown on the west side, and 89th Street on the east side of Manhattan. Roughly 27 billion pounds (12,000,000 t) of steam flow through the system every year.
For that to work, you have to actually have some use for that heating (and you probably only want heating some of the year, unless you're up in the polar regions or on a mountain or something).
You can also use waste heat to drive industrial processes that require heat, but waste heat from a datacenter isn't super-hot compared to, say, that from a power plant, so I don't know how interesting that necessarily is. Lots of chemical processes that might require elevating something to a much higher temperature, but a datacenter
at least using current computing hardware
normally tries to keep temperatures from getting to something like the boiling point of water.
Some greenhouses will also use waste heat (in the case of power plants doing cogeneration, some of the waste carbon dioxide as well) to help boost plant growth.
This guy heats.
In less fair weather places you could do district heat. Use a data center to provide heat for a few Condo complexes or something.
There are systems that do heat recovery, but that didn't really help this problem
The primary issue is that there's a limit to how much energy you can get out based on the difference in temperature between the cold fluid (liquid or gas) and the hot fluid. With data centres it's maybe 20°C? Based on that assumption and the Carnot Theorem you get a maximum work extraction efficiency of about 6-7%.
Unfortunately, in the data centres they obey the laws of thermodynamics.
It would work better in places that get colder, but unfortunately places like that don't tend to have as much available electricity (or infrastructure).
An aside:
We are starting to run up against fundamental laws of how much energy is required to do a certain amount of computation. i.e. In order to do a computation that moves a system from a state X to another state Y, there is a minimum amount of entropy change. That entropy change requires a certain amount of energy based on thermodynamics, known as the Landauer Limit.
We were already only about a billion times less efficient than the limit in 2012. I would wager we've improved computation per watt by 1-2 orders of magnitude since then. Which means we might only be 10^7^ or so off of the limit. That sounds like a lot, but when you think about how fast we're improving...
Yeah, this is fundamental; if you use a thousand joules of energy to do work (of any kind) you will ultimately end up producing a thousand joules of waste heat. The only choice one has in the matter is where that heat goes.
This is a major reason why I get annoyed at the people pooh-poohing space-based data centers. It literally puts the waste heat outside the environment. It should be everything that data center opponents say they want.
I read an article a month or two ago that explained without an atmosphere to carry away the heat, the chips would just super-heat and melt.
That article was incorrect, then. There are many satellites already in orbit that have computers in them - basically all of them do, nowadays - and cooling them is a well understood engineering problem.
Space-based data centers are wildly impractical to bordering on not physically possible. The largest feature on the ISS, which you can resolve from earth with a pair of binoculars, is the radiators, and it generates 70 kW. Large data centers use >100MW of electricity. You'd be looking at large fractions of a square mile of just radiators.
The radiator panels on the ISS are 2,500 square meters in area. The radiator panels are 645 square meters.
Most of the proposals for space-based data centers have ended up focusing on plans to place thousands of individual satellites into orbit, not just one big space station with everything packed inside it. Scott Manley recently did an analysis of the cooling requirements, he worked through all the numbers and explained how it works, and there really doesn't seem to be a problem here.
Oh man they can't afford to gain any degrees in Phoenix.
Important context to the headline:
Temperatures downwind of data centers averaged 1.3 to 1.6 degrees F warmer than upwind temperatures and reached as high as 4 degrees F above upwind temperatures. The heat impact was detectable up to a third of a mile, or about five city blocks, distant from the perimeter of datacenters.
So it sounds like a very local effect, that is not measurable more than 1/3 miles from the datacenter. Doubt it will be noticeable at all in a climate as warm as Arizona
That's 2.2°C.
Which neighborhoods are downwind of the effect? Are there enough of the right white people there for it to trigger responses from the supremacist government?
Can this be regulated at some point? The planet is going to get scorched?
At some point, sure. Not until at least 2028, though.
Eh, elections this year might do more than you think.
I mean I'm not super hopeful and have accepted being cooked, but I'm open to being surprised
This could've been regulated decades ago. We chose not to regulate it, because we were told it would hurt the economy, and we always choose benefits to the economy, whether they are real or imagined, over environmental regulation. Always have, always will. We're still doing it today. We could regulate it today too. But AI is now the foundation of our economy, so we will choose what we imagine will benefit the economy, even if it is completely imaginary, over the real impacts to the environment, yet again. Because we always do. The cult of capitalism has brainwashed us all and there doesn't seem to be any escape. The capital in the economy must grow, forever. The people who benefit from it will make sure to tell us so when they tell us what decision we must make for the sake of the economy that benefits them. And we will listen to them, because they have lots of money so they are ideal successful people whose success we rely on for our own meager lives.
I mean if you're living in hell what's an extra 4 degrees? You're not going outside a good portion of the year anyway.
Humans aren't the only lifeforms impacted by the heat.
I wonder where the vast majority of air intake happens on a building like this. Asking for a friend
Most likely not one centralized spot. It'll vary by location, but most will likely have cooling units on the roof that each have their own intake.
Hrmmm
could they also kill themselves?
