[HN Gopher] Hetzner Price Adjustment
___________________________________________________________________
Hetzner Price Adjustment
Author : gmemstr
Score : 266 points
Date : 2022-08-11 08:41 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.hetzner.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.hetzner.com)
| xvilka wrote:
| Maybe at least increasing energy costs will force people and
| companies to ditch Electron-based "programs" (or Java/NodeJS in
| case of servers). Native is much more energy efficient by
| definition.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I don't know about the energy usage of NodeJS but the jvm can
| be pretty efficient. Switching implementations or tuning an
| implementation is easier than rewriting an app to native c++
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3475716.3475774?sid=SCITR...
| sneak wrote:
| No. Most people do end user computing (where the Electron-based
| apps run) on laptops, which, for battery size/weight/runtime
| purposes, are already power constrained.
|
| The efforts are going into making browser engines and
| processors more efficient.
|
| > _Native is much more energy efficient by definition._
|
| "much more" is not true. It may be much more efficient in some
| cases, but with modern runtimes for interpreted code for many
| operations it is very close to native performance.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Native may also mean the software may not exist, because it's
| too expensive, which is more sustainable.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| first I've heard of java not being energy efficient
| sremani wrote:
| If I am running Hetzner, I will be looking at an aggressive North
| American expansion. The energy cost gap between US and Europe are
| going to get bigger.
| riskable wrote:
| > The energy cost gap between US and Europe are going to get
| bigger.
|
| Only briefly. The fracking boom is basically over:
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/01/1027822/fracking...
|
| We're presently running a good portion of our heating and
| electricity via the cheap gas that the fracking boom unlocked
| but that's going to taper off pretty quickly over the next
| decade. Because fracking was never a long-term solution.
|
| Here's what's probably going to happen: Places like Europe will
| be investing _heavily_ in renewable energy and locking in long-
| term contracts to get things like solar panels and wind turbine
| blades. Meanwhile the US will continue "business as usual"
| thanks to the largely for-profit power sector that only looks
| at next quarter. Then as the cheap gas from fracking runs out
| the US will be screwed and have the same problem that Europe is
| currently having.
| jmbwell wrote:
| Fracking changed the market but the Western Hemisphere is not
| dependent on it. There is enough oil and gas in the North and
| South American continents to last hundreds of years by all
| projections.
|
| What's likely to happen is the global market will split into
| three regional markets: the Americas, Europe and Africa, and
| Russia and Asia. The US will recalibrate for more local
| feedstocks and very much continue business as usual. The
| other markets will realign producing regions and consuming
| regions along political lines and eventually get back to
| business as usual. The difference will be the prices in each
| region, which will go back to pre-globalization independent
| activity.
|
| Other than that, yes, renewables and other sources will see
| heavy investment, but they depend on raw materials that come
| primarily from unstable (or newly unstable) political
| regions. I'd say it very much remains to be seen how this
| affects prices between renewables and petroleum.
|
| What's clear is that we are all heading into an "all of the
| above" energy policy regime that will no longer enjoy the
| perks and stability afforded by the global market.
| sremani wrote:
| This is a flawed analysis.
|
| 1. Permian basin itself will provide fuel for at least 300
| years and right now if you have skills, you can get well paid
| job in Texas.
|
| 2. Texas has so much Wind and Solar footprint already it will
| make most European countries headspin, and we are not even
| adding Iowa! So, US has massive set up already and the best
| part is, unlike Germany, US has windmills where Wind is.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Just write efficient software, then you won't need that many
| servers.
| rozenmd wrote:
| Same vibes as "I would simply write bug-free software"
| cbg0 wrote:
| If you're operating at a small scale of a few servers (like
| most people using Hetzner), re-engineering the code that you
| already have to be more efficient will cost considerably more
| than paying your server bills for a year.
| michaelmior wrote:
| While this is true to a degree, development costs also come
| into play here. Let's simplify the problem a lot for a moment.
| Suppose the only thing you care about is cost and the only
| things you can control are the hardware you're running on and
| the code it runs. You can optimize your code to use less
| hardware, which would lower operational costs. But you also
| have to pay developers to optimize the code. In some cases, it
| may be more cost effective to run less efficient code rather
| than pay for the development time to optimize.
| tgv wrote:
| Well, let's play that game. 0.22EUR/kWh. So a 1kW server
| costs almost EUR2000/year. If you write Python vs. Go, the
| performance increase can be 10 fold, so you'd save
| EUR1800/yr. So when you're running 55 Python servers, you
| could earn 1 dev by rewriting (assuming EUR100k/yr, all in).
|
| Not to upset anyone: there are a lot of assumptions. It's
| just ballpark numbers. There's a large difference between
| Python v. Go for tensorflow and as a Django backend.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I do sometimes wonder about the global cost to run Python and
| Ruby versus equivalent but literally-more-efficient programs
| that otherwise do the same thing in e.g. Go or Nim.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| You can pay lots of mediocre engineers mediocre salaries to
| ship tons of inefficient mediocre code. Or you can pay a few
| rockstar engineers high salaries to ship small and efficient
| software. Basically the WhatsApp model.
| mikedelago wrote:
| Every algorithm I write ends up being O(2^n)
| yread wrote:
| That could just be because your inputs are very small
| dangerface wrote:
| Love Hetzner great to see a hosting company thats being upfront
| and transparent about its prices.
|
| So tired of hosting companies doing dodgy stuff with their
| pricing like giving you the first month 99% off but wording it
| like you will pay that month to month.
| onphonenow wrote:
| AWS has never raised prices on me.
| nik736 wrote:
| Don't worry they will. At least in Germany :-)
|
| Electricity pricing is insane and will only get worse. I
| doubt AWS will operate a whole region at a loss.
| wongarsu wrote:
| AWS EC2 is like 6x the price of Hetzner cloud (4x with
| reserved instances). I imagine AWS has a lot of room to
| absorb price swings, if they want to.
| Dunedan wrote:
| Amazon invests a lot in its own wind and solar parks.
| Because of that, energy prices on the open market shouldn't
| affect them too much.
|
| Read more about that at https://sustainability.aboutamazon.
| com/environment/renewable...
| nik736 wrote:
| Interesting, but looking at their map they will go live
| in Germany in 2025. Which is way too late to ride this
| out.
| Dunedan wrote:
| Continental Europe has a synchronous power grid, so
| Amazon can also use electricity produced outside of
| Germany for its German data centers.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Transit lines even in Germany are already at capacity,
| and the French are buying up whatever capacity they can
| because of their nuclear foolishness.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Buuut... Just because you made a good business move and
| hedged one of your raw materials, doesn't mean your
| competitors did. If your competitors didn't, then you
| might as well rise prices and just take the extra as
| profit.
|
| Or... look at it another way, you bought some nice energy
| futures contracts when they were cheap. You might earn
| more selling those energy futures contracts now they're
| very valuable than you make putting that energy into
| servers and selling the compute.
| vegai_ wrote:
| Dunno about you, but that tells me something about their
| profit margins.
| klarq wrote:
| They had boutique prices (think 10x Hetzner price) to begin
| with. And cost control is notoriously difficult.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| because everything except the loss leader (EC2) has triple+
| digit markup
| lucb1e wrote:
| What is "loss leader"? Do you mean they make a loss on EC2,
| or that it's the bottom entry if you'd sort by profit? I'd
| assume the former but making a loss at AWS' price level
| would be extremely impressive.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Interesting that the colo electricity cost goes up that much,
| that's a lot more expensive than what I will pay as a normal
| consumer, I'd have thought they'd get better discounts.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Colo costs are just insane compared to consumer prices.
|
| At home: 12 or 42 EUR/month (details1), depending on whether I
| want gigabit upload or not. Advantages:
|
| - fast LAN speeds,
|
| - don't need to go anywhere to do hardware
| maintenance/replacement/additions,
|
| - low cost,
|
| - partially solar powered if you have solar panels,
|
| - don't need to make things fit in a rack (can be a raspberry
| pi, an old laptop, or whatever you like),
|
| - likely you have more space available, and you get to share
| that gigabit uplink if you pay for it for your server.
|
| Colocation: EUR128 / month (120 base price, 8 electricity in
| germany; if you want to fly to Finland for accessing your
| hardware, then electricity is half the price). Advantages:
|
| - redundant power supply,
|
| - maybe noise if you don't have a separate room for this stuff,
|
| - you can do this also if your home has poor internet.
|
| 1 I pay EUR50/month for my internet connection regardless (I
| didn't buy a bigger bundle for the server), the server uses
| ~35W average which makes ~26 kWh/month which makes ~9
| EUR/month. Though, I'd pay the base connection fee for
| electricity anyway so the _added_ cost is even a bit lower.
| Rent is about EUR6 per m2, but I have my stuff in between
| storage (above and below) so the column above those 1.5 m2 is
| basically cut in three, coming out to about 3 EUR /month added
| cost. The _added_ cost of hosting a server at home is about 12
| euros per month. If I wanted to upgrade to gigabit symmetric
| internet, that would be an added 30 EUR /month (total 42
| EUR/month). At 35W it doesn't make much of a difference for
| cooling, but there is no AC installed in my home anyway.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > At home: 12 or 42 EUR/month (details1), depending on
| whether I want gigabit upload or not.
|
| For me it's either 40EUR a month if I want Gigabit down or
| move to a different city in case I want Gigabit up. Which is
| actually pretty good for current German standards; most can
| only dream of Gigabit down. Also, your home link is meager
| compared to a Gigabit link with proper redundant links to
| IXPs.
|
| If you have a big home with solar power, appropriate cooling,
| a good connection and space to stuff servers away then yes,
| you can outprice collocation - but that's excluding a lot of
| costs you had before; if I was already running a server farm,
| collocating my servers would be even cheaper ;) If, however,
| you live in a flat in a city or in a rural area with bad
| connection [0], these prices are very competitive.
|
| [0] So, most of Germany.
| 88 wrote:
| Does your ISP allow you to use their service to host a
| server? Most expressly prohibit it in their terms and
| conditions.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I remember in 2005 or so, there were people that got
| letters from their ISP to stop hosting things, and blocking
| port 25 was common until about 5-10 years after that but
| then net neutrality became more of a topic. Haven't heard
| of any such trouble since then.
|
| There are also ISPs that expressly encourage it. Formerly I
| was with XS4ALL who encouraged it when I asked them on the
| phone (long time ago), nowadays their spiritual successor
| is Freedom Internet. I think the name says enough :)
| Semaphor wrote:
| That is pretty uncommon in Germany (possibly illegal?),
| here I can host whatever I want.
| xuki wrote:
| > At home: 12 or 42 EUR/month (details1), depending on
| whether I want gigabit upload or not.
|
| Your consumer gigabit connection is not comparable to a DC
| gigabit connection. Your ISP is over subscribing 20x and
| hoping people don't use anywhere near their capacity. To make
| it fair you should compare it to a business plan with a
| proper SLA.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > business plan with a proper SLA
|
| If I am that serious, then I'd also want the redundant
| power and would have a budget for it. For business,
| 130EUR/month is going to be a _fraction_ of the cost of
| your first employee. The scenario posed was "as a normal
| consumer".
| kuboble wrote:
| I believe in EU household electricity is largely subsidized and
| the industry always paid more.
| barney54 wrote:
| It's the other way around, at least in Germany. Households
| pay more than industry for electricity. https://www.globalpet
| rolprices.com/Germany/electricity_price...
| kuboble wrote:
| Well. I have to admit you're right. But it seems to not be
| universally true.
|
| In Poland I have found that price for companies can be 3x
| higher based on at least one source. C11 - the tariff for
| the companies seem to cost 1.6 PLN / kwH [1] G11 - the same
| tarrif for households seem to cost more like 0.4-0.5PLN /
| kwH [2]
|
| [1] https://www.energa.pl/mala-firma/umowy/prad-dla-
| firm.html [2] https://www.energa.pl/dom/umowy/taryfa.html
| ReadTheLicense wrote:
| I'd guess this is because of price regulation, not
| subsidy.
| kuboble wrote:
| What's the difference?
| ReadTheLicense wrote:
| No money transfer from the state to the energy company.
| PinguTS wrote:
| Nope. Wrong. The economy of scale works also for electricity.
| We don't have subsidized electricity. The other way around we
| had additional premiums to pay for green energy. That got
| yanked and is now paid by the general taxes.
| doikor wrote:
| In Finland it is the other way around. Household pays the
| full price with industry paying the same but get huge tax
| breaks.
|
| Basically residential and companies pay the same but are
| taxed very differently in a form that ends up with companies
| paying way less electricity taxes.
| jo909 wrote:
| I'd guess that they used to have very good discounted contracts
| but are not able to renew them anymore.
|
| The cost they charge also includes the cooling, so you could
| see it as for example 30c/kWh for power, 15c/kWh for cooling to
| compare it to a consumer contract. Maybe they have published
| their ratio of that split "on average" before.
| lima wrote:
| In colos, the cost of electricity typically also pays for air
| conditioning since it's a perfect linear relationship - more
| power goes in, more AC needed to get the heat out.
|
| Plus some overhead costs (but with Hetzner, I'd assume they're
| minimal - they have razor thin margins).
| tecleandor wrote:
| There's a more than probable markup for redundancy and
| management.
|
| Anyway, I believe industrial power billing is quite a trip (at
| least in Spain), and probably have a miriad of different prices
| depending on the hour of the day, and different guarantees of
| delivery compared to a regular user.
| bombcar wrote:
| In many places if you as a business are willing to take
| intermittent power cuts (with varying warning times) you can
| get significant discounts.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Their cost is 1/3rd more just for running the AC (your
| electricity use generates heat that has to get out). And
| savings from discounts probably get eaten up by the costs of
| redundancy, diesel backups etc.
| sammy2244 wrote:
| omega3 wrote:
| I'd have thought that these cloud providers would be pretty well
| insulated from the retail energy prices by their renewable energy
| generation.
| Ekaros wrote:
| That is not much use if the future contract prices at the
| moment are very high. 24 month consumer deals seems to be
| around 25 to 30 cents/kWh currently or even more, 12 month even
| more. And some sellers have stopped selling these.
|
| Overall there is nothing much to do as unless you own the
| production there just isn't insulating contracts available.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Will this affect their US cloud (ASH)? I didn't see it listed but
| they mention all locations.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Please see: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/price-
| adjustment/#wh... "in all locations" = Yes, the ASH location
| will also be affected. --Katie, Hetzner
| [deleted]
| Ekaros wrote:
| 0.22EUR/kWh is actually pretty reasonable looking at what current
| long term contracts are offered in Finland.
| 076ae80a-3c97-4 wrote:
| Really annoying that they're not publishing the new prices now,
| we have to wait until 1st September.
| trollied wrote:
| At least they're not changing pricing for already provisioned
| products until 31st December.
| em-bee wrote:
| yes, that's frustrating, but they would have to list both
| current and future prices or make some a list of changes
| instead of just updating the actual price when they go current
| [deleted]
| tecleandor wrote:
| They are publishing the prices now, just not in the main
| pricing page until the prices are current: The
| new prices for the colocation electricity/air conditioning
| rates are: electricity/air conditioning rate old price\*
| new price\* Germany EUR 0.29/kWh EUR 0.45/kWh
| Finland EUR 0.12/kWh EUR 0.22/kWh \*These prices
| do not include VAT.
| schroeding wrote:
| But those are only the rates for collocation. The other
| server products (rented dedicated servers, VPS, etc) will
| become more expensive, too. Those prices are not yet
| announced, are they? (except the rough estimate of 10%)
| tecleandor wrote:
| Ah, it's true it isn't super clear... So "around 10%" and:
| The products that do not directly use electricity are not
| affected: IPs, domains, SSL certificates, racks, setup
| fees, and a few other examples.
| lovelearning wrote:
| Putin's starting to get on my nerves.
| tafazi9090 wrote:
| Writing this on a new account because my main has been
| shadowbanned
|
| Why don't they switch to an alternative cooling method like
| ground cooling?
| zaroth wrote:
| Server pricing, potato pricing, I suppose every product has some
| energy component baked into the price. Probably more than I might
| even guess...
|
| High electricity price, and high energy cost in general, is
| probably the biggest regressive tax that humans face.
|
| Not just in direct energy and gas consumption, but in the
| baseline increases that flow through to all the essential goods
| that households purchase.
|
| New energy generation technologies must not only be cleaner, but
| also more efficient. It is so crucially important to raising
| standards of living to ensure a reliable supply of cheap energy.
| rgj wrote:
| Guess this is something that has been going on for much longer
| already.
|
| Leaseweb has been raising their prices because of higher
| electricity costs on February 1st, and recently DigitalOcean
| raised their price by even 20%.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Germany EUR 0.29/kWh EUR 0.45/kWh Finland EUR 0.12/kWh EUR
| 0.22/kWh
|
| Damn, why is electricity in Germany over twice as expensive as in
| Finland?
|
| I doubt Germans have twice the purchasing power as Finns.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Finland has a lot of nuclear and hydro, which are stable
| sources. Hydro can get dirt cheap since production is basically
| constant even if demand is low.
| ubercore wrote:
| Hydro may be stable, but prices are soaring in Norway as
| well, despite being mostly hydro. The entire energy market in
| Europe is having a tough time.
| weberer wrote:
| Germany shut down all their nuclear plants about 10 years ago,
| opting to rely on natural gas from Russia.
|
| Finland invested in nuclear and is bringing their latest plant
| online this fall.
|
| It doesn't take a genius to see which one would be hit harder
| by sanctions on Russian gas.
| fs111 wrote:
| > Finland invested in nuclear and is bringing their latest
| plant online this fall.
|
| How exactly has a not yet operating reactor that is vastly
| over budget and time any influence on the current price
| though?
| weberer wrote:
| 1. The Hetzner article is about future prices
|
| 2. Supply and demand
| doikor wrote:
| It effects the futures which effects any fixed price
| contract they might want to try and negotiate. Going for
| spot price is very risky at the moment with what winter is
| looking like to be.
|
| Also there are the 4 existing reactors that are running
| just fine at the moment. (at this moment production is over
| 25% nuclear)
| PinguTS wrote:
| Not that I know of. We still have 3 nuclear stations in
| production. One of them is Isar 2 next to Munich. They will
| stay in operation until the end of this year.
|
| That said, there are debates right now to prolong their
| operation until another few years. But that has other
| constraints.
| jansan wrote:
| It didn't take a genius even 10 years ago. That decision to
| get out of nuclear power, based only on emotions, was a grave
| mistake.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > Germany shut down all their nuclear plants about 10 years
| ago...
|
| "Nuclear power in Germany accounted for 13.3% of German
| electricity supply in 2021, generated by six power plants, of
| which three were switched off at the end of 2021, the other
| three due to cease operation at the end of 2022 according to
| the complete nuclear phase-out plan of 2011."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
| wewxjfq wrote:
| And spot market prices last December when all six plants
| were running at full power were as high as they are now.
| This has nothing to do with nuclear energy. It's demand
| pushing Germany to run more expensive power plants, which
| in turn dictate the price of electricity for _all_ power
| plants, so pointing at the electricity mix of Germany is a
| waste of time.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The instantaneous market price that everyone pays is the
| marginal cost of the most expensive power source currently
| online.
|
| For nearly every country worldwide, that is gas turbines most
| of the time. Even if 90% of power generation is coming from
| solar, it's the 10% gas that sets the price (since the marginal
| cost of installed solar is near zero).
|
| Gas prices in Europe vary by region, but are pretty much
| determined by gas transport capacities to Germany. Ie. Germany
| has the highest prices because of government mandates to fill
| storage. Any place with good gas transport links also has high
| prices. Places with few/no pipelines to Germany and an
| independent supply have low prices.
|
| And that is why Germany is twice Finland (Finland gets gas from
| Norway, and neither has big pipelines to Germany).
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| Not really. That's the theoretical microeconomics approach if
| all kWh were "rebid" instantaneously. In fact, wholesale
| distributors can dampen the cost by diversifying in time
| (with contracts), location (by distribution) and cost
| (different plants).
| doikor wrote:
| > (Finland gets gas from Norway, and neither has big
| pipelines to Germany).
|
| Not really. Finland used to get gas from Russia but now it is
| mostly from a pipeline through Estonia to Latvia where it
| arrives in ships from wherever happens to be the cheapest (we
| are in process of building the first LNG terminal in
| Finland). Could be Norway but can also be USA, middle east,
| etc
|
| Finland just doesn't use much gas for electricity. What we
| use mostly goes into industrial processes. We do have a
| couple gas peaker plants but those are only used in the
| winter if needed. Actual load balancing happens through hydro
| (and imports from Norway/Sweden but that is also mostly
| hydro)
| ztrww wrote:
| There is no LNG terminal in Latvia the closest one is in
| Lithuania. Also AFAIK it doesn't even have enough capacity
| for the three baltic states let alone Finland. So chances
| are you most of the gas your buying through Estonia is
| Russian, just sold be some reseller.
| doikor wrote:
| Ok I got the country wrong but it is being bought from
| that terminal.
|
| https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2022/helen-to-break-away-
| from-r... with similar moves by the other gas buyers in
| Finland.
|
| Only pipeline connection from Russia to the Baltics is
| this pipeline (Balticconnector) as it connects to the
| Finnish gas grid that has its own pipeline to Russia and
| through the national grids and the pipeline between
| Lithuania and Poland that I guess allows access to the
| Russian pipeline in Poland.
|
| So no clue where Estonia would get that Russian gas from.
| sneak wrote:
| There is also an energy consumption tax in Germany:
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromsteuergesetz_(Deutschland...
|
| I don't know if Finland has something equivalent or not.
| nik736 wrote:
| Politics
| samsk wrote:
| The primary reason is: Winter is coming...
|
| But there is more:
|
| - They wanted to be super green so lets go with sun and wind
|
| - But, hey sun and wind are not reliable (not talking about
| some problems that the grid is not very good prepared to handle
| the peaks), especially not in winter
|
| - Let's use gas to cover that, Russia is so friendly country,
| and its all about business, what kind of maniac would stop
| natural gas, when we pay billions for it
|
| - Hmm, well there is 'a country' that is using natural gas to
| do politics, but hey, they got Crimea now, what would they want
| more, when we are still paying that billions to them. Let's
| build another gas pipe, and pretend nothing can go wrong, while
| ignoring that negativistic east-european countries preparing
| for worst case scenario
|
| - And, what about shutting down that completely functional
| nuclear power plants ? We want to be green, lets do that.
|
| - Oops, our lovely natural gas supplier attacked another
| country
|
| - Oops, our natural gas power plants are somehow costly to run
| now, lets burn some coal
|
| - Oops, coal is also getting a bit expensive
|
| - Oops, our not very friendly natural gas supplier,
| occasionally stops natural gas now
|
| - Ooops, our natural gas reservoirs will be not full before
| winter
|
| - Oooops, winter is coming...
| riskable wrote:
| > They wanted to be super green so lets go with sun and wind
|
| This is a complete mischaracterization of why Germany
| invested so much into renewables. Like... 20 years ago?
| Germany saw the writing on the wall when it comes to how they
| were getting their energy which at the time was mostly coming
| from coal. They didn't want to go Nuclear for whatever reason
| so that left renewables and natural gas which wasn't
| _preferred_ but it was still significantly better.
|
| They didn't do it just to "be super green". They did it
| because coal is all around bad and wasn't the future that
| Germany wanted--and they were right. They absolutely made the
| right decision back then and investments by the German
| government are a big reason why solar is the cheapest form of
| energy right now (thanks Germany!).
|
| If anything they didn't invest _enough_ in renewables. They
| obviously didn 't expect the effects of global warming to
| come this quickly. A big reason why electricity is so
| expensive is because the _rivers in France that supply water
| to their nuclear reactors dried up_. I mean, how do you
| predict something like that happening even 10 years ago? Even
| if that was a possibility included in some climate change
| report how seriously would politicians take such a
| prediction?
| samsk wrote:
| I don't say that that being super green is bad, the problem
| was to rely almost solely on natural gas (from those we
| don't name) to stabilize the grid. Well, and now using that
| bad coal to fix that... I don't know, that also doesn't
| seem to be very wise, although I know, its only the
| consequence of the first mistake, but it completely negates
| what they tried to achieve.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Every single country relies on either natural gas or
| hydro power to stabilize the grid. What alternative did
| you expect?
|
| If there is a problem, it's either on the share of the
| generation that they decided to let for those
| "stabilizing" sources (it is much larger than the short
| term instabilities on their grid) or on the lack of
| diversity of their supply.
| doikor wrote:
| I would say the big mistake was to only use pipelines to
| Russia for gas. They should have built LNG terminals as
| redundancy. And maybe push for another pipeline to Algeria
| either through France and Spain or Austria/Switzerland and
| Italy.
|
| They basically left the door open to abusive trade partners
| by not building any redundancy on such a critical resource.
| And it is not just electricity Germany needs gas for as it
| is also a very important resource for lots of industrial
| processes (and used for heating a lot but that should be
| replaced by heat air pumps)
|
| Obviously such redundancy would have pushed up the price of
| gas in the short term at least. Easy to say this stuff in
| hindsight.
| dasv wrote:
| https://www.gem.wiki/Midi-Catalonia_Pipeline
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I'm just going to point out that Trump said this exact
| thing and was ridiculed for it:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/09/25/trump-
| accuse...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I'm quite sick of that "reverse ad-hominen" attack on
| politics of discrediting ideas just because somebody
| stupid agrees with them.
| zach_garwood wrote:
| Finland has oil. Germany imports oil from Russia.
| weberer wrote:
| You're thinking of Norway. Finland does not have any oil
| reserves at all.
| zach_garwood wrote:
| You're right
| jansan wrote:
| Only 0.2% of the electricity is generated from oil in
| Finland. But Finland produces a good quarter of its
| electricity from nuclear power. Maybe that makes a
| difference?
| ztrww wrote:
| It's hard to export electricity from Finland due to it's
| geographic location and it's main connections are with
| Sweden where electricity is also much cheaper than in
| continental Europe.
| doikor wrote:
| And the national grids of Sweden and Norway can't really
| keep up with the current load. The price of electricity
| up north is dirt cheap due to lots of hydro but the grid
| just can't get it to where the people are (south). So you
| get crazy 100x price differences between the two ends of
| the countries.
|
| This is also why both Sweden and Norway want to invest
| into new transfer lines to northern Finland as the
| national grid of Finland is actually in good enough shape
| that any electricity you get to any part of it can
| actually be sold to a customer anywhere in the country.
| This is why Finland is a single price zone when both
| Sweden and Norway are split into multiple zones (4 and 5)
| doikor wrote:
| Gas and oil use for electricity is very low. Electricity is
| over 85% renewable and nuclear with most of the rest coming as
| industrial or district heating by products
|
| District heating is quite often coal or oil for now but quickly
| changing to non carbon forms.
|
| Here is a real time view of the electricity market in Finland
| https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
|
| Germany on the other hand bet heavily into gas (and mostly as
| pipelines to Russia without building any LNG terminals of their
| own for redundancy) while trying to change over to renewables.
| Now gas is very expensive and the change over is not finished
| yet so they have to burn expensive gas and keep their old coal
| plants running (very expensive in terms of co2 credits)
|
| edit: Electricity is really expensive now in Europe in general
| due to sanctions on Russia (and their retaliation cuts).
| Hopefully the new Olkiluoto 3 reactor goes into full production
| mode before winter to help a bit (it is running at partial
| power during testing at the moment)
| PinguTS wrote:
| The problem is called Merit-Price-Fixation and is the method
| used all over Europe to "define" the costs for energy. It is
| also called Windfall earnings.
|
| I heard that in Austria it is under discussion that this
| method is not well suited for price fixation. I also heard
| the first tones here in Germany.
| jansan wrote:
| Germany already had the highest electricity prices in the
| world even when gas was cheap. Green energy has become an
| ersatz-religion here.
| PinguTS wrote:
| Green energy is in the costs of 8 cents/Wh. Coal is more
| expansive as gas always was. Only nuclear is calculated
| with 2 cents/Wh ignoring the costs of the nuclear waste as
| this paid for by taxes in addition.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Are you missing a 'k' or 'M' on those units? 8 cents per
| watt-hour is obscenely expensive. A hibernating Mac m1
| would cost over a dollar an hour. Just to hibernate.
| PinguTS wrote:
| Thanks for correcting.
| netzego wrote:
| Also ignoring the cost of cooling water they take for
| free from rivers and habitats. As half of the German
| water consumption are used for cooling gas, coil and atom
| facilities. As stated in this article.
|
| "In Deutschland zum Beispiel geht etwa die Halfte des
| gesamten Wasserverbrauchs fur das Kuhlen der Atom-,
| Kohle- und Gaskraftwerke drauf [...]"
|
| https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Krisenstab-eingesetzt-
| Atomd...
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Pretty sure that's included.
| netzego wrote:
| Pretty sure? Like it is gut feeling? If you can read
| German, here you can find an article from the Linke
| party. There are several of links to papers from the
| German government to the cost of that mess. I don't want
| to offend you, but your comment has really no value and
| also is wrong.
|
| https://www.hubertus-zdebel.de/atommuell-kommt-teuer-
| offizie...
| PinguTS wrote:
| Nope, if you want to make a true comparison, then nuclear
| is in the costs of about 40 Cents/kWh instead of the
| postulated 2 Cents/kWh.
|
| Because as we do not have a final deposit for nuclear
| waste there are no costs for it. There are only models
| with suggested costs. But all of this is not priced into
| it.
|
| A German paper produced by the independent
| "Wissenschaftlicher Dienst des Bundestages": https://www.
| bundestag.de/resource/blob/887090/1867659c1d4edc...
| doikor wrote:
| There is no way storing the spent fuel would cost so much
| that it would generate 38c/kWh of costs.
|
| For example the total lifetime costs of Onkalo (Finlands
| spent nuclear fuel storage site) is estimated to be 3.5
| billion.
|
| Lets take the new OL3 reactor as a example. It produces
| at 1600MW which comes to around 14 million MWh in a year
| so 14 billion kWh per of electricity produced yearly
| (slightly less in reality with downtimes for refueling
| and maintenance). That would mean that if storing the
| spent fuel would actually cost 38c/kWh just OL3 would
| generate ~5.3 billion euros worth of fuel storage costs
| per year which is more then Onkalo lifetime total costs.
| And OL3 has a planned operational life of 60 years.
|
| And Onkalo is supposed to store all of Finlands already
| produced spent nuclear fuel and the fuel produced in the
| next 100 years.
|
| Even if you add dismantling costs of the plants at the
| end of their lifetime there is no way to get to such
| crazy numbers even if it costs 2 or 3 billion euros per
| reactor to rid of. Lets say with 60 year lifetime of OL3
| you get around 840 billion kWh produced and decomissions
| costs 5 billion it would be ~0,6c/kWh of cost. Yes it
| costs but not tens of cents. For the older plants that
| produce less it would be around 1c/kWh.
|
| In Finland they started to collect money into a fund for
| decomissioning and spent fuel storage in the 80s and it
| currently has a bit over 20 billion euros in assets (the
| fund invests the money on markets so it fluctuates
| obviously). So basically they try to do their best to
| estimate how much money they need to save and collect it
| during the lifetime. For now it looks like the amount has
| been roughly correct. And still the for profit companies
| keep investing into new nuclear plants with this cost
| already in the price so it doesn't seem to be too much.
| netzego wrote:
| That is only right if we completely ignore the cost of
| the final disposal and such. As always in this
| calculations they forget to add the cost for the 15.7
| billion years of nuclear waste maintenance. If we talk
| about the cost for the normal consumers (tax payers) this
| must be included. Don't you think? But if we do the
| profit talk, you're totally right. What a fantastic
| business model this is, isn't it?
| rndgermandude wrote:
| What, the nuclear waste handling, long term storage and
| disposal, as well as disposal of old nuclear plants? It
| is not really included in any of the price calculations
| I've seen around Germany, when it comes to what either
| the plant operators put out (in their business reports),
| the nuclear lobby is publishing or the politicians are
| quoting.
|
| One of the most used metrics is the so called Levelized
| Cost of Electricity (LCOE). The LCOE includes investment,
| maintenance and operation, fuel and "carbon" costs, as
| well as waste costs. However, the waste costs are only
| calculated for the years of operation, so it's not really
| a great number to look at in terms of actual total cost.
|
| Regardless, the LCOE the German federal government uses
| is 4-8 cents/kWh for onshore wind, 2-6 for photovoltaic,
| 14-19 for nuclear.
|
| The (former) nuclear plant operators in Germany are
| required to pay into a fund that is meant to be used for
| covering the costs of decommissioning and disposal of the
| plants, as well as long term storage (except not
| everything is covered[0]). This is not included in the
| LCOE. Anyway, operators are required to pay a total of 47
| billion EUR into that fund[1].
|
| The old East German plants that got shut down right after
| the German reunification and are in the process of slowly
| being deconstructed and disposed of[2] are now estimated
| to cost 3-7 billion EUR a piece for full disposal (but
| not storage). If that's any indication, even when
| considering "lessons learned" will lower costs for future
| decommissioning and deconstruction, those 47 billion EUR
| is very unlikely to cover the eventual costs of
| deconstructing those 20-odd decommissioned German nuclear
| facilities and store spent fuel and contaminated
| materials for the first few decades. Some economists from
| the DIW (the private German Institute of Economic
| Research, not exactly tree huggers) calculated the
| eventual cost until 2100 will be closer to 169 billion
| EUR in 2019s money.
|
| There are some eco lobbying organizations - obviously not
| without their own bias - that make claims such as "the
| true cost of nuclear is 42.2 cents/kWh while wind is 8.1
| cents/kWH"[3]. I have previously looked through their
| numbers and argument in more detail, and it sounded
| mostly very sound to me, however I am a layperson.
|
| Regardless, the fact is: we do not actually know yet the
| total cost of nuclear power.
|
| [0] E.g. German tax payers have spent 1.5 billion EUR
| just on exploring potential long term storage sites so
| far. Just exploring.
|
| [1] This is still litigated a bit, as the German
| legislature only really had the great idea to make a law
| about that in 2016. That's another reason nobody
| historically included it or now includes it in the LCOE.
|
| [2] E.g. the old Greifswald plant. When it operated, it
| employed 10,000 people. Now 32 years after it officially
| ceased operation in 1990, it still employs around 1,000
| people. Full deconstruction and disposal is now expected
| to happen by 2028 and will eventually have accumulated
| costs of a total of 6.5 billion EUR according to the
| company in charge of the disposal. Not including long
| term storage costs. Since the operator of those things
| used to the East Germany, it's now the Federal Republic
| of Germany's full responsibility to pay for that.
|
| [3] https://www.bund-
| sh.de/energie/atomkraft/hintergrund/die-wah...
| bungle wrote:
| This picture shows you this crazyness:
| https://lampopumput.info/foorumi/attachments/1660195161813-p...
|
| In north Norway the electricity costs: 0.75 c/kWh In south
| Norway the electricity costs: 307.00 c/kWh In Latvia it costs:
| 1,240.00 c/kWh
|
| It is like that every day everywhere in Europe. In Finland the
| transfer line to Estonia means a lot to our local prices. If we
| cannot get that line fully utilised (in normal non-windy day,
| and I bet producers want it to stay around 99%), it means that
| prices are fixed to Estonia (which you can see in that
| picture). If we get the line fully loaded, Finland divides to
| its own market and prices drop considerably.
|
| In Norway and Sweden you can see multiple prices inside a
| country. It is because their internal lines are not sturdy
| enough to transfer enough electricity to south (in nordics it
| is common that electricity is made at north (e.g. a lot of
| rivers), but needed at south). The random energy (wind) has
| made this quite crazy. On windy days, the electricity price can
| even be negative. But wind energy is not reliable at all. But
| nobody builds or wants to run anything else as wind is easily
| the cheapest on windy days, and it is not that easy to always
| start and stop other facilities, which operate with losses on
| windy days. In general Germany jumped to a dwell, and everyone
| followed, and now we are where we are.
| jve wrote:
| > In Latvia it costs: 1,240.00 c/kWh
|
| Note that this is particular price point today (11.08.2022)
| at 12 - 13. Record was some other day for 2100 c/kWh.
|
| However at particular moment, you can get 27 c/kWh fixed
| price contract. (last year it was 6 c/kWh)
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| It's not that the energy is made in in the northern parts of
| Norway. Most energy is from the south west of Norway, but the
| southern parts of Norway has connections to other parts of
| Europe and is affected by the energy crisis in Europe.
|
| But the part about capacity internally is true, so the
| average price in northern Norway today is 0.00061
| EUR/kWh(yes, you read that correctly) while it's 0.35 EUR/kWh
| in the south. That's 574 times as expensive!
|
| Norway is making a ton of money on energy export now.
| cbmuser wrote:
| The result of shutting down nuclear plants. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| wewxjfq wrote:
| In France, yes.
| upupandup wrote:
| Well the green energy proponents (which we are now learning
| were on the payroll of Gazprom lobbyists) launched a FUD
| campaign against nuclear plants which were completely safe and
| working fine post-Fukushima.
|
| This chess move by Putin is paying dividends because Germany is
| shifting towards populism/right wing as is the trend in Western
| Europe (can you really blame Parisians?) and realizing it can't
| replace Russian gas without incurring serious internal turmoil
| and economic ruin.
|
| Now we are seeing this impact everything. Even hetzner isn't
| safe.
| cgeier wrote:
| While I'm a fan of nuclear power myself, I don't think this is
| true. Nuclear is only good for base loads, current high prices
| are mostly driven by peak demand.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Wouldn't it be the case that the nuclear portion would be
| price stable, so any fluctuations in say the last 30% of
| power to reach peak power would be less severe in the final
| bill?
| wewxjfq wrote:
| No, the most expensive power plant defines the price.
| tzahifadida wrote:
| Worth it, especially because of the reasons the prices of
| electricity went up.
| spaceheater wrote:
| Worth how? Sanctions achieved nothing on the military front. Is
| it more of a scaremongering thing? 'If we didn't do it, things
| would have been much worse'?
| tzahifadida wrote:
| I am not talking about strategy but my own feeling that I
| don't mind to pay the increase. My wife family was wiped out
| in the holocaust. I don't think that sitting and doing
| nothing is a better option. And I do really not wanting to
| start an argument about it. As I said, it is a feeling and I
| am not a general and I have no knowledge of what is best.
| GeorgeWBasic wrote:
| "We have to do something. This is something. Therefore, we
| have to do this."
|
| Never mind that it doesn't have any positive effect, and a
| lot of negative effects.
| spaceheater wrote:
| I am discussing the idea in general. That's perfectly fine
| if you personally don't agree. Although I do not agree that
| there are only two options: 1) Do this, 2) Do nothing. It
| is always possible to.. 3) Do something else.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| German here. The causes of Germany's sky high electricity
| prices are not the Ukraine war.
|
| A large part of the current spot price hike is the French bet
| on going all-in on nuclear: first, half the reactors is
| offline because they are simply broken down - they bet on
| Flamanville to replace parts of the extremely aged fleet
| which infamously failed. Then, the drought led to rivers
| drying up which means the reactors that are operational
| simply cannot get cooled, which led to a further reduction in
| capacity right when AC demands a lot of power, which in turn
| led to the French buying a shitload of capacity from Germany,
| and our spare capacity is mostly gas peaker plants since we
| phased out many coal stinkers over the last year.
|
| The second part is regulatory... the fees that have to be
| paid for by everyone other than heavy industry for
| modernizing the grid and build out renewables are a large
| part, as well as the taxes that add on top of that.
|
| And the last part is that states like Bavaria did their very
| best to impede the build-out of renewable energies
| (especially wind farms) and, worse, transit lines that could
| ship cheap North Sea wind energy to Bavaria - that led to an
| oversupply in the North where wind and solar have had to tune
| out because the energy could not be transferred to where it's
| needed.
| tzahifadida wrote:
| If that is the case then the whole point is mute. However,
| what about Finland which was also specified?
| [deleted]
| collegeburner wrote:
| aaaand thank goodness i'm on an american server host or else i'd
| probably be getting the same rn.
| nikolay wrote:
| Russophobia is a costly endeavour!
| rr888 wrote:
| Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of
| computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save
| money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn't
| thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to
| remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its
| going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It's like with refrigerators - when some years ago it was both
| cost-efficient and even 'green' to scrap working refrigerators
| and replace them with new ones, because the difference in
| improved energy efficiency meant that the electricity cost
| savings outweighed the cost of the new refrigerator already
| within a year or two and the reduced pollution from less
| electricity (at the time, fossil fuels) outweighed the
| environmental cost/waste of making that new refrigerator.
| Timshel wrote:
| Not the first time I see someone saying this for
| refrigerators and I don't understand how it could be
| possible.
|
| From what I can find even in extreme case it's not true. Even
| with a fridge from 1972 which averaged 1726kw/h (Source: http
| s://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.energy.27....)
| to a more recent one which will probably be around 400kwh.
| And with the kwh at 0.15$
| (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610).
|
| You obtain a reduction of (1726-400) * 0.15 ~= 200$ a year.
|
| I believe the average refrigerator price in the USA is over
| 400$ so I can't understand where the 2 years figure would
| come from without even talking about trying to supposedly be
| "green" ... And after 1988 you are down to 800kwh so you
| would gain something like 60$ a year.
| Macha wrote:
| 1. Electricity in other countries is more expensive. e.g.
| in Ireland it is EUR0.35/kwh (~$0.40).
|
| 2. Other countries have smaller houses, therefore smaller
| kitchens therefore smaller refrigerators. Between that and
| higher energy efficiency standards in general, new
| refrigerators in my local store vary from 230kwh (A energy
| rating) to 260kwh (F energy rating) in power usage.
| Timshel wrote:
| For your second point it probably applied 10/20 years ago
| too, then it means you have an even smaller budget to
| make some economy.
|
| So even when doubling electricity price I fail to see how
| it could be possible to reach the two years originally
| mentioned.
|
| And I believe each time I have seen this 2 years figure
| mentioned it was probably USA centric conversation. I'm
| French and I had never heard of it before.
| happyopossum wrote:
| $0.15 is laughably cheap for some parts of the country...
| Here in California it's not uncommon to pay 3x that, so
| $600/yr in electricity saved by a $400 appliance is a huge
| deal.
| simfree wrote:
| Even here in expensive Seattle our top rate (when you go
| above 500kWh a month, which is $0.1056/kWh) is $0.1307
| per kWh. If you go just north the top rate falls to
| $0.10/kWh, and many PUDs in the state charge around half
| that price.
| massysett wrote:
| Folks make these same sort of claims on high-efficiency
| HVAC systems and I never get them to pencil out. The higher
| efficiency doesn't pay for itself even over the entire
| lifespan of the system.
|
| Inevitably the people making these claims sell HVAC
| systems.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can get some pretty cheap fridges
| https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-10-cu-ft-top-
| freezer-r... - but as you suspect it's post-facto
| justification of a purchase someone wanted to make anyway.
|
| Once you account for manufacturing and disposal, running
| the older is probably almost always better.
| Timshel wrote:
| Yes and it even has a lower energy usage : ~300kw/h :).
| But since you probably upgraded from a similar one then
| you are probably more inline with the 60$ I mention at
| the end and not 200$.
|
| From what I understand high end fridge are often less
| efficient because of features like ice fountain or
| freezer in the lower part with drawers instead of doors.
|
| Anyway I'm thinking it's probably not just post-facto
| justification because it looks too much like a seller
| pitch and wondering where it comes from. I'm French and I
| had never heard it.
| tedunangst wrote:
| I plugged my parents 1960 fridge into a kilowatt and it
| used so little power I had to leave it plugged in for
| several days to make sure I got a reasonable reading.
| Something like 2 kwhr per day. So it would take about five
| years for a replacement to pay for itself if the
| replacement ran on nothing but happy thoughts.
| spurgu wrote:
| Well the electricity prices (according to the article) rose 55%
| in Germany and 83% in Finland, while the server prices are just
| going up by 10%, so electricity is just a part of it.
| Loic wrote:
| In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is
| 1EUR/year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more
| something like 3EUR/year. The increase is so important I am
| still not sure if my calculations are right!
| 1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh My current price: 0.33EUR/kWh
| (100% renewable) 8.76kWh x 0.33EUR/kWh = 2.89EUR
| ghosty141 wrote:
| This lines up with my experience, I use ~2/3EUR per year per
| watt
| zapt02 wrote:
| You can use Nord Pool data for the last couple of years to do
| estimations.
|
| https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-
| data1/Dayahead/Area-...
| ReadTheLicense wrote:
| You have day-ahead pricing at home? Please tell me how
| bungle wrote:
| Yes, you just purchase your electricity with a market
| price contract (usually with added margin) and every day
| the next day prices are published around 3pm Finnish time
| (perhaps 12 UTC). Then just use the free APIs to load
| data and use the data to adjust when you spend
| electricity on what. E.g. to charge EV on cheapest hours,
| or load batteries, or when you fire up your electric
| Sauna...
|
| These days the price is different for every hour, in near
| future they move to 1/4 hour pricing.
|
| About 10% of finnish household contracts are market price
| contracts. Most of the contracts are kinda continuous
| (price changes every 12 months) or fixed (e.g. a two year
| fixed price contract).
| simongray wrote:
| This is also common in Denmark. You get the new estimated
| hour-by-hour rates around noon the day before.
|
| I actually made a little calendar subscription service[1]
| to help our household plan when to run the dishwasher,
| drier etc. and we've saved about 50% this quarter despite
| the rising electricity costs. You can usually tell when
| it's cheap/almost free too just by sticking your head out
| the window, since it's mostly always the cheapest on
| especially windy days.
|
| [1] https://el.simongray.dk/
| joneskoo wrote:
| Spot price (+margin) contracts became common in Finland
| at least some years ago. Most energy companies provide
| them now. The margin is something like 0.30-0.40
| cent/kWh.
|
| We buy energy from any Finnish seller with contract
| separate from transfer of electricity (a natural
| monopoly).
| simfree wrote:
| That margin is more than many commercial and industrial
| customers pay in Washington State.
|
| In the cheaper public utility districts here, the per kWh
| price is only double those rates, with no time of day
| pricing or similar shenanigans.
| mqus wrote:
| My rule was something like 2Eur /10W/Month(~2A 5V Raspi)
| which comes down to 2,4Eur/W/Y.
|
| Just for my curiosity though, Where did your 1Eur come from?
| The prices were >20ct for 10 years now. Or do you calculate
| without taxes and stuff?
| Loic wrote:
| I suppose it was a "left over" from my time in France where
| the price was just above 10ct/kWh.
| aaronax wrote:
| I use $1 USD per watt per year, with electric prices around
| $0.10/kWh. Good enough to inform decisions like whether to
| leave a light on all the time ($5/year) or whether to
| purchase a NAS vs. used server ($40 vs. $300 per year).
|
| I guess my prices are actually a little over $0.10 and a watt
| over a year is a little under 10,000Wh as shown in your
| calculations, so those offset to make the estimate even more
| accurate (than necessary).
| bushbaba wrote:
| In sf electricity is closer to 4x that rate.
| happyopossum wrote:
| if you're a PG&E customer, at top tier it's well over 4x,
| and closer to 5x, and since so many people WFH now, many
| more are paying in the top tier.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I just signed a new contract at 18.9C//kWh + delivery.
| That's up from last year's contract rate of 8.1C//kWh.
|
| With the way the world is today, we'll all be paying SF
| prices soon.
| simfree wrote:
| California's power market is heavily distorted by the
| private utilities needing to make a profit, extreme cost
| of living, and a need to import power from other states.
| cbmuser wrote:
| You don't get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50%
| renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas.
|
| With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and
| natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany
| will soon burn more coal than ever.
|
| New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh
| thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
| highwaylights wrote:
| The rush _out_ of nuclear fission power still shocks me.
|
| It's a miracle fuel. It really is wonderful. It solves
| climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had
| Chernobyl and Fukushima not been reported so irresponsibly.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| It seems like that might be changing again though, now
| that non-renewable energy prices are so high.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| It would be miracle fuel if _any_ country in the world
| would have solved the waste problem by now. Finland is
| close, but still not done.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Russia recycles nuclear waste into nuclear fuel.
| watsocd wrote:
| Research what France does. They recycle the waste because
| it is not waste, it just needs processing and can be used
| again. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-
| efficiency-in-t...
| belter wrote:
| "The history behind Germany's nuclear phase-out":
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-
| behind-ge...
| sveme wrote:
| No one knows where to put the trash. That was the major
| reason for the phase-out, that no one knew how to handle
| that. I'm just the messenger, don't shoot me.
|
| And please do not come up with future inventions that
| will magically remove that issue, that does not help.
|
| Btw, it wasn't really a rush, it was started more than 30
| years ago by not building new nuclear power plants. Many
| of the power plants are actually at the end of their
| lifetime anyway.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| Burning coal on the other hand has a waste disposal
| mechanism built in! The carbon atoms are converted into
| CO2, a harmless gas that we can release into the
| atmosphere without any consequences.
| espadrine wrote:
| > _No one knows where to put the trash_
|
| They do, though. That is where the "trash" is. They have
| become so adept at it, they made a museum out of one
| facility[0].
|
| Two misconceptions that benefit from being clarified:
|
| 1. There is very little waste for the amount of energy
| produced. If we only used nuclear, it would amount for 40
| grams per person per year[1].
|
| 2. The waste is not trash, it is extremely valuable. It
| was valuable in the ground, and it is still valuable out
| of the ground; just not for the particular reactor that
| it came from.
|
| [0]: https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-
| of-preserv...
|
| [1]: https://whatisnuclear.com/factoids.html
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| You're talking about fuel, and we're talking about trash.
|
| From refinement to the reactor and spent fuel processing,
| the nuclear power industry generates a huge amount of
| trash that is low-grade radioactive and thus cannot be
| just dumped in a landfill.
|
| The nuclear industry has had over seventy years to get
| their act together regarding fuel recycling. They'd
| rather just dump it into pools on-site because it's
| cheapest and makes it Someone Else's Problem. It's the
| same attitude of the chemical industry from the 1950's:
| dump it in a hole and let someone else deal with it after
| you've long since left.
|
| Here's an idea: let's spend the money on wind turbine
| blade, battery, and solar panel repurposing and recycling
| instead.
| kaba0 wrote:
| > Here's an idea: let's spend the money on wind turbine
| blade, battery, and solar panel repurposing and recycling
| instead.
|
| The two is not exclusive. You do need stable base energy
| production and none of the renewables solve it well.
| Hydro could do it, but the locations where it is
| appropriate are few and it has quite a big ecological
| impact in and of itself.
| espadrine wrote:
| What is the kill count for this low-grade radioactive
| "trash" per TJ? What is the volume per TJ?
|
| The coal industry has convinced the ecologists to require
| titanic standards from literally every green energy
| source, especially the one with the most stable output.
|
| > _Here 's an idea: let's spend the money on wind turbine
| blade, battery, and solar panel repurposing and recycling
| instead._
|
| I am into doing that, AND the nuclear stuff. No need to
| tie an anchor to our ankle while we try to metaphorically
| swim back to the surface.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| > No one knows where to put the trash. That was the major
| reason for the phase-out, that no one knew how to handle
| that.
|
| We know so well how to handle it that we are wondering
| how to keep people out of the storage places in the event
| of a civilization collapse. That is, where current
| languages are forgotten and we forget what nuclear is.
| That's how advanced in storage we are.
| Mo3 wrote:
| I'm almost anxious to ask, I know very little about the
| topic, but I've been wondering if it wasn't a viable
| option to just shoot the waste into space? I know it's
| prohibitively expensive to do that as of now, but seeing
| what they're doing with Spinlaunch..
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I'm sure someone here can do the math, but it takes a lot
| of energy to get things not just in space, but out of the
| Earth's gravity. You don't want that nuclear waste
| raining back down. It's far easier, cheaper, and more
| fool proof to just bury it deep.
| kej wrote:
| In addition to the raw costs of moving anything into
| space, there is the contingency cost of what happens if
| the launch goes wrong. A new satellite blowing up on the
| launchpad is bad, but a cargo of nuclear waste exploding
| a few seconds after liftoff is catastrophic.
| Mo3 wrote:
| True, that sounds reasonable..
| gizmo wrote:
| That's not true. Nuclear waste is so minimal in volume
| nuclear power plants can just sweep it under the carpet.
| Or more specifically, just store it on-site. Modern
| nuclear reactors can even use the waste of old reactors
| as fuel and reduce it by another 80% or so. Dealing with
| nuclear waste is really no big deal. At least for medium
| term storage.
|
| Storing waste so you don't have to look after it for
| thousands of years is admittedly more difficult. Then
| again, future generations are always impacted by the
| choices we make today and I'm pretty sure the kids 300
| years from now would rather deal with the cleanup of our
| nuclear waste than with the consequence of global
| warming.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Meanwhile France, a famously pro-nuclear country, has to
| shut down many of its nuclear power plants in summer
| because they can't cool them adequately.
|
| (Yes, I'm sure issues can be fixed. Point is, nuclear has
| an awful lot of practical problems for supposedly being
| miraculous.)
| forty wrote:
| Yeah, I'm French and I'm a bit sad that people seems to
| deal with nuclear energy as if it was some kind a
| religious thing. Both sides, anti nuclear who seem to
| ignore the great benefits it can bring and the pro
| nuclear who can't seem to see how it sucks (not because
| it's dangerous or not green, but because it's expensive
| and doesn't work half of the time because of maintenance
| or heat - oh and also because we cannot build new reactor
| in reasonable time and budget anymore )
| kaba0 wrote:
| It still produces plenty of energy, and that much more
| would you have to create mostly from coal otherwise.
| freemint wrote:
| No, they didn't fix it but is has gone better. Today
| 25338 MW from nuclear. A year ago 37119 MW from nuclear.
| So almost 1/3rd down.
|
| Source: https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-
| generation-energ...
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| If you ignore the radioactive waste, it really is
| wonderful, but we still don't have a single final depot
| in Germany for it and it takes some 100k years to get rid
| of it the natural way.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| "Takes a long time to become progressively less harmful"
| is, if you think about it, an _improvement_ over "never
| really gets any less bad".
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would
| have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima_
|
| Every energy source is the perfect energy source, if you
| choose to ignore its problems. Just like every operating
| system is the perfect operating system if you overlook
| its flaws.
|
| Messing with atoms is better than burning fossil fuels,
| but let's not pretend that it's perfect.
|
| _not been reported so irresponsibly._
|
| "Blame the messenger" is an ancient, and irresponsible
| game.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Blame the messenger is perfectly valid if the message is
| not delivered accurately. I think the qualms people had
| with the reporting of nuclear plant problems is that they
| were overblown and scared people away from nuclear.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It's possible to pay extra for only renewable electricity.
| Zr40 wrote:
| There isn't enough renewable energy yet to cover all
| consumption. Which means that you paying extra is only an
| administrative move. You're just swapping places with the
| party that would otherwise have consumed the renewable
| energy.
| layer8 wrote:
| You're financing the further development of renewables.
| joss82 wrote:
| No you can't (unless you do it yourself but the price is
| extremely high if you want uninterrupted power). What
| happens is: your provider purchase "green energy
| certificates" which means that some green electricity was
| generated on a sunny and/or windy day. When it's night
| and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone
| else.
|
| No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy
| on day-to-day scale, let alone seasonally.
|
| Please don't let the brainwashing gets to you and inform
| yourself.
| highwaylights wrote:
| There's a massive business opportunity for someone
| willing to produce low density batteries for home use.
|
| In a lot of countries customers are billed significantly
| less during the night than during the day for
| electricity, so the incentives already exist to make it
| financially worthwhile if a home battery pack that can
| provide a days typical use can be installed at a
| reasonable cost.
|
| This would substantially smooth out base load
| requirements and mean that renewables could make up
| substantially more of the energy mix.
| joss82 wrote:
| > There's a massive business opportunity for someone
| willing to produce low density batteries for home use.
|
| Can you explain why, please? I'm genuinely interested. I
| don't understand how this would be anything other than
| rich prepper niche market.
|
| Installing batteries in all homes is going to be more
| expensive than grid storage, since you will need to pay
| more in total installation costs rather than installing
| ginormous grid batteries (or reversible dams, where
| feasible) in bulk.
| highwaylights wrote:
| My thinking on this is that if you don't need to pack the
| energy storage into a small volume (like in a vehicle),
| and if weight is less critically important (as it'll
| occupy space in e.g. a garage), it opens up a lot more
| options for storage medium (as an example, iron-flow
| packs).
|
| At scale the costs could come down quite substantially
| given that the basic chemistry is iron, salt, water and
| little else - at which point it's a substantial financial
| boon to the customer given that they could see an up to
| 50% reduction in their energy costs (going by tariffs in
| my own region) to compensate.
| aembleton wrote:
| Couldn't the grid install these somewhere for less than
| every home doing their own installation?
|
| The net effect would be the same but might be cheaper
| overall.
| joss82 wrote:
| My point exactly.
|
| Iron flow sounds great though. Thanks for mentioning,
| I'll look into it.
| freemint wrote:
| It could and it might even be more efficient. That
| doesn't mean home installation is not a huge market
| though. It also has access to different capital.
| merb wrote:
| > No you can't (unless you do it yourself but the price
| is extremely high if you want uninterrupted power). What
| happens is: your provider purchase "green energy
| certificates" which means that some green electricity was
| generated on a sunny and/or windy day. When it's night
| and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone
| else.
|
| that is bullshit. also besides that germany is small
| compared to other countries and dense, there is no time
| of the day where its nowhere windy nor sunny. so at the
| moment there is just no need to purchase green energy
| certificates for the bigger providers, they can either
| buy power from other providers or they can produce their
| green power. and also it does not matter, since if you
| need 3kW and they can't deliver green power at the moment
| they will deliver more green power later, thats how it
| usually works.
|
| > No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind
| energy on day-to-day scale, let alone seasonally.
|
| also bullshit. it has nothing to do with cost, more with
| there is no storage for everybody.
|
| most providers that offer 100% green power actually do
| generate the amount of power in green that you use (that
| is their premise) of course they can't create different
| power lines, thus it's a mix.
|
| (in germany it's forbidden to mark your product as "100%
| green power" if you buy certificates, of course you can
| write it some where but if your contract states it, it
| would be illegal, but there is a difference between
| contract and marketing, of course...
| Energiewirtschaftsgesetz - EnWG SS42)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _When it 's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal
| and gas as everyone else._
|
| Since this thread is about Germany, and not everyone on
| HN reads threads in scope, it's worth pointing out that
| this is not universal.
|
| In most of Texas, for example, the wind blows most
| fiercely -- and regularly -- at night. Solar power
| contributes to the grid during the day, and wind power
| picks up that generation loss when the sun goes down. I
| once saw a graph of it from a utility regulator published
| in a newspaper.
|
| Not every geography is so lucky in this manner. But
| because this is the global internet, it's important to
| point out that solar and wind aren't exclusively daytime
| sources on most of the planet.
|
| What Germany needs is a source of wind that works at
| night. I've read that Spain imports energy from North
| Africa. Perhaps a more robust link in that direction is
| the solution.
| sveme wrote:
| Wind blows over the north sea day and night.
| HotHotLava wrote:
| There are several power companies in Germany that are
| offering 100% green power after X years, in the sense
| that they're committing to constructing or buying new
| green power plants with a generating capacity at least as
| high as the amount sold X years ago.
|
| The actual power from your outlet is going to be the same
| no matter which company you buy from, but it's still
| buying "green power" in a more meaningful way than a
| zero-sum relabeling.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I'm curious what that actually accomplishes in non
| marketing terms. That just means someone else is getting
| less renewable electricity, right?
| milicat wrote:
| Well, it makes a difference what kind of energy supplier
| turns a profit from your energy consumption. If you're
| buying renewable energy from a company that still invests
| into fossil fuels, it's fairly useless. If you buy it
| from a company that mainly builds up renewable energy
| production capacity, that helps the transition.
|
| Of course, even a 100% renewable supplier needs to buy
| from the market to smooth out peaks in energy consumption
| for their customer base.
|
| (disclaimer: i work for such a renewable energy supplier)
| pavon wrote:
| It depends on what other market forces there are. If the
| utility has a government mandate to install more
| renewable energy than there are renewable energy
| customers, then it is like you say - just a book-keeping
| exercise.
|
| On the other hand, if there is no government mandate, or
| if customer demand for renewable energy exceeds that
| mandate, then it provides a profit incentive for the
| utility to install/purchase more renewable energy.
| pmyteh wrote:
| One of the British '100% renewable' companies used to buy
| renewable power and then _destroy_ their surplus
| resellable renewable obligation certificates instead of
| selling them (each supplier was obliged to hold
| certificates covering x% of their supply, where x <<
| 100). That had the consequence that the renewable power
| generated was genuinely additional, as the other
| generators would have to get their renewable obligation
| certificates from new generation rather than the
| secondary market, at the margin.
|
| They stopped, publicly reasoning that the proceeds from
| selling certs could be used to build their own additional
| renewable generation. I suspect it was just leaving too
| much money on the table, though.
| seb314 wrote:
| Some providers promise to build new renewable capacity
| that matches the consumption of their customers (not sure
| about the timeframe). I'm not aware of any provider that
| builds the required storage too, though
| sdoering wrote:
| With nuclear being 6.3 percent and the rest of this half of
| the circle being coal and a bit of gas.
| iwillbeshutup wrote:
| longsword wrote:
| It's not 100% renewable in the Mix. Thats not what he said.
| It just means, that he picked a supplier, which exclusively
| buys renewable energy on the energy market. Obviously it's
| still the same energy mix, which arrives on your house. But
| your money won't support Coal Power Plants.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Don't use a "server" server, unless you _really_ need that. Use
| a desktop from a few years ago, from some oem who advertises
| power efficiency. Stuff it full of hdds and ram.
|
| I've made very good experiences with Fujitsu. The power
| consumption figures they publish in their energy consumption
| white papers has been matching my measurements very well, so
| you can check ebay for used machines that match your
| performance/price expectations and then google eg "p920 energy
| white paper" and check the pdf. (Note, some models are
| available with different PSUs, ie 90+ and 85+.)
|
| My "home server" mostly idles at 14W with one hdd running, one
| in standby and one ssd.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| This is the way. You don't need high density at home
| (usually) so don't pay the price for it. Get a mobo with ECC
| ram that fits an ATX case if you want server grade stuff. If
| you don't use stupid tech like VMware it won't eat your
| resources either (not that VMware is bad in a datacenter, but
| it is quite resource hungry in comparison to virt-manager or
| Proxmox).
|
| I mean unless databases or Java are your favorite things in
| the world.
|
| Configure power saving as well, that way your CPU really
| doesn't consume a lot.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > mobo with ECC ram that fits an ATX case
|
| yes, and careful choice of graphics card; GPU computing is
| special purpose and can be costly in an urban area
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Indeed, I don't know how dense the megascalers build, it
| looks less dense than what I see at work compared to the
| few videos that are out there.
| npteljes wrote:
| Same conclusion here. Initially I used an old notebook with
| USB cases for full-size HDDs, nowadays it'n an older desktop
| PC in a midi tower, with some extra memory and HDDs. Idle
| power is <20W, which is most of the time. I really wanted a
| proper server for the cool factor, but it's just so expensive
| to maintain.
| psy-q wrote:
| Were there significant downsides to the laptop solution?
|
| I have a similar setup with a NUC mounting storage from a
| small ARM-powered NAS, but I was thinking of changing this
| to an old ThinkPad X230 with just internal storage and
| offsite backup.
| npteljes wrote:
| It was a really old beater, and the problems, I think,
| stemmed from there - think of electrical problems,
| because of old USB ports and such. Otherwise it was
| chugging along like a champ. What I like in my current
| setup more, is that I could upgrade it as my needs
| increased - in the desktop, I could fit 5 HDDs and 20G
| RAM, impossible with my old laptop.
| rz2k wrote:
| Take a look at the Tiny Mini Micro[1] project from Serve the
| Home for some very enthusiastic reviews of small 1 liter-
| sized desktop computers from Lenovo, Dell, and HP. I use a
| tiny Lenovo that's been rock solid, and uses almost no power.
|
| [1] https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-
| tinyminimic...
| difflens wrote:
| I've been wondering over the past few months if we can build a
| "public" cloud. I have some old machines gathering dust, I'm
| sure others do too. Is it feasible to build an ad-hoc network
| of such computers where the compute power is rented out. For
| ex: I can connect my old lenovo i5 laptop to this network for
| 6hrs a day and charge 1.2x my electricy cost. Sort of like on
| demand EC2 instances, but backed by torrent like tech. It'd
| make computers pay for themselves over time
| kappuchino wrote:
| In order to keep my eletricity bill for a running system in my
| apartment to then minimum I researched the specs & prices from
| the "The Power Consumption Database"[1] and found an intel nuc
| running on 5watts idle. Thats the same class of power
| consumption of a raspi 4 8GB, but easier to maintain. Now I'm
| waiting for my a Coral TPU USB-Accelarator to keep the peak
| consumption down for some recognition tasks in homeassistant.
|
| [1]http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=13
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Electricity is a significant opex for many products including
| Agriculture. For example, I've seen Farmers cost as high as 50%
| for power, generally to move or pump water
| amelius wrote:
| As a rule of thumb, 1W costs about $1 per year.
| wongarsu wrote:
| There's a reason used servers are so cheap on ebay: if you run
| them 24/7 their electricity cost makes them unattractive
| compared to new hardware (often within a year).
| Nextgrid wrote:
| They are still a great deal for burstable workloads or to use
| as a workstation - only run it when needed so no need to run
| 24/7.
|
| If you need really cheap (and local!) compute for short
| periods of time, picking up one of those servers can still
| work out cheaper than renting from a cloud provider.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Highly disagree.
|
| Said in another comment, my server averages around 100-200W.
| It's equivalent to running a gaming PC.
|
| The reason there's a lot of cheap servers on eBay is that
| their support contracts expired and are absolutely
| ridiculously expensive to maintain for a big company. It's
| easier to get a new server (which will likely have
| performance and efficiency upgrades as well) than to continue
| maintaining a server that no longer has a support contract.
|
| The reason there's not many servers in people's hands is size
| and noise. Servers aren't meant to go in a house; most people
| don't have server racks in their home. And by default, the
| fans are jet engines, even behind closed doors.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| You probably live in the USA, because 200w 24/7 would cost
| me about 600EUR/year which is definitely significant.
| happyopossum wrote:
| I live in the USA - California, and 150W 24/x would cost
| about $550/yr. In fact it would cost me a lot more, as my
| family shifted to time-of-use billing to save money
| (yeah, it means we don't do certain things between 4-8pm,
| but with some adjustment it's made a difference in our
| bills).
| collegeburner wrote:
| one of the upsides to living in texas, lots of cheap wind
| power lol. even with more expensive electricity i can
| still run old hardware for cheap. means less e waste
| also.
| delroth wrote:
| https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-TEX-ERCO
|
| Your cheap TX electricity is, unsurprisingly, mostly gas.
| And if you look at data from 12h ago it was more coal
| than wind.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Yearly averages are probably the most sensible to look
| at. Wind is at 20% which is still nothing to sneeze at:
|
| > According to ERCOT, nearly half of Texas' electricity
| was generated by natural gas-fired power plants in 2019.
| Coal-fired plants and wind power each generated about 20
| percent, while the state's two nuclear power plants --
| the South Texas Project near Bay City and Comanche Peak
| near Glen Rose -- supplied a total of 11 percent. Solar,
| hydroelectric and biomass resources provided most of the
| remainder
|
| https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-
| notes/2020/augu...
| vorpalhex wrote:
| A fan replacement and activating quiet mode on the server
| (usually a bios option or sometimes a hardware tweak) helps
| with the noise a ton at the cost of slightly less thermal
| ceiling.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| That's why I said "by default". I have done the IPMI
| toggles needed to lower the fans but it's still not quiet
| by any stretch of the imagination.
| philjohn wrote:
| This is why for my home server I didn't get second hand servers
| but built the following in a 2U case that fits in my network
| closet:
|
| Asrock Rack c246 WSI (Mini ITX workstation board) 32GB DDR4 ECC
| Udimms (16GB x2) Core i3 9100T (25w, low power 4 core part,
| supports ECC, and quicksync) 6 IronWolf 4TB NAS drives
|
| The 6 drives are in RaidZ2 so give 16TB usable space, and at
| full pelt the max power consumption is 60W for everything.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| My R730 averages at around 100-200W with two 12-core CPUs,
| 128GB RAM and 8 12-14TB drives.
|
| Servers are more efficient than people give them credit for.
| It's close to a gaming PC in electricity usage. Certainly not
| 60W (or what people can get with NUCs and RPi clusters) but
| for the power I get, it's very much worth it.
| happyopossum wrote:
| If we average that out to 150W, that'd be 1250-1300Kwh/yr.
| Current Bay Area electric prices means that'd cost in
| excess of $500/yr to run. I'd say that servers are _not_
| more efficient than people are giving them credit for...
| manfre wrote:
| Servers are more efficient when fully utilized. A
| commercial grade server in a homelab is more likely to
| idle all the time, making it very energy wasteful.
| Servers need to be right-sized, instead of "more is
| better".
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| And at Seattle prices, that's $150, so I don't exactly
| see what the purpose of your anecdote is other than to
| mention how pricy your electricity is.
|
| Edit: But even at $500, that's pretty much the price of a
| low-spec VPS or VM per year. So for a fairly low initial
| price to buy the server, you're getting _far_ more
| performance for the same price you 'd pay someone else to
| use theirs.
| philjohn wrote:
| What's it like at idle though?
|
| Since it's a home server, when it's not receiving backups
| from computers in the house, or streaming media via Plex
| it's sitting there at < 15w, which is low enough not to
| worry about.
| TylerE wrote:
| I'd guess the issue isn't so much _peak_ consumption but
| idle.
| xemdetia wrote:
| My favourite 'home server' board for a while was J3160DC-ITX,
| which runs at 6W TDP and runs off a 12V brick.
| lukeqsee wrote:
| While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven
| by the input costs of electricity is even more telling.
|
| The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit,
| correction: _marginal_ ) cost of cloud computing basically means
| that:
|
| 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and
| ecological impact) of our clouds.
|
| 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over
| the next few years where we can expect energy prices to continue
| rising.
|
| 3) Building more power-efficient chips is a big deal, and I'm
| glad to see more general ARM deployment, given their efficiency
| gains.
| ericd wrote:
| I wouldn't talk about "clouds" as being limited by energy
| prices, as though they're uniform. Hetzner is much, much
| cheaper than AWS/Azure/Google. There's a huge amount of
| fat/gross margin that could be cut from the pricing of the big
| ones.
| adrianN wrote:
| How many data centers already use waste heat for district
| heating?
| blitzar wrote:
| gonna go out on a limb and say 0... made me look though and
| apparently it is starting to happen.
|
| _In March (2022), Fortum and Microsoft announced our joint
| plan for a ground-breaking data centre region in the
| Helsinki, Finland metropolitan area. The data centres will
| use 100% clean electricity and the waste heat they generate
| will be used to heat homes, as well as business and public
| premises in the area. I must say I am immensely proud of this
| project - but I believe it's only the beginning._
| ninjin wrote:
| To be fair, Hetzner is _notorious_ for pushing down prices for
| everything as far down as they can by any means necessary. So
| this most likely makes their price point more sensitive than
| many other providers to any cost increase. Here is a great
| walk-through of one of their data centres [1] and you will see
| how streamlined everything is down to the hardware components.
| Nearly nothing goes to waste.
|
| [1]: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
| aasasd wrote:
| Those consumer PCs don't look too energy-efficient, though.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Wow, that's really cool. Love the old midi-towers.
| miohtama wrote:
| Hetzner has a data center in Finland as well. While the
| electricity price in Finland is going up, it is not going up
| as much as in Germany due to availability of nuclear power.
| If you want to use Hetzner services I recommend picking a
| location in Finland.
| breakingcups wrote:
| How is the peering to Finland nowadays? Last I heard it was
| all still going through their German centres.
| [deleted]
| schroeding wrote:
| From Telekom Germany:
|
| Telekom -> Level3 (*.edge1.helsinki1.level3.net et al.)
| -> Hetzner Helsinki (core*.hel1.hetzner.com)
| lukeqsee wrote:
| For sure, and I agree, but that's underscoring my point.
|
| The marginal cost of cloud computing isn't capex, it's opex.
| And of that opex, it's mostly electricity. We aren't paying
| for the hardware so much as we're paying for the cost of
| keeping it turned on and cool.
| endorphine wrote:
| Why "notorious" though? Isn't this a good thing for them and
| for customers as well?
|
| I would expect "famous", since this seems lika a
| feat/achievement to me.
| tikhonj wrote:
| "Notorious" isn't always negative--the connotations of the
| word depend on context (and probably regional use?) in
| sometimes confusing ways.
| galdosdi wrote:
| Indeed! It's a really interesting usage. Maybe it
| developed in a similar way as "badass" to convey a sense
| of (positive, approved) vaguely dangerous wildness and
| coolness.
|
| It kind of makes sense here -- Hetzner's competitors
| probably hate this "notorious" behavior of being so good
| at ruthlessly[1] slashing prices
|
| [1] See, another example of this sort of thing. Cool!
| endorphine wrote:
| Interesting, didn't know that. Thanks for elaborating!
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I mean if your competition is Amazon I image you'd have to be
| like that.
| scarab92 wrote:
| Amazon's margins are astronomical. Hetzner doesn't need to
| give up any where near as much consumer surplus as they do
| in order to compete on price, but having a solid offering
| at very low price point is how they have chosen to
| differentiate themselves from other providers on the VPS to
| cloud spectrum. Arguably they are competing more against
| Linode, OVH, digital ocean etc..
|
| Massive respect to them for linking the change to
| electricity prices rather than just "inflation". They know
| that by doing this there will be pressure to reverse the
| increase once electricity prices normalise.
| dannyw wrote:
| Their competition charges XXX% markups on everything but
| EC2...
| greggyb wrote:
| EC2 is definitely at a premium. If you are pricing CPU
| and RAM, the big three cloud providers are near the top
| of the pricing continuum. Hetzner is usually at or near
| the bottom end of the pricing continuum.
|
| If you are including the value-add of other cloud
| features, then it is not a like-for-like comparison.
| lima wrote:
| EC2, particularly traffic, has massive markups too.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 4) Cloud computing will be outsourced to low energy cost
| countries.
| quintussss wrote:
| I wonder if latency allows this
| greggyb wrote:
| It depends on your requirements. Serving user-facing
| content is likely to be a task best suited to data centers
| geographically close to the user base. There are plenty of
| non-user-facing tasks that could be offloaded to another
| location.
|
| As an example, the product I am developing spends most of
| its time calling third party APIs to do bulk data
| extraction and processing. That can happen anywhere. After
| data processing and some batch ETL work, we surface that to
| our end users. The output of that ETL needs to go somewhat
| close to our users, but everything else could easily happen
| network-seconds away.
| ruuda wrote:
| With cloud egress cost though, moving the data to a low-
| cost region could be expensive itself. I wonder when it
| would pay off.
| greggyb wrote:
| I am not shipping more than 20TB/host/month:
| https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
|
| Also not shipping more than unlimited/host/month:
| https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/
|
| Start with a cloud provider that is better in terms of
| cost profile, and then move only the stuff that needs
| wider distribution to a higher cost geo-distributed
| provider.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Or people will separate out heavy tasks that aren't time
| critical to run them when power is abundant (when there's wind
| or sun) and not when it's scarce.
| amichal wrote:
| People do.
|
| https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481957/Google-
| creates...
| philjohn wrote:
| Some of the hyperscalers area already experimenting with this
| - https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-
| center...
| gadders wrote:
| 4) Cloud computing and the electricity used is impacting
| housing provision:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/london_electricity_su...
| hgsgm wrote:
| jbverschoor wrote:
| ARM on desktop => ARM for development => ARM on servers => ARM
| on cloud.
|
| Apple's multi-billion contracts with AWS are ending this or
| next year, Apple has their own power efficient systems and will
| compete with AWS, as they have to maintain/increase growth.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > Apple has their own power efficient systems and will
| compete with AWS
|
| Are you saying Apple is going to roll out an AWS competitor
| to the public? I find that highly unlikely.
| Kye wrote:
| This does seem to be the normal course for services
| companies, and that's where Apple is headed.
| riskable wrote:
| I dunno. I could see it... As long as you access the
| "iCloud Web Service" from an iDevice or a Mac there will be
| loads of useful and functional tools and features for you
| to take advantage of. It'll be 4x more expensive than AWS
| but the integration with Apple's ecosystem will be
| fantastic!
|
| If you try to access it from a PC or an Android device
| though you'll have your bandwidth throttled and all your
| images will be reduced and compressed like it's 1999.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| They don't have anywhere close to the capacity to produce
| the necessary amount of silicon
| telesilla wrote:
| What other verticals does it have to seek out next, if
| growth is demanded by shareholders?
| jaywalk wrote:
| There's all kinds of consumer-oriented things they can
| expand into, like they're currently doing with sports on
| ATV+. I don't see how competing with AWS could ever work
| out for them, absent some anti-competitive stuff like
| allowing additional functionality for apps that use
| AppleCloud for their backend.
| acdha wrote:
| Apple shareholders aren't demanding growth - they're
| doing fine and given Apple's history it'd make more sense
| to expand their consumer footprint, especially
| internationally, since that's an area where Apple has
| considerable strength.
|
| Cloud computing is also a hard field to move into: you
| need a significant amount of capital up front but
| customers will be slow to migrate. Google is struggling,
| I'm not sure what pitch Apple would come up with which is
| obviously better.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| But you'll only be allowed to deploy code that's been
| reviewed by Apple.
| Kye wrote:
| That would be an interesting restriction/value-add. So
| many things block cloud IPs due to the heavy abuse they
| get from them. Apple could offer high deliverability IPs
| and block clearing as services.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I wouldn't be too surprised. They already have or are
| rolling out cloud development environments with XCode
| cloud.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| They used aws, gcp, azure.
|
| The aws contract will end this or next year, I don't
| recall.
|
| They're offering Xcode cloud build.
|
| It's only logical for them to also grab a piece of market
| share of a highly profitable / high margin market.
|
| They're doing the same with EV, AR, etc.
|
| I am long apple
| justapassenger wrote:
| It's been like that for a long time (not only for cloud
| computing, but any big IT infra). Power is everything. To a
| point, that you measure datacenters in megawatts, when you
| bring new HW to datacenters you most often talk about
| improvement in compute per watt, not absolute compute.
|
| It's not only because of the cost of power, but also because
| power is something that's hard to increase in an existing
| datacenter - you can put in new servers easily, but putting new
| power lines and upgrading all the infrastructure is usually
| just too expensive.
| prirun wrote:
| > The fact that electricity costs is the dominating cost of
| cloud computing
|
| In the article, they say that electricity has gone from .29 to
| .45 euros, a 55% increase. If electricity was the dominating
| cost, seems like they would have raised the price way more than
| 10%.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Assuming that the 10% price raise is equal to the increase of
| the electricity cost, that implies that after the increase
| the cost of the electricity represents slightly more than 25%
| of the price (which must also include the profit, besides the
| other costs).
|
| So the electricity is not really dominating the costs, but it
| might still be the largest component of the cost.
|
| There is an estimate that Amazon has a 61% profit margin for
| cloud services. Hetzner must have a lower profit margin, but
| nonetheless the electricity could be as much as half of the
| costs.
| lukeqsee wrote:
| The article didn't seem to say how much they're raising
| prices, only that they're raising prices due to electricity.
|
| Where are you pulling seeing the price change %? I may need
| to edit that to _marginal_ , if it's only 10%. :)
| Majestic121 wrote:
| The article gives the prices in a table in you scroll down
| a bit :
|
| electricity/air conditioning rate old price* new price*\
|
| Germany EUR 0.29/kWh EUR 0.45/kWh
|
| Finland EUR 0.12/kWh EUR 0.22/kWh
| LeonidasXIV wrote:
| That's the price for electricity/air conditioning
| (presumably for Hetzner), not how much their products
| will rise in price.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| It is the electricity/air rate for their colocation
| service
| michaelmior wrote:
| > we are forced to increase the prices of many of our
| products by approximately 10%
| polaco wrote:
| First paragraph: "we are forced to increase the prices of
| many of our products by approximately 10%"
| lukeqsee wrote:
| Missed that. Thanks!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| eternalban wrote:
| > Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends
| over the next few years where we can expect energy prices to
| continue rising.
|
| I suspect this is already happening in places like Google and
| paying significant dividends given the scale of code
| replication.
| elorant wrote:
| I have a bunch of servers in an apartment I use as a secondary
| office space. Monthly electricity cost increased by 230%. It's
| like that since January. Hetzner's 10% seems too low, although
| the increase is calculated on the total price of the server, so I
| guess it could be sufficient. I won't be surprised if they
| further increase their prices in the near future.
| schroeding wrote:
| I currently pay less per month to Hetzner for a rented
| dedicated server (from the second hand "server auction"
| section) than I would pay in electricity alone if I ran the
| thing in my home. Yeah, electricity is quite expensive now in
| Germany and Europe. ^^
| jacooper wrote:
| I think Germany has the most expensive electricity in the
| world, and AFAIK that was 2021, so its even worse in 2022.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-11 23:01 UTC)