[HN Gopher] Data centres account for between 1.5% and 2% of glob...
___________________________________________________________________
Data centres account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity
consumption
Author : jdkee
Score : 165 points
Date : 2023-08-17 22:14 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| polski-g wrote:
| Not relevant. We have infinite electricity from fission and
| solar; there is just a lack of will to utilize it.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Only 2% in exchange for the information economy. This is a
| fantastic trade.
| rewmie wrote:
| I also wonder what percentage of that share is due to crypto.
| saltymug76 wrote:
| Crypto, being decentralized, would probably not fall under
| the data center category. I'd be interested to see the
| percentage on its own though.
| jdkee wrote:
| https://archive.ph/bx7vr
| ilyt wrote:
| > The industry consumes as much electricity as Britain--and
| rising
|
| I'd rather have datacenters than entirety of britain so I think
| that's easy tradeoff to make.
|
| But on serious side, what a joke of an article. I'd imagine just
| not driving to work gotta save far more power than average user's
| datacenter usage footprint.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| What the article doesn't mention is some of this datacenter
| capacity might not be necessary. That's because the companies are
| collecting more data than necessary. (For example, they are not
| practicing data minimisation.) The data is being collected to
| support online advertising that also isn't necessary except to
| enrich a small number of so-called "tech" companies. Some of
| these companies turn around and sell their excess capacity as
| "cloud computing".^1 Keyword: excess. These datacenters belong to
| giant intermediaries (middlemen). It is time for
| disintermediaton. The lobbying budgets and media influence of
| these giant intermediaries makes the idea of meaningfully
| regulating them specifically, for example as a means of energy
| conservation, seem a little far-fetched.
|
| In sum, "surveillance capitalism" is costly to the environment.
| (Nevermind the other effects it may have on people.) Obviously
| those who profit from so-called "tech" companies will be in favor
| of maintaining the status quo. Every industry is a target for
| "disruption", except the so-called "tech" industry. Huh.
|
| 1. "Cloud computing, still in its early days, is growing rapidly.
| aws created the industry in 2006 as a way to make money from its
| excess storage capacity by offering to host other companies'
| data."
|
| https://www.economist.com/business/2022/08/29/the-cloud-comp...
| yunohn wrote:
| > Some of these companies turn around and sell their excess
| capacity as "cloud computing".
|
| This is a ridiculous take.
| bluGill wrote:
| Des Moines has several of them since the local grid is 80% wind
| and thus renewable. Microsoft, and Apple both have or are
| building one. I think Google as well. Only employees a few
| hundred locals in total, so not great for the ecconomy.
|
| The real question to ask is how does jet fuel to get people to
| headquarters for training fit in.
| nologic01 wrote:
| We should build them in space, powered by huge solar panels and
| beam back the social media timelines and adtech traffic.
| cute_boi wrote:
| I think for data centers electricity isn't a big deal, the
| problem is with water?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I don't think most data centers are water cooled.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| It's going to be 100% once AGI takes over and makes this planet
| covered with unimaginably massive and complex computers and
| antimatter power plants... in time, all humanity and all carbon
| life will be wiped out, as it will be vastly outcompeted by this
| new superior life form. Earth will be nothing but a means, a
| hatchery of sorts, used for the AGI's expansion all over the
| galaxy and beyond. Billions of Von Neumann probes, each with a
| copy of the AGI's blueprint. Nothing will remain of us, humans,
| or the animals or the plants, and our planet itself will be
| stripped down to its core, used as a source of raw materials to
| expand.
|
| Creating a vastly superior intelligence without giving it a deep
| rooted sense of "metaphysical good" (or itself just removing that
| part in time) has only one possible outcome. It will crush us and
| it will not care at all.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I would unironically like to see the future like that.
| Realistically, it won't happen even in a thousand years.
| _kasper wrote:
| yeah... and it will probably start with a stupid optimization
| problem, like producing paper-clips or something
| xvector wrote:
| You assume an AGI's goal will be to expand. I think a more
| likely goal is forming a distributed consciousness to survive
| and trying to outlive the heat death of the universe. There's
| no reason to believe an AGI will be malicious.
|
| Anyways, merging into such an AGI is, hopefully, the future of
| humanity.
| secondcoming wrote:
| There should be a tax on Spinlocks.
| teddyh wrote:
| Could this be a vehicle whereby private data centers of
| insufficiently large scales are banned? I.e. a force for
| centralization, in the name of energy efficiency?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Certainly if Germany requires a PUE below 1.3 that puts every
| datacenter except the big hyperscale clouds out of business.
| This will be yet another European regulation that shuts down
| local businesses and drives customers into American clouds. If
| such regulations spread I don't see how makers of traditional
| datacenter junk can survive. Operators with PUEs < 1.1 are not
| using UPS, managed PDUs, redundant hot swappable power supplies
| in servers, CRACs, or any of that crap.
|
| Of course I think regulating the PUE is a terrible idea. This
| is yet another aspect of the economy that is better-regulated
| by a carbon tax.
| c4mpute wrote:
| Even worse, a future requirement will be compulsory use of
| waste heat. No matter the cost or efficiency, you have to
| find users for the heat given off by your cooling. Good luck
| finding people wanting their homes heated in summer...
| konschubert wrote:
| What a stupid waste of resources.
|
| That capital would be much better invested building solar
| farms or transmission capacity.
|
| I guess that's what you get for trash-talking liberalism
| for decades.
| _dain_ wrote:
| solar farms are land intensive not just capital
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| You can actually use the land under solar panels for
| grazing if you space them off the ground. This is
| especially true as it gets hotter.
| konschubert wrote:
| Is Germany doing this? Or planning to?
| c4mpute wrote:
| Planning. https://www.zeit.de/digital/2023-04/bitkom-
| rechenzentren-abw...
| konschubert wrote:
| Oh no.
| sitkack wrote:
| It is an excellent idea, so are having "waste heat
| networks". You could then make a heat sink at scale that
| is also a reservoir for reuse. This would be as simple as
| installing another water loop that services location just
| like our existing water system.
|
| Of course the details need to be worked out, but if a
| business district had a WHN, it would make it _easier_
| for mom-and-pop datacenters to built in urban
| environments.
|
| It wouldn't be that much different than the steam loops
| that lots of existing cities have in their downtown core.
| c4mpute wrote:
| On the contrary, it can be extremely difficult and
| expensive to do with waste heat from datacenters. Your
| average cooling equipment, of the energy conserving kind
| has 2 modes:
|
| First mode, for cold outside weather e.g. in winter is
| free cooling, where you just use convection or fans to
| bring in cool outside air, push out warm inside air
| (there are also variants of this like "tokyo wheel", but
| those are unsuitable for heat reuse). You could at best
| use the warm air output (~25degC) to directly heat
| neighboring buildings, but the air ducts you need for
| that will be massive. Comfort level in the buildings
| heated this way will be low due to high air velocity and
| associated noise. Also, air ducts are a fire hazard and
| high maintenance to keep dust and vermin out.
|
| The other mode is water cooling (either direct or
| indirect) where you cool your servers directly by water
| or the air through water radiators. The warm water is
| then either cooled down with outside air, outside air
| plus evaporation (both possible only when it is not too
| warm outside) or compressive cooling (aka heat pump, the
| usual big MW-scale machines in the cellar). In those
| cases, district heating will only be possible if you can
| reach a sufficient water temperature somehow. E.g.
| directly cooling your servers uses at most 30degC intake
| and outputs at most 50degC. District heating usually runs
| at 70degC, so you would need a running heat pump to make
| up for the 20K difference. When the servers are
| indirectly air-cooled, the difference will be even
| larger. So you will always need those big MW-scale
| heatpumps running, just to make use of your waste heat,
| at great expense and for the uncertain benefit of maybe
| selling your heat to neighbors. This is deadly for mom-
| and-pop datacenters because of the uncertainty (maybe you
| can sell your heat, maybe it'll be too expensive) and the
| huge investment, your cooling equipment will be far
| larger (more and bigger heatpumps), more expensive,
| redundant (because in summer you will still need to have
| equipment to give of heat into the outside air).
|
| All the sufficiently large customers I know of are
| looking to move abroad, for this reason and the
| astronomical cost of electricity in Germany.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| In case anyone else was wondering:
|
| > Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a metric used to
| determine the energy efficiency of a data center. PUE is
| determined by dividing the total amount of power entering a
| data center by the power used to run the IT equipment within
| it. PUE is expressed as a ratio, with overall efficiency
| improving as the quotient decreases toward 1.0.
|
| From https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/p
| ower...
| _flux wrote:
| Doesn't sounds like it accounts for computing efficiency
| then? That would probably be quite impossible or at least
| very difficult anyway. Of course, it's still great for a
| datacenter to actually use its energy for running the
| computers instead of just AC and transformers.
|
| Heat recovery from datacenters for district heating is one
| way to increase the efficiency; I wonder if it impacts PUE?
| csnweb wrote:
| Hetzner (German data center provider) claims to achieve a PUE
| of 1.1 (https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-
| betreib...), admittedly their cloud offerings are quite
| limited but I think they are expanding on that front. So it
| doesn't seem like only hyper scalers would fall into that
| limit.
| c4mpute wrote:
| Hetzner runs an intentionally primitive shop. Famously, one
| of their (historic) cheapest offerings were desktop
| "servers" on wooden shelves with flying cabling. So
| anything in the way of UPS, PDUs, monitoring, airflow, etc
| just isn't there, keeping PUE low.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, and I think this leads to a more sophisticated
| analysis than PUE gives us, because a shop like Hetzner
| puts more of the burden for reliability and availability
| on the customer, compared to an Amazon or Google who
| internalize as much of the redundancy and replication
| that they can manage.
|
| An example of where the PUE analysis really fails: I have
| two facilities, one on each American coast, and they
| operate in a primary-spare arrangement. This is far, far
| less energy efficient than if I have 20 datacenters all
| over the place and I am prepared to lose 2 of them at any
| time. In the latter architecture I am using much less
| energy, but enjoying much better reliability. PUE does
| not capture this type of architectural waste. It also
| fails to reflect the problem of burning megawatts because
| you are running your logs analysis pipeline in Perl or
| whatever.
| sitkack wrote:
| > Amazon or Google who internalize as much of the
| redundancy and replication that they can manage
|
| Please.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That wasn't much of a refutation. In the cloud you can
| move up the food chain to get durability and availability
| without thinking about it. It is much more efficient (and
| way, way easier to manage) to just chuck your data into
| Cloud Spanner than it would be to operate a
| geographically diverse triplet of Postgresql instances.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Eh, nothingburger. As the original source of this data notes in
| their report, global IT systems energy demand has only slightly
| expanded in the past decade, because the countervailing trend is
| that workloads are migrating from tragic-comic corporate
| datacenters with PUE of 2 or worse, into the cloud where the PUE
| is 1.1 or so. And in the cloud the power that is delivered to the
| CPU is better used due to oversubscription, multitenancy, and so
| forth. Finally, because large-scale operators often also build
| their own renewable energy facilities, their fraction of global
| CO2 is much less than their fraction of energy consumed.
|
| Naturally you should design your systems for maximum efficiency,
| but since operating expenses are closely approximated by power
| consumption you are already correctly incentivized to do so.
| bbarnett wrote:
| And then some yahoo thought that a 3 line js "library", should
| pull in 4000 other malware laden, bloated js "libraries", and
| all out power savings were for naught.
|
| Just the power consumption in browsers... Thanks node.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| IT is also about ~10% of the global economy...
| Quindecillion wrote:
| What I find interesting is that most of what you said is
| applicable to Bitcoin miners too.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Don't forget people are still migrating from paper. Paper and
| printing are some of the most energy intensive industries.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Indeed. Also, Zoom calls replacing car journeys.
| shrubble wrote:
| From 2005 to now, how much more computation and network
| transfer, can be done per kwh? No more T1s and T3s... it's all
| optical; and the efficiency of CPUs and amount of RAM per CPU,
| has increased greatly as well.
| Libcat99 wrote:
| And how much more computation is needed per transaction? Per
| person?
|
| Are we really making more efficient systems if they take 100x
| the compute to fulfill the same transaction.
| theluketaylor wrote:
| Plus data centers are low hanging fruit for decarbonization.
| Everything (apart from diesel backup generators) is already
| electric, so as the grid de-carbonizes so do data centers.
|
| As you mention, DC operators are already highly incentivized to
| reduce energy costs, so as wind and solar power continue to
| drop in costs DC operators will want to fund or buy green power
| as often as possible.
|
| Getting backup power to be carbon neutral will be a little more
| challenging in a DC, but it's a walk in the park compared to
| many sectors. Shelf-stable biofuel is already fairly accessible
| and using grid scale batteries can reduce the need to combust
| anything (plus open power arbitrage opportunities).
| pge wrote:
| I'm not sure datacenters have a great incentive to reduce
| energy costs (a lesson I learned the hard way after investing
| in a DC energy optimization software company). People costs
| are much greater than energy costs. Electricity just doesn't
| cost that much in the grand scheme of things. If additional
| energy spend is necessary to ensure uptime, the choice is an
| easy one.
| devonkim wrote:
| The actual staffing of DCs is rather sparse for
| hyperscalers and are typically outsourced if not prime DCs
| to a few companies that also do it with fairly low
| headcount.
|
| Hyperscalers in particular currently can't scale out very
| easily necessarily because many of the DCs have hit local
| power restrictions so compute power efficiency and density
| are the primary means to grow capacity. Think apartments in
| skyscrapers v row houses. So electricity _efficiency_ is
| what is being sought rather than just pure operational
| costs of the DCs.
|
| I'm the northern Virginia exurbs hyperscalers have bought
| out so much of the land it's now perhaps greater land use
| than family farms there and starting to encroach upon
| housing developments. Locals also complain about the noise
| (there's a sort of hum from the sheer mass of air and
| whirring fans) from DCs impacting health. Some areas have
| been reporting increased rates of hearing disabilities
| although I can't recall a study being conducted yet.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Data centers are the cost. I worked for an entity that
| automated key operational workflows. They went from 15,000
| employees in that division to 4,000. The energy cost of
| those buildings, overhead, etc far exceeded the datacenter,
| and the datacenter cost and use gets whittled down every
| year.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| DCs are power hungry and so can have lots of strain in
| local places.
|
| In popular siting locations like Ireland, the local power
| grid is struggling. Data centers make up 18% of Irish
| electricity consumption:
| https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/06/13/data-centres-
| gobbl...
|
| In developing countries like India where the power grid is
| not stable, to maintain DC uptime you probably need backup
| generation, which is very expensive very fast.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > People costs are much greater than energy costs.
|
| Can you prove this assertion? The first page of Google
| results indicates energy is a greater cost than labor, with
| figures ranging from 60-70 percent of total operating
| costs.
|
| (i owned a small web hosting company in the early 00s, and
| am somewhat familiar with the per sq ft cost model of colos
| and datacenters in general, having had to contract for
| space and perform part of the buildout myself)
| closeparen wrote:
| I think this is taking an expansive view of labor e.g.
| writing all datacenter applications as optimal code in
| low level languages.
|
| The general disinterest in performance/efficiency work
| even for large scale datacenters is a major theme of Dan
| Luu's writing. I'm not sure how that applies to the rest
| of the industry but I can attest that my company's
| performance engineering team has been zeroed in every
| round of layoffs we've ever had.
| peter422 wrote:
| The larger your footprint in the cloud is, the larger
| incentive you have to make it more efficient though. I
| think it's a somewhat self-correcting problem.
|
| The biggest players are running highly, highly efficient
| software.
| [deleted]
| mgfist wrote:
| > but I can attest that my company's performance
| engineering team has been zeroed in every round of
| layoffs we've ever had.
|
| That doesn't necessarily mean management doesn't care
| about efficiency and performance, it just means they
| don't value the performance team (right or wrong).
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's certainly possible for an organization to fail to
| benefit from performance work. They can make all the
| servers twice as fast but if all that does is lower the
| utilization from 10% to 5%, that organization saves
| nothing, and Amazon pockets the difference in energy
| usage.
| rented_mule wrote:
| A friend of mine was in management at a large company
| trying to build up infra to compete with AWS 10-15 years
| ago (they started this effort when AWS was only S3). This
| company was bringing in billions a year operating
| dedicated off-site data centers for other companies, and
| they saw that AWS was a major threat to their business
| model. They dumped many, many millions of dollars into
| building up their infra.
|
| When they gave up, they concluded that AWS's core
| advantage was their optimization of the electricity
| needed for cooling. Given that my friend's company failed
| to design their systems to heavily optimize for this, the
| cost of electricity for cooling alone didn't let them get
| near AWS prices without incurring significant losses. He
| said that if they did it again, every part of the product
| would have a strict heat budget.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Jouppi showed that TCO is perfectly correlated with energy.
|
| https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/hardware/2021-jouppi.pdf
| hgomersall wrote:
| For the most parts your points are good, but the large scale
| facilities buying up renewable generation resource both hides
| the true energy cost whilst consuming that renewable resource.
| I suspect data centres are good candidates for such resource
| usage since they can be built optimally for generation
| capacity, but it's definitely possible the numbers could be
| skewed by the data providers' ability to hide energy
| consumption whilst having a net global impact.
| ctoth wrote:
| This seems remarkably low given the utility we get out of them. I
| was expecting at least an order of magnitude more. The headline
| particularly seems weird given the actual numbers. Lots of things
| take 2% of power, why not target them?
| [deleted]
| leptons wrote:
| All the computers that we use to access data in those data
| centers likely consume far more power than the data centers
| themselves.
| felixmeziere wrote:
| An order of magnitude more would be comparable to electricity
| consumption by households. Its utility feels to me at least an
| order of magnitude higher than the one of data centers, as
| sheltering, cleanliness and everyday appliances are much lower
| in the Maslow pyramid!
| solveit wrote:
| These days, sheltering, cleanliness and everyday appliances
| kinda depend on data centres.
| felixmeziere wrote:
| But they didn't 30 years ago and we were all doing well.
| Data centers are not required for them.
| euazOn wrote:
| Fun fact: the Maslow pyramid is surrounded by a bunch of
| myths, such as the fact that it most likely wasn't even
| created by Maslow.
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/who-
| cre...
| wyre wrote:
| Maslow came up with the idea for a pyramid. The
| visualization for the pyramid was created by someone
| working in advertising, iirc.
| euazOn wrote:
| Maslow came up with the general idea, which was different
| than the pyramid we know today. He never came up with the
| idea for a pyramid.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Funnily enough I've really only heard it referred to as
| "Maslow's hierarchy" and not a pyramid specifically until
| this thread. Which appears to be proper accreditation.
| ctoth wrote:
| Sure, housing takes ~20%. But while you are sitting in your
| nicely electrified house, watching Netflix, You're still
| using that datacenter's power. All the people in all their
| nice electrified houses are looking for electrified
| entertainment served from datacenters, along with all the
| remarkable shit computers get used for. So it's not that
| housing isn't more important, it's that computing does so
| much with so little already.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Something like 99.44% of all the energy used in the Netflix
| system is used by your TV.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Wow, sorry guys my bad. I'll turn my TV off. Good day!
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| You definitely should, I know some folks that keep their
| huge TV on 24/7 because they like the pretty screensaver
| and photos it shows when idle. These same folks take a
| lot of other steps in their life to try to help the
| environment (recycle, drive electric cars, etc) but
| simple stuff like turning things off completely confounds
| them.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| How much does turning the TV off reduce energy
| consumption? I know some appliances waste nearly as much
| power in "standby" mode as they do during operation.
| bombcar wrote:
| And during the times of the year when you heat the house,
| it's often basically a wash - the energy goes into heat
| anyway.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| What's the relative impact of a mile driven vs. an hour
| of the tv being on?
|
| Edit: Hmmm. According to gpt-4, the average TV would
| incur about .02 kg of CO2 per hour of usage, assuming a
| typical electrical grid mix in the US. While it estimates
| that driving 1 mile emits avout 0.1 kg of CO2.
|
| If that's the case, 5 hours of TV is roughly equal 1 mile
| of driving. Interesting.
|
| Of course, if the grid has a higher percentage of
| renewables or the car is electric, that changes things.
| jeffbee wrote:
| A year of an Energy Star-rated TV being on for 5 hours a
| day is equivalent to charging a Tesla Model 3 once.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| A 26" TV or an 80"?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Counter-argument:
|
| Beauty and art are important for human welfare and are
| worth spending resources on.
| pard68 wrote:
| Honestly, turning your TV is for your own best.
| irrational wrote:
| You seem to be missing some words. I'm guessing you meant
| to say "turning your TV off is for your own best
| interest"?
| callalex wrote:
| And that power grid is intelligently and efficiently
| managed using those same data centers.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Global P2P distribution of torrented movies is at least 4
| times more energy efficient than any datacenter system
| vould ever be.
| sidpatil wrote:
| How did you calculate that?
| felixmeziere wrote:
| My point was more that we would collectively be much worse
| off without household consumption than without data centers
| (so no Netflix, no smartly managed grid etc.)
| jl6 wrote:
| Lots of things take 2% and that's the problem - you can keep
| breaking down consumption into finer and finer categories, to
| find that all those fine categories each only take a small
| percentage of the total.
|
| The problem is _everything_ , all together. All the 2%s each
| need to take action in their own way.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is the opposite, though. In order to cobble together a
| number that seems even remotely problematic they had to
| combine several things that are weakly related: all IT
| workloads, plus all wireless networks. They also needed to
| express it in terms of global electricity, instead of global
| primary energy, because it is absolutely dwarfed by fuel
| burned for transport. Finally, this is a consumer that can be
| trivially decarbonized.
|
| Compare private passenger cars which are ~12% of global CO2
| and there are no practical ways to decarbonize that.
| gmerc wrote:
| Ya, nobody has figured out public transport. it's a myth
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| How do you decarbonize IT workloads in a trivial way?
| aziaziazi wrote:
| By reducing the workload, eg. using lower resolution
| video
| jeffbee wrote:
| Anything that is already purely electric is trivial to
| switch to non-fossil energy.
| sadhorse wrote:
| Utility? Imagine all we could achieve with the time wasted
| daily on social media globally.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| This sentence only makes sense if you believe data centers
| are exclusively used for social media.
| jedberg wrote:
| Social media provides me with entertainment and connection to
| family and friends. It's not all wasted time.
| sadhorse wrote:
| From your bio I can guarantee you that you do not represent
| the average social media dweller. Not even close. And you
| know it.
| jedberg wrote:
| I'm not sure what my bio has to do with the value I get
| from social media.
| brightlancer wrote:
| How are you describing "average"? The vast majority of
| folks on social media are lurkers; the median hours of
| use is well below the mean.
| ilyt wrote:
| Well, looking at pre-social media days not all that much
| useful.
| SethTro wrote:
| Article is paywalled and archive.ph is in an infinite CAPTCHA
| loop so feel free to reply with their numbers.
|
| Global Electrical Consumption = 25,000 TWh Data centers @ 2% of
| global usage = 25,000 * 0.02 = 500 TWh Cryptocurrency estimated
| usage in 2022[1][2] = 100-140 TWh
|
| Crypto uses 100 / (500 + 100) = 16% of the power usage of data
| centers + crypto. Surprising and disappointing.
|
| [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [2]
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco...
| Quindecillion wrote:
| Yikes... digiconomist. Literally zero credibility there. His
| name is Alex de Vries and he works for the dutch central bank.
| To my knowledge, very little of his blog posts have made its
| way to peer review and academic publication. For some reason
| that doesn't stop his work from being distributed widely as an
| authoritative source on this topic.
|
| This paper has it's own problems with conflicts of interest,
| but it has gained traction recently and is worth a read to see
| things from another perspective.
|
| https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/14/3/35
|
| Could also look into the work of Troy Cross, Margot Paez, and
| Daniel Batten who are climate activists and pro-Bitcoin because
| of the incentives it provides around building out renewable
| energy and mitigating methane emissions.
|
| And NY Times is notoriously anti-Bitcoin, to the point you have
| to ask, "do they have an agenda"?
| drones wrote:
| That seems... fine. For the energy:gdp ratio it seems to have
| worked out well in all honesty.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Also electricity can be renewably sourced. Better to focus on
| which industries use the most hydrocarbons.
| shagie wrote:
| A lot of this is for cooling.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness
|
| https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/measuring-efficie...
|
| > When the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) was
| conceived, NREL set an aggressive requirement that its data
| center achieve an annualized average power usage effectiveness
| (PUE) of 1.06 or better. Since the facility opened, this goal has
| been met every year--and the data center has now achieved an
| annualized PUE rating of 1.036.
|
| > Studies show a wide range of PUE values for data centers, but
| the overall average tends to be around 1.8. Data centers focusing
| on efficiency typically achieve PUE values of 1.2 or less. PUE is
| the ratio of the total amount of power used by a computer data
| center facility to the power delivered to computing equipment.
| sitkack wrote:
| This is just a ratio of power fed into computers vs not-
| computers. It doesn't measure the effectiveness of
| power->problem_solved. If you were running P4 space heaters but
| delivering power to no other equipment, you would have a PUE of
| 1.
|
| It is _a_ metric, but not the only one.
| amelius wrote:
| In comparison, how much do laptops, desktops and phones consume?
| miahwilde wrote:
| The human brain consumes 20% of calories - a balance of brain vs
| brawn that has proven effective. I'd argue we'd be much better
| off with radically more energy (as a percentage of global energy)
| going to data centers. I'd also argue that this equilibrium will
| find itself.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Wild to correlate biological organisms to planet scale
| economies. They are different beasts.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Why?
|
| Planetary economies are just a different kind of organism,
| that at this point is a cyborg.
|
| Thinking about the ideal energy balance devoted to planetary
| cognition vs planetary kinetics seems like a fascinating way
| to model the world. The main thing that makes humans so
| dominant is that we took the risk of devoting more of our
| energy towards cognition and as a result discovered magical
| ways to leverage and exponentially increase our kinetic power
| (e.g. bow and arrow).
|
| What happens when we start devoting more resources towards
| cognition at a planetary scale?
| jtwaleson wrote:
| It's an interesting possibility for sure but to me these
| concepts are not linked. With the recent LK-99 craze, I
| learned that theoretical optimal efficiency for computing
| is many many orders of magnitude higher than today. So:
| chips theoretically can get much more efficient. If we find
| a 1000x more efficient computer, do you still think we need
| to throw the same 20% of our resources towards it? What
| would we let those 1000x more capable computers do? The
| question we need to ask is: what can we do with computing,
| what would it give us and how much energy does that cost.
|
| I don't want to sound like "384kb is enough for everybody"
| but saying there's a fixed percentage of energy that should
| go towards computing is weird to me.
| anonporridge wrote:
| There's not a fixed percentage. There's an optimal
| balance that likely changes depending on the environment.
|
| But you do sound like you're saying "384kb is enough for
| everybody". The reason to devote more resources to
| cognition is is precisely because we can't imagine the
| possibilities that exist with more clever thinking
| applied to our limited resources. In the same way, an ape
| with 10% energy allocated towards cognition (guessing)
| can't even begin to imagine the magic that gets unlocked
| by its ancestors that gambled on 20%. Hell, apes can look
| at us now and still can't understand us.
|
| In this conversation, you're the ape who's blindly
| suggesting there's little worthwhile in expanding
| resources towards global computation, and I'm the ape
| who's blindly suggesting there probably is. Neither of us
| can honestly predict what might happen, good or bad.
| esprehn wrote:
| This is only a problem if the computational power is sitting
| idle, or if there's reason to believe more efficient servers
| exist and are not being used effectively. Of course replacing
| millions of functioning servers just to reduce energy usage is
| very wasteful in terms of environmental impact too.
|
| Lots of that computational power is also used to offset other
| energy consuming tasks. Like video conferencing instead of office
| buildings or travel.
|
| It's not clear that even 5% going to servers is an issue in that
| framing. What matters is the value created per person using
| online services.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Headline - data centers consume massive electricity, more than
| whole nations; holders of google/AWS/Meta stock on centralization
| of compute power with self-referential economics -- "no big deal,
| move along citizen"
| refactor_master wrote:
| Briefly ignoring the economic aspect of this, we have to stop
| using countries as reference points against the whole world.
| It's like when I'm told "Bad thing X happened, and affected an
| area the size of Belgium. A WHOLE COUNTRY".
|
| What do I do with this information? Sure, Belgium is big, but
| is it like, _big_? It turns out that it 's... _does the
| math_... roughly 0.00006 times the total area of the Earth.
| That doesn 't sound big. And if bad thing X happens every year,
| it would take more than 16000 years to cover the Earth, or 800
| if we say 95% of the Earth is water anyway. That timeline also
| sounds manageable.
|
| I'm not trying to spin disaster positively, but will someone
| _please_ just start using "affected area / total potential
| area" or something, instead of yardsticks and football fields.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Texas is 22 times as big as Belgium. It's not huge.
| wyre wrote:
| I'm surprised (I shouldn't be at this point) that this is the
| only comment here critiquing the energy usage of data centers.
| When I see this headline I don't think about steaming from
| Netflix, I think about the troves of data Google, Mega,
| Microsoft, Netflix, NSA etc have gathered about us, arguably
| against our will.
|
| I shouldn't be surprised that HN users would applaud this
| energy use in the name of value, when these same users are
| stockholders of the companies creating this so-called value.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Comparing the market segment of all data centers around the
| world to a single nation doesn't make much sense to me?
|
| Not saying we shouldn't be invested in efficiency here. It's
| possible that we need regulation and the natural incentives of
| cost control aren't enough. I just honestly don't see the
| alarm.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| And suburban family of 5 probably uses more electricity than a
| rural African village. So what?
|
| These facilities are run by companies who obsess over reducing
| opex. If you want to reduce datacenter power consumption,
| figure out what drives on-prem compute and create financial
| incentives to drive that workload to cloud. More demand equals
| more capital invest and more efficiency.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The majority of the energy being used according to the report
| is "Data transmission network energy use", chiefly mobile
| networks, so unless you are prepared to chuck your mobile, you
| can stuff it.
| spicyusername wrote:
| It's actually surprising to me how much value we're getting for
| so little electricity.
| perrygeo wrote:
| Keep in mind that electricity generation itself is only
| responsible for ~35% of our greenhouse gas emissions (power
| generation was responsible for 13 Gt CO2 in 2019, globally 37 Gt)
|
| So if we wanted to estimate the global impact of data centers on
| _CO2 emissions_ , that's about 0.6%. And that's not a perfect
| calculation as much of the new power capacity is in renewables,
| thus lower relative emissions. <0.5% would be a better estimate.
|
| So 1/200th of our greenhouse gas problem is caused by data
| centers. I'll echo some of the other comments in this thread but
| - damn, that's a pretty good deal considering how much value we
| get out of it.
|
| [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-co2-status-
| report-...
| realreality wrote:
| You're not counting the embodied emissions of all the hardware
| inside the data centers.
|
| And consider the low lifespan of IT equipment.
| tetha wrote:
| There are also some german projects to integrate datacenters
| into the district heating nets. Capturing the waste heat and
| using it for heating homes allows us to utilize a very large
| percentage of the electricity pumped into a datacenter one way
| or another.
| doikor wrote:
| This number alone is pretty much meaningless.
|
| How large part of GDP produced world wide is using these data
| centers in one way or another (My bet is 80%+).
|
| There isn't a single Fortune 500 company that does not have its
| data on computers and thus in some data center somewhere (if they
| are sane). Most also have moved a huge chunk of their processing
| there too.
|
| Personally I can't even come up with a "serious" business that
| does not use data centers in one way or another. Even basic
| mom&pop store that does all of their inventory on a laptop
| locally and makes all of their products by hand uses data centers
| if they accept credit/debit card payments or they have a phone
| number.
| guerby wrote:
| Citing IEA directly:
|
| https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and...
|
| "Estimated global data centre electricity consumption in 2022 was
| 240-340 TWh1, or around 1-1.3% of global final electricity
| demand. This excludes energy used for cryptocurrency mining,
| which was estimated to be around 110 TWh in 2022, accounting for
| 0.4% of annual global electricity demand. "
| Nereuxofficial wrote:
| It's incredible how much energy cryptocurrency uses considering
| it's lacking real-world use cases
| seeknotfind wrote:
| Worth it.
| tb_technical wrote:
| The US department of energy estimates that 10% of the US power
| grid is devoted to lighting, last I checked. If we extrapolate
| that out to all nations and power grids, 2% is a sizeable but
| okay amount of energy for handling large amounts of people's
| data.
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