I mean yeah, that would check out. Seems like a lot of these facilities are sitting on a bit of a real estate goldmine in which installation of solar panels and storage batteries could offset a lot of that consumption (in addition to being nicely synergistic with emergency power needs when grid power is interrupted).
I think you might be over-estimating solar or under estimating data center power usage. A quick search suggests that a data center consumes between 150W and 750W per square foot of building space. Solar is roughly 20W per square foot.
Even if you assume 1 floor and a roof covered entirely in solar and the lower end of the power estimate, that's only covering 13% of the power requirements. If you look at the higher end of power estimates and assume a 3 storey data center with 50% of the roof covered, a more realistic set of numbers for a hyperscaler, that's only 0.4%.
As for being synergistic for emergency power, batteries would help here, but peak power usage is probably around dusk when solar won't be that useful but when power is most likely to be disrupted.
Those solar production numbers are exceedingly exaggerated. You need to add capacity factor to the solar install. Multiply your solar production by 0.2 to 0.3 or so and you’ll be in a better ballpark range.
Peak power usage for large scale facilities is not much different than off peak. Most megawatt plus builds I’ve been part of have less than 10% difference between peak and valley in terms of watts used. Perhaps the hyperscalers see a much larger difference but I have my doubts.
If you want to see exactly the type of solar panels needed for a data center (and why they’re impractical in even ideal situations) then check out this mockup of a proposed space data center ran off solar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew
I don't totally understand the implications of this (although clearly they're not good):
The most important tools in this “creative accounting” when it comes to data centers are renewable energy certificates, or Recs. These are certificates that a company purchases to show it is buying renewable energy-generated electricity to match a portion of its electricity consumption – the catch, though, is that the renewable energy in question doesn’t need to be consumed by a company’s facilities. Rather, the site of production can be anywhere from one town over to an ocean away.
The "doesn't need to be consumed by a company's facilities" part makes it sound like you can buy these credits without actually using them(?), but the "site of production" part makes it sound like you're buying credits and cashing them in, just not in the same location as your data center. So I'm not sure if the situation here is that you have a data center in Seattle, but you're buying solar power generated in Kansas City, and you may or may not have a corporate office or something in Kansas City to use it.
Close. The office in Kansas City wouldn't use it, if that office existed.
Suppose you can get solar power in Kansas City, but can't transport it to Seattle, maybe due to lacking interconnect capacity, maybe lack of contracts among the power companies, it doesn't matter. What you do is buy 1GW of solar in Kansas, sell that same power as fossil power in Kansas and buy fossil power in Seattle.
The Guardian thinks it's creative accounting, IMO it's a fair and good hack: When you open a new site and use that hack to buy power for the new site, the corresponding new power generation is solar. It's just solar with two additional accounting hops.
It's a useful stepping stone, and probably better for the environment than not doing it, but ultimately the emissions still happen. The sad reality is that in some areas there is no emissions free energy to buy no matter how much you want to. Some would say not to put datacenters there, but if there are customers wanting them I understand why companies do it (even if I don't agree).
Well… the emissions happen so long as someone else wants to buy fossil power, but you can hardly blame the DC company for some other company wanting to buy fossil power.
In the case where I came across it, the problem was contractual. Only one vendor could supply power to that site. So by applying that hack, ① new renewable energy generation was built ② a conventional power plant lost a contract with Otherco and ③ another conventional plant gained a contract of the same size. After a while the contractual problem was solved.
IMO it doens't make sense to choose site based on something as flimsy as a contract. Contracts are changeable on a timescale of months or years, buildings last longer.
What are "the emissions" in your sentence? When a new server boots in such a DC, the increased power usage is matched by increased regenerative power generation, so what are "the emissions" that "still happen"?
If its fossil power, the carbon from it got removed from the ground and inserted into the surface carbon cycle. Lacking any large-scale method to put it back into the ground, this is a irreversible process.
The damage is done regardless of where the emissions happen. Shuffling the location of the emissions around does not help.
The Guardian blames companies who use regenerative power, and who pay to have regenerative power generation expanded faster than would otherwise be possible. IMO that blaming hurts.
If you buy solar credits from KC to use in Seattle, you've increased the solar generation in KC without affecting demand in KC. This will idle one plant's worth of fossil generation in KC. In Seattle, you're buying one plant's worth of additional power. In Seattle excess demand is generally met by buying Hydro from BC, but let's assume worst case and it spins up previously-idle fossil.
So in KC you're +1 solar, -1 fossil. In Seattle you're +1 fossil. Net: +1 solar.
Right — this only works because someone else wants to buy fossil power. If no one wanted to buy fossil power this would stop working. But if/when we get that far, there shouldn't any need for hacks like this.
No, there are two consumers, the baseline is two units of fossil energy. The clean energy you're paying for is still being used by someone in lieu of more fossil energy. It doesn't just disappear.
I think it's useful to look what happens at the margin. If you are connected to the grid, or could be reasonably connected, all the power you use comes from the source with the highest marginal costs in the region. Most of the time in most places, that means a power plant burning fossil fuels. If the demand goes down permanently, that power plant will be the first to shut down.
If you buy existing clean energy to compensate for your emissions, overall emissions will remain the same, no matter which hacks or accounting tricks you use. That clean energy would be produced and sold anyway, because the marginal costs are so low. If you can't avoid emissions and want to compensate them, you must invest in new renewable capacity that replaces fossil fuels somewhere.
If you buy so much solar that it leads to expansion of facilities, this "hack" will have you buying so much fossil power you are in effect subsidising the other fossil customers and thus prolonging their use of fossils. You definitely shouldn't count that power as 100% renewable.
It only works as a clean bypass of you buy so little you don't impact the local fossil market, but this is a discussion about large data centres so that's basically never satisfied.
That argument applies to my personal electricity bill too.
I buy my power from a company that supplies 100% regenerative power and gets most of its power from new generation facilities, 350 of them so far. Those 350 deliver power to about a half-million people, which obviously took market share away from existing fossil plants and pushed the market prices down.
So by that test, what action does not prolong the use of fossil fuel? You're making the test much too strict.
You've got that backwards. If you're using a solar credit from KC in Seattle, you're subsidizing the cost of power in KC. Solar generation is built in KC, but demand is unaffected. Therefore the price of power drops in KC, crowding out fossil there and lowering the price of green power.
In Seattle you've increased demand without increasing generation, raising the price there. Yes, fossil generators may be built to satisfy this new demand, but that's unlikely in 2024. In Seattle in particular, excess demand is generally met by buying hydro from BC.
> Close. The office in Kansas City wouldn't use it, if that office existed. Suppose you can get solar power in Kansas City, but can't transport it to Seattle, maybe due to lacking interconnect capacity, maybe lack of contracts among the power companies, it doesn't matter. What you do is buy 1GW of solar in Kansas, sell that same power as fossil power in Kansas and buy fossil power in Seattle.
If I’m understanding this correctly:
1. You buy 1MW of solar power in location X, and don’t use it.
2. You sell 1MW of emissions producing power in location X, that someone else uses
3. You buy 1MW of emissions producing power in location Y, and use that.
Net result: 2MW of emissions producing power used, 0MW of solar power used, and a claim of net-0MW of emissions produced?
Yes, it’s a “clever hack”, but accounting sleight of hands are just that. Most charitably magic, less charitably outright falsehoods.
> IMO it's a fair and good hack: When you open a new site and use that hack to buy power for the new site, the corresponding new power generation is solar. It's just solar with two additional accounting hops
I don’t understand how you got to this outcome from the first position. Can you help me understand what steps I missed for this to actually have good outcomes resulting in solar power actually being used?
I’d love to be wrong and for this to actually be actually good outcomes combined with clever accounting - those are absolutely the most satisfying solutions, both to design and read about (for me personally, anyway): where clever people are coming up with creative solutions to solve bureaucratic bullshit, while also achieving good outcomes.
EDIT: Child comment has helped me spot the error in my comprehension leading to incorrect math: “ What you do is buy 1GW of solar in Kansas, sell that same power as fossil power in Kansas” - I didn’t read ‘same power’ properly in my first read. I’ve left my comment as-is despite it now being completely wrong as a result of that, and glad to have been wrong
No, the 1MW solar power was used. It was used by someone who believed that it created emissions. But the emissions were instead produced in Seattle rather than Kansas. The accounting relies on the person buying power in Kansas not to care that it's fossil fuel power that they're purchasing. They know that there's emissions from their power use, but they don't know where those emissions are.
I think it's a really clever hack. An admirable way to drive forward installation of regenerative power plants, faster than the infrastructure/contracts would otherwise allow.
Some people refer to these as "indulgences", like the certification of having your sins forgiven that the Catholic Church used to sell before Martin Luther (and half of western Europe) got mad about it.
The effect is to either shift the attribution of emissions to some other company who doesn't care, or to cause renewables to be double-counted.
Consider a toy grid, with two users A and B and generators C(lean) and D(irty). All connect to the same point. A buys a certificate saying that 100% of their energy comes from C. But that does not inform B about anything - they might reasonably look at the grid and then claim that 50% of their energy is clean, when in fact by arithmetic 100% of it is dirty because all the clean stuff has been bought by A.
Also I have always wondered about this model. Electricity is only fungible in the moment, not on longer scale. So let's say C goes entirely offline. How many of A instantly stop using any power? B can happily use the D as overall on long term it will balance out, but A should not be able to use any power.
Having a grid makes it pretty difficult to "buy clean energy" because all generation is sort of laundered together. If you pay for a clean energy supplier, obviously there is no way to force that you only get electrons pushed by solar or whatever. You could change your supplier from week to week and nothing in the grid infra changes. But the market overall determines who can sell power, so if nobody wants to buy from coal, the coal plants won't get paid (or it becomes financially unviable to generate).
If you have on-site generation then this is a bit different because you can at least reduce your grid consumption. But otherwise it's not hugely different to buying carbon offset credits and assuming the trees will exist in 100 years.
Sounds like carbon emission rights which are freely traded from companies that just get them without using them; iirc Tesla earned a lot of money selling their emission rights.
I mean on paper it's a good idea, but there's not enough restrictions. Emission rights, for example, should be bought (from the government) in the first place, at an exponential price (so the more you need the more you pay). Supply should be reduced every year, with a goal being zero. They should not be tradeable across country (or in the case of the US, state) borders. Same with these renewable energy certificates mentioned, the further away the source, the higher the price should be.
But that's all bookkeeping shenanigans; it doesn't mean that e.g. data centers or industry will reduce their energy usage. That's what's broken about the push for renewable energy; it isn't a replacement of existing power production, it's on top of, and any added capacity is bought up and used.
Obviously data centers shouldn't lie about the emissions, but it would be interesting to know how e.g. Amazon compares to the on-prem setup their offerings frequently replaces. Apple and Meta is a little different, in that none of their data center capacity directly replaces anything, it's all "extra".
Internally we had an interesting discussion, about travelling. Some one brought up that it might not look good that we fly to frequently, or at all. That's true, but it's also a very visible and easy to understand thing to focus on. One engineer does some quick napkin math and suggests that we optimize our code instead, as that would save more CO2 yearly, compared to us not flying. To me that's a really good indication of something that's wrong in the industry, we're not optimizing our code anymore, we're barely able to get rid of rarely used code and infrastructure, because keeping it running isn't really that expensive anymore.
Again, data centers shouldn't lie about emissions, but what difference would it make it they didn't? We're the ones buying the capacity, rather than moving to on-device computing, rather than an always running cloud. We spin up way more infrastructure than we should, because it's easy, and it doesn't cost that much.
I totally agree with you!
There are so many layers we could optimize, with various level of difficulty and return in term of cost and co2 reduction.
Legacy tech stack are especially wasteful: HW + OS + App running 24/7 regardless if it used or not.
My intuition is that AWS claims they can reduce CO2 emissions from your onprem stack by 80% because *IF* it was rewritten into a serverless app, it would consume energy only when it runs.
A friend of mine is heavily into AWS. Over the past two years he moved their entire organisation off of EC2 instances. They where apparently running EC2 for everything, and the reflect my experience as well. Organisations mostly see AWS as a hypervisor in the cloud.
We tried to move so many customers to some sort of container, auto-scaling EC2 (i.e. turning the instances off when not in use), Aurora, Lambda, you name it, anything that doesn't necessarily run 24/7. The customers don't like it. They don't feel safe, it's no familiar to them, they don't understand how they should manage it or make up reasons as to why they need to run MariaDB one EC2 or why EFS or S3 won't be able to replace their EC2 backed NFS share.
When it's done correctly, seeing an entire business running without a single VM or physical server is really a amazing thing to see.
glimpsed into it, looks fancy but find it apologetic. IMO it's double-standards to campaign against "the next datacenter from being built" without reducing personal usage and demand.
Individual frugality is the precondition for collective degrowth, both practically and morally. Otherwise you just open business opportunities for datacenter growth.
IMO both should be pursued, make one and don't omit the other.
The simple answer to this:
Tax the #### out of the greenhouse gas emitting energy sources.
If we as a planet need to be using better sources of power so that our planet literally doesn't melt our food sources, and then us, then our governments need to make it more cost effective to use better sources. Carbon credits or energy swaps don't work to actually reduce the amount of polluting energy produced.
Datacenters require pretty constant 24/7 loads. You don’t get much difference at scale between 2pm and 2am. Maybe 10-20% at best.
It’s about the last place you want to start using intermittent power sources.
Chemical battery storage is simply not feasible today for such uses cases. If you go renewable your choice currently is to back that intermittent source with either coal or natural gas at nearly a 1:1 basis.
Nuclear starts looking pretty compelling for such use cases.
The dirty secret of renewables is that they are currently directly linked to natural gas peaker plants. This was obvious a decade ago, and still is just as true. My portfolio shows I was completely correct in this prediction.
Chemical storage at these tens to hundreds of megawatt scale is currently a pipe dream. Current deployments are measured in single digit hours of storage. Perhaps another decade will show things have changed, but I doubt it. Nuclear is currently the best battery tech we have available. Especially considering how greenwashed methane production has been.
And that’s not even getting into seasonal energy storage which we simply do not have any answers for short of hydro. Interconnections only work so long until you run out of other people’s coal or nuclear power sources.
I suppose you could redesign your facility to operate the emergency diesel backup generation on a regular basis but that’s even worse.
I’m very into solar and battery storage where it makes sense - even if not the most economical. I think anyone who can afford it should have a solar setup plus a few days worth of batteries installed at their place of residence. Focusing on datacenter power use is about the last thing we should be looking at after we optimize the rest. It’s like focusing on aviation as your priority for co2 reduction. Why go after the highest hanging fruit when so much low hanging fruit currently exists?
>> The dirty secret of renewables is that they are currently directly linked to natural gas peaker plants. This was obvious a decade ago, and still is just as true. My portfolio shows I was completely correct in this prediction.
It is true that peaker plants have grown alongside renewables. And that combination has reduced CO2 emissions, which was the whole point. And mostly it isn't peaker plants but more conventioanl CCGT's.
>> Chemical storage at these tens to hundreds of megawatt scale is currently a pipe dream. Current deployments are measured in single digit hours of storage.
There is over 80GW of battery storage capacity in the pipeline for the UK alone. And GW scale schemes are already active and being built. And whilst most schemes are still small (in MW and MWh terms) the grid is perfectly well designed to handle that.
>> Interconnections only work so long until you run out of other people’s coal or nuclear power sources.
And particularly renewables where there is excess generation in geographically distant places.
>> I suppose you could redesign your facility to operate the emergency diesel backup generation on a regular basis but that’s even worse.
Or just connect to a grid with a healthy mix of renewables, storage, interconnection, and yes nuclear. It is not an all or nothing question.
>> Why go after the highest hanging fruit when so much low hanging fruit currently exists?
Grid scale generation and usage is the low hanging fruit. That is why companies focus on it so much! A solar farm with 80k panels is cheaper to develop than 20k rooftop installations. A large operator like Google can make a significant difference on their own.
The perceived problem people keep mentioning is waste, but the problem there is that people don't want it in their backyards, like, anywhere. But, yeet it into a mountain cave, encased in lead and concrete, and forget about it. This is what's happening in Finland I believe.
We planed to do that originally but unfortunely the NIMBY crowd near yucca mountain got upset about it. fortunatly we have tech now to build reactors that turn refine used fuel into new fuel and low radiation byproduct but thanks to decades of the fossil fuel industry funding groups like the siera club and greenpeace we now have a national irrational phobia of atomic energy of any-sort
We've had that tech for decades, it's what France's infrastructure is built on.
The US doesn't like it because you end up with plutonium doing that. It's contrary to their geopolitical/non-proliferation goals if we start using it because we simultaneously want fairly arbitrary foreign states to use nuclear power (so they don't feel as compelled to start wars over energy), and we don't want arbitrary states having the ability to create nuclear weapons. So pretending that reprocessing fuel isn't the best way to approach long term nuclear power generation is what the DoE/DoD/DoS are stuck on, even domestically.
the real problem is cost, because bad regulations (which causes too safe and too expensive reactors, but even on top of that the whole industry is too small, there's no efficiency in building half a plant in 5 years...)
Even simpler answer - acceptance of humanity's addiction to fossil energy and the inevitable outcome. We started an anthropic fire a million years ago and it's only going to be extinguished when we are.
This is such a defeatist and simplistic answer. Climate warming models show big differences between 2 and 4 degrees Celcius. I know the planet is eventually going to be extinguished, but we are nowhere near that point and just giving up seems like a very bad idea for our children...
Acceptance is the road to inner peace. Accepting the mortality of the species is no different to accepting personal mortality - you know you're going to be dead before the end of the century, right? You enjoy the time you have, as we all collectively should. To expect even one person, ever mind a whole country to give up living like Royalty is unreasonable. (despite its inevitability). Big fast cars, abundance of food, instant satiation, nobody's going to give that up voluntarily.
Asking for taxes to go up is fine, but nobody wants to pay more taxes.
I agree that this is where it is likely going to go. I have also found my peace about that a while ago. On a personal level I also don't believe that giving up big cars, flying and other things is something that nobody is doing. There are quite a few people that avoid such things, including me.
I feel like you underestimate the energy that sacrifice releases. I also feel like you don't have children. Because if you did a sentence like "you know you're going to be dead before the end of the century, right?" would probably not be what you were thinking. Exactly when you have something to lose (the life of your children and grand children), it generates a desire to change this miserable state that the world is in. This is not a depressed or negative state. It's the opposite. It feel like diving into the issues of the world and not looking away.
And I think the injunction to "Enjoy!" is exactly what's wrong with the world and what leads you away from inner peace. This is what psycho analysts have discovered quite a while ago and what religious people are able to avoid by having higher goals than your own enjoyment. My own experience with this is that since I have given up trying to enjoy my life and I'm trying to wrestle with my own negativity, life is better.
Makes sense to locate your data center in a country or area with a low emissions electricity system and then also buy clean electricity. There are lots of good choices for DC operators and electricity providers at least in EU.
While true, the problem is that these data centers buy up the capacity of newly built clean energy systems (like windmills), instead of the renewables replacing non-renewable energy sources. The objective should not just be to add renewable energy to the grid, but to reduce consumption so non-renewables can be replaced.
69 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadWould need a solar farm with about 50x-100x the land area.
Even if you assume 1 floor and a roof covered entirely in solar and the lower end of the power estimate, that's only covering 13% of the power requirements. If you look at the higher end of power estimates and assume a 3 storey data center with 50% of the roof covered, a more realistic set of numbers for a hyperscaler, that's only 0.4%.
As for being synergistic for emergency power, batteries would help here, but peak power usage is probably around dusk when solar won't be that useful but when power is most likely to be disrupted.
Peak power usage for large scale facilities is not much different than off peak. Most megawatt plus builds I’ve been part of have less than 10% difference between peak and valley in terms of watts used. Perhaps the hyperscalers see a much larger difference but I have my doubts.
Suppose you can get solar power in Kansas City, but can't transport it to Seattle, maybe due to lacking interconnect capacity, maybe lack of contracts among the power companies, it doesn't matter. What you do is buy 1GW of solar in Kansas, sell that same power as fossil power in Kansas and buy fossil power in Seattle.
The Guardian thinks it's creative accounting, IMO it's a fair and good hack: When you open a new site and use that hack to buy power for the new site, the corresponding new power generation is solar. It's just solar with two additional accounting hops.
There are other variants of the same hack.
In the case where I came across it, the problem was contractual. Only one vendor could supply power to that site. So by applying that hack, ① new renewable energy generation was built ② a conventional power plant lost a contract with Otherco and ③ another conventional plant gained a contract of the same size. After a while the contractual problem was solved.
IMO it doens't make sense to choose site based on something as flimsy as a contract. Contracts are changeable on a timescale of months or years, buildings last longer.
If we had a world without wind it would be different, but we do have wind on this planet.
The damage is done regardless of where the emissions happen. Shuffling the location of the emissions around does not help.
The Guardian blames companies who use regenerative power, and who pay to have regenerative power generation expanded faster than would otherwise be possible. IMO that blaming hurts.
So in KC you're +1 solar, -1 fossil. In Seattle you're +1 fossil. Net: +1 solar.
If you buy existing clean energy to compensate for your emissions, overall emissions will remain the same, no matter which hacks or accounting tricks you use. That clean energy would be produced and sold anyway, because the marginal costs are so low. If you can't avoid emissions and want to compensate them, you must invest in new renewable capacity that replaces fossil fuels somewhere.
It only works as a clean bypass of you buy so little you don't impact the local fossil market, but this is a discussion about large data centres so that's basically never satisfied.
I buy my power from a company that supplies 100% regenerative power and gets most of its power from new generation facilities, 350 of them so far. Those 350 deliver power to about a half-million people, which obviously took market share away from existing fossil plants and pushed the market prices down.
So by that test, what action does not prolong the use of fossil fuel? You're making the test much too strict.
In Seattle you've increased demand without increasing generation, raising the price there. Yes, fossil generators may be built to satisfy this new demand, but that's unlikely in 2024. In Seattle in particular, excess demand is generally met by buying hydro from BC.
If I’m understanding this correctly:
1. You buy 1MW of solar power in location X, and don’t use it.
2. You sell 1MW of emissions producing power in location X, that someone else uses
3. You buy 1MW of emissions producing power in location Y, and use that.
Net result: 2MW of emissions producing power used, 0MW of solar power used, and a claim of net-0MW of emissions produced?
Yes, it’s a “clever hack”, but accounting sleight of hands are just that. Most charitably magic, less charitably outright falsehoods.
> IMO it's a fair and good hack: When you open a new site and use that hack to buy power for the new site, the corresponding new power generation is solar. It's just solar with two additional accounting hops
I don’t understand how you got to this outcome from the first position. Can you help me understand what steps I missed for this to actually have good outcomes resulting in solar power actually being used?
I’d love to be wrong and for this to actually be actually good outcomes combined with clever accounting - those are absolutely the most satisfying solutions, both to design and read about (for me personally, anyway): where clever people are coming up with creative solutions to solve bureaucratic bullshit, while also achieving good outcomes.
EDIT: Child comment has helped me spot the error in my comprehension leading to incorrect math: “ What you do is buy 1GW of solar in Kansas, sell that same power as fossil power in Kansas” - I didn’t read ‘same power’ properly in my first read. I’ve left my comment as-is despite it now being completely wrong as a result of that, and glad to have been wrong
No, the 1MW solar power was used. It was used by someone who believed that it created emissions. But the emissions were instead produced in Seattle rather than Kansas. The accounting relies on the person buying power in Kansas not to care that it's fossil fuel power that they're purchasing. They know that there's emissions from their power use, but they don't know where those emissions are.
Thank you!
I think it's a really clever hack. An admirable way to drive forward installation of regenerative power plants, faster than the infrastructure/contracts would otherwise allow.
The effect is to either shift the attribution of emissions to some other company who doesn't care, or to cause renewables to be double-counted.
Consider a toy grid, with two users A and B and generators C(lean) and D(irty). All connect to the same point. A buys a certificate saying that 100% of their energy comes from C. But that does not inform B about anything - they might reasonably look at the grid and then claim that 50% of their energy is clean, when in fact by arithmetic 100% of it is dirty because all the clean stuff has been bought by A.
See e.g. https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/the-trouble-with-eu...
If you have on-site generation then this is a bit different because you can at least reduce your grid consumption. But otherwise it's not hugely different to buying carbon offset credits and assuming the trees will exist in 100 years.
I mean on paper it's a good idea, but there's not enough restrictions. Emission rights, for example, should be bought (from the government) in the first place, at an exponential price (so the more you need the more you pay). Supply should be reduced every year, with a goal being zero. They should not be tradeable across country (or in the case of the US, state) borders. Same with these renewable energy certificates mentioned, the further away the source, the higher the price should be.
But that's all bookkeeping shenanigans; it doesn't mean that e.g. data centers or industry will reduce their energy usage. That's what's broken about the push for renewable energy; it isn't a replacement of existing power production, it's on top of, and any added capacity is bought up and used.
and to think of all the emissions being spent on useless AI
Internally we had an interesting discussion, about travelling. Some one brought up that it might not look good that we fly to frequently, or at all. That's true, but it's also a very visible and easy to understand thing to focus on. One engineer does some quick napkin math and suggests that we optimize our code instead, as that would save more CO2 yearly, compared to us not flying. To me that's a really good indication of something that's wrong in the industry, we're not optimizing our code anymore, we're barely able to get rid of rarely used code and infrastructure, because keeping it running isn't really that expensive anymore.
Again, data centers shouldn't lie about emissions, but what difference would it make it they didn't? We're the ones buying the capacity, rather than moving to on-device computing, rather than an always running cloud. We spin up way more infrastructure than we should, because it's easy, and it doesn't cost that much.
Legacy tech stack are especially wasteful: HW + OS + App running 24/7 regardless if it used or not.
My intuition is that AWS claims they can reduce CO2 emissions from your onprem stack by 80% because *IF* it was rewritten into a serverless app, it would consume energy only when it runs.
That's one big if! https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/mt/how-to-drive-the-discussi....
We tried to move so many customers to some sort of container, auto-scaling EC2 (i.e. turning the instances off when not in use), Aurora, Lambda, you name it, anything that doesn't necessarily run 24/7. The customers don't like it. They don't feel safe, it's no familiar to them, they don't understand how they should manage it or make up reasons as to why they need to run MariaDB one EC2 or why EFS or S3 won't be able to replace their EC2 backed NFS share.
When it's done correctly, seeing an entire business running without a single VM or physical server is really a amazing thing to see.
Thought it was quite good: https://emmlab.info/Resources_page/Data%20Center%20Fights_di...
Individual frugality is the precondition for collective degrowth, both practically and morally. Otherwise you just open business opportunities for datacenter growth.
IMO both should be pursued, make one and don't omit the other.
To measure it, we use your detailed billing data and local kWh carbon intensity.
To reduce it, we are offering a cloud governance tool based on Cloud Custodian to identify and remediate wasteful or/and unsecure cloud resources.
If we as a planet need to be using better sources of power so that our planet literally doesn't melt our food sources, and then us, then our governments need to make it more cost effective to use better sources. Carbon credits or energy swaps don't work to actually reduce the amount of polluting energy produced.
It’s about the last place you want to start using intermittent power sources.
Chemical battery storage is simply not feasible today for such uses cases. If you go renewable your choice currently is to back that intermittent source with either coal or natural gas at nearly a 1:1 basis.
Nuclear starts looking pretty compelling for such use cases.
The dirty secret of renewables is that they are currently directly linked to natural gas peaker plants. This was obvious a decade ago, and still is just as true. My portfolio shows I was completely correct in this prediction.
Chemical storage at these tens to hundreds of megawatt scale is currently a pipe dream. Current deployments are measured in single digit hours of storage. Perhaps another decade will show things have changed, but I doubt it. Nuclear is currently the best battery tech we have available. Especially considering how greenwashed methane production has been.
And that’s not even getting into seasonal energy storage which we simply do not have any answers for short of hydro. Interconnections only work so long until you run out of other people’s coal or nuclear power sources.
I suppose you could redesign your facility to operate the emergency diesel backup generation on a regular basis but that’s even worse.
I’m very into solar and battery storage where it makes sense - even if not the most economical. I think anyone who can afford it should have a solar setup plus a few days worth of batteries installed at their place of residence. Focusing on datacenter power use is about the last thing we should be looking at after we optimize the rest. It’s like focusing on aviation as your priority for co2 reduction. Why go after the highest hanging fruit when so much low hanging fruit currently exists?
It is true that peaker plants have grown alongside renewables. And that combination has reduced CO2 emissions, which was the whole point. And mostly it isn't peaker plants but more conventioanl CCGT's.
>> Chemical storage at these tens to hundreds of megawatt scale is currently a pipe dream. Current deployments are measured in single digit hours of storage.
There is over 80GW of battery storage capacity in the pipeline for the UK alone. And GW scale schemes are already active and being built. And whilst most schemes are still small (in MW and MWh terms) the grid is perfectly well designed to handle that.
>> Interconnections only work so long until you run out of other people’s coal or nuclear power sources.
And particularly renewables where there is excess generation in geographically distant places.
>> I suppose you could redesign your facility to operate the emergency diesel backup generation on a regular basis but that’s even worse.
Or just connect to a grid with a healthy mix of renewables, storage, interconnection, and yes nuclear. It is not an all or nothing question.
>> Why go after the highest hanging fruit when so much low hanging fruit currently exists?
Grid scale generation and usage is the low hanging fruit. That is why companies focus on it so much! A solar farm with 80k panels is cheaper to develop than 20k rooftop installations. A large operator like Google can make a significant difference on their own.
The US doesn't like it because you end up with plutonium doing that. It's contrary to their geopolitical/non-proliferation goals if we start using it because we simultaneously want fairly arbitrary foreign states to use nuclear power (so they don't feel as compelled to start wars over energy), and we don't want arbitrary states having the ability to create nuclear weapons. So pretending that reprocessing fuel isn't the best way to approach long term nuclear power generation is what the DoE/DoD/DoS are stuck on, even domestically.
https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flo...
Asking for taxes to go up is fine, but nobody wants to pay more taxes.
I feel like you underestimate the energy that sacrifice releases. I also feel like you don't have children. Because if you did a sentence like "you know you're going to be dead before the end of the century, right?" would probably not be what you were thinking. Exactly when you have something to lose (the life of your children and grand children), it generates a desire to change this miserable state that the world is in. This is not a depressed or negative state. It's the opposite. It feel like diving into the issues of the world and not looking away.
And I think the injunction to "Enjoy!" is exactly what's wrong with the world and what leads you away from inner peace. This is what psycho analysts have discovered quite a while ago and what religious people are able to avoid by having higher goals than your own enjoyment. My own experience with this is that since I have given up trying to enjoy my life and I'm trying to wrestle with my own negativity, life is better.
Demand will fall in the countries with dirty electricity.