cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/74351191
A proposed data center in northwestern Alberta could generate dozens of atomic bombs worth of heat every day.
I’ve got to wonder if there’s some way to install heat exchangers on these data centers to recapture the heat. Nearly 100% of that energy is turned into heat (with a little escaping as sound). I’ve heard they’re wanting to build datacenters inside decommissioned nuclear power plants, so maybe those would even have some of the infrastructure to do it?
It might be tricky if the hot exhaust never gets above water boiling temperature…
Edit: It looks like this is the closest technology we have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower Building one of those on a datacenter could recover maybe 20-30% of the energy if I’m understanding the article right.
Most data centres use some type of mechanical cooling (like AC) but instead of using compression, they can use a close system exchange with outdoor air. Still the same problem (several thousand households worth of heat in a single building), but it’s at least not wasting clean water for it. They could use the heat to keep green houses warm, heat towns, or use it for power generation even.
But those all cost money, which is why they won’t do it. This is the same type of planning that puts trains in a city above ground and builds multi million dollar buildings that will be torn down in 30 years because they are falling apart.
They could use the heat to keep green houses warm, heat towns, or use it for power generation even.
Which is exactly what I’m suggesting?
I’m not talking about water consumption of evaporative cooling, I’m more talking about the massive power inputs that put 100% of that heat into the surrounding environment. It would be amazing if that could be reduced to only 70% of the energy input.
Good thing we’re not dealing with a existential crisis caused by heating the earth, or anything…
Global warming is caused by GHG emissions causing the atmosphere to delay the Earth’s radiation of heat from the sun back into space. The heat directly emitted by the data center would have more of a local effect. It is unprecedented in terms of a point heat source so it could potentially be quite destructive to the local environment. That being said, the article stated the data center alone would also account for a whopping 4% of Canada’s GHG emissions.
While you’re correct, that much heat emitted in a local area prone to yearly fire seasons seems to be unwise. If sparks from trains travelling around curves can start fires (Lytton seemingly every year), multiple nukes’ worth of heat daily might be worse.
Also, it’s still an increase of emissions, more is always worse than neutral in this scenario. Yes, there are more polluting things to worry about, but we need to be reducing emissions, not increasing them.
On the order of 20MW continuous draw, saved you the math.
That’s pretty small for an industrial load and some hyperscale data-centers are in the 500MW scale.
500mw???
Metric motherfucker, do you speak it?
This website is ad-laden cancer
This heat would be from fossil methane combustion. Who accepted to store all the exhaust in their own backyard?
queue the people telling us how little that is in comparison to the energy of the sun… you know what else the sun is doing? making plants grow! can your data center do that? no it does the opposite…
edit: they are already coming out of the woodworks, just with different “arguments”… 🙄
It does not do the opposite, no, it provides compute.
deleted by creator
Sure, and our planet doesn’t need saving. Planets don’t just break.
Galaxy brains.
Shinra Mako reactors have become an actual thing in real life. Sucking all the life out of everything around it to generate computing power for tech billionaires to burn while creating nothing of value.
Negative value if you look at the impending crash.
Also very negative value considering the added climate change they contribute to.
Went into the article and no, it doesn’t provide actual hard numbers beyond ‘atom bombs’. Stupid bullshit.
a daily thermal load of between 16 and 18 gigawatts
Yes, there is a range in standard units. Please read the article more carefully.
That’s the common journalist error of mixing up power and energy. 1 Watt is 1 joule per second, and is a rate of power. Saying a datacentre will have a daily thermal load of 16 and 18 gigawatts is like saying your car has a daily thermal load of 14 litres of gas per kilometre.
Heat exchange can be given in watts, but again that’s heat exchanged per second. If a room has a heat loss of 500w you can maintain temperature by using a 500w space heater on max or a 1000w space heater at 50% power. Saying the room requires 500w of heat daily doesn’t make sense.
It’s most likely the data centre has a maximum power draw of 18 gigawatts if everything was running at max all at once, which isn’t a realistic average use, and also doesn’t give an indication of how much heat is being produced.
It seems they got the 23 nuclear bombs by taking the amount of energy the Hiroshima nuclear bomb was estimated to have released (about 63 terajoule) and comparing it to the amount of energy consumed in 24 hours at a rate of 18 gigawatts (18 gigajoule/s × 86,400 s/day is about equal to 63 terajoule × 23).
This makes no sense tho. One sentence earlier, they say: “In all, the data center project will use about nine gigawatts of power using on-site natural gas generators per day, instead of drawing power from an energy grid”
You can’t just use 9GW of energy and produce 16 GW of waste heat. That would be a very severe violation of every law of physics I know.
You can’t just use 9GW of energy and produce 16 GW of waste heat.
I suspect that’s 9GW of usuable elctrical power.
Physics tells us no process is 100% efficient. If their gas powered generator is particularily innefficient, they might be burning 16 GW worth of gas to produce 9 GW of electricity, the 7 GW difference being mostly heat coming out of gas generators. The 9 GW of electricity would eventually turn into heat as well, which would come out of the processors and cooling systems
An a bomb isn’t a unit of measurement.
The $70 billion project, backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary
Of course it’s the wonder valley project. I don’t have time to read the full article just now but last I had heard it kind of sounded more like investor fraud than a legitimate project.
Edit: Here’s a youtuber covering it. Also at about 5:03 he shows the promo video that Kevin O’Leary AI slopped… It’s ridiculous.
celebrity investor
OK rich people will always attract public attention but this phrase is just fucked up.
Kevin O’Leary is a piece of shit that should be banned from anything related to Canada.
Lol. I’m embarrassed that he’s a Canadian.
Need an atomic banana for scale…
Dino juice should be phased out, and something like this should be required to develop a Candu reactor, than the heat should be shoved up Kevin’s ass!
Marlaina Smith passed a law that data centers can NOT use renewables, they must use gas. I shit you not.
WUT 😲
but why
yeah, no woke windmills turning frogs gay in Alberta
Because she is an evil cunt sucking the dick of oil companies.
Today in “Possible Future News That May Or May Not Happen”. Film at 11:00PM in 15 years. /s
What an absolutely stupid and intentionally misleading way to frame this.
Whhhaaaaattttt???
