Submitted 2 days ago by MintyFresh@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Like they could cool their shit, and desalinate water all at once. Provide water to dry areas. Like Baja or Texas. Bonus points if they could run off renewables. Seems like a win win
Money. The answer is always money. If it’s cheaper to build on land they will.
The answer would probably to make a special tax that force them to move to more environmentally friendly locations.
It’s access to electricity and cost of land. People want to live near oceans, so it’s usually more expensive. If you can get dirt price land in Wyoming that has a power plant near it with capacity, you have most of what you need.
Salt water is corrosive.
Yeah. If you live close to the beach, iron stuff rusts quite quickly.
Great lakes then?
Microbial corrosion
So fun fact: Microsoft played around with the idea of Underwater Data Centres and experimented with one off the coast of Orkney.
Here’s their in-house article about it, apparently they were pleased with the results.
oh don’t worry in 10 years the ocean floor will be full of DCs
You may not have heard, but the ocean level is rising, not only posing a flooding risk, but more importantly drastically increasing the severity and frequency of water-based natural disasters right at the coast. So, okay, still flooding; but wind too, and sometimes circular wind.
Your DC needs to be in Nevada mountains with the salt mines and it needs to provide heat for the homeless at the air-cooling ejection ports, as the prophet William Gibson foretold.
Just because something generates heat doesn’t mean that it can boil something. In this case heat pumps would still be needed to concentrate it anyway.
Not enough heat. I think in Europe they want to use it for building heating, still not enough, they need normal heating too.
Waste heat recovery is a thing, and the economics usually work out in your favor if the feed material is really hot. If it’s only mildly warm, you’ll need a lot of machinery to concentrate the heat and raise the temperature to a useful level. At some point, the investment just gets absurd and the idea gets scrapped.
Using heat as heat makes the most sense, since there are fewer lost steps. Theoretically, you could boil water with server heat, but the massive investment is probably the reason why that isn’t happening everywhere. Running reverse osmosis probably won’t work, because you need electricity for the pumps, and converting heat into electricity comes with significant losses.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to colocate large greenhouses with datacenters. The exhaust temperatures seem compatible with hothouse growing. The heat would still end up in the atmosphere, but at least it could enable growth of fresh local produce first.
Preheat to 60°C using waste server heat, then boil conventionally.
Yes, that helps to lower the total energy cost of boiling the water. It’s better than nothing, but still pretty far from ideal.
Or build in cold climates where they could use geothermal for power and naturally cold air to bring the temps down.
I hear land in Detroit is cheap. As is Northern Canada.
Data centers are generally built in dry, geologically stable places with few severe storms and cheap power. Coastal areas typically check none of those boxes.
You nailed it. Every time desert data centers are criticized around here there are several BS explanations. You got the correct answers in one sentence.
But, but, then they would produce at least something useful. No, that won’t happen.
Both Google and Microsoft tried with actual underwater data centers. It looked like it was feasible, but repairing something when it’s deep underwater was not feasible.
Near water, there will be environmental issues – similar problems to factories and nuclear power plants, debris in intakes and warm water affecting marine life.
Basically, the solution is to build more efficient or less compute-intensive software, but that’s not where we all seem to be heading right now.
Shipping large volumes of water long distances is not generally feasible. Using saltwater to cool has a ton of extra complications as humidity and proximity to saltwater generally drives up costs for things needed to avoid corrosion.
Building in arid areas avoids a lot of costs, building near rivers in low humidity areas is even better.
Microsoft did that afaik
Then just said ‘no’. Because changing hard HDDs Hard
I wonder how much undersea heating this contributes to…
Still better, than the current overground implemetations
Texas isn't dry except for the desert parts of west Texas. south Texas is a mix of swamp and normal coast, central is just hills, east is Arkansas lite (I live here) and north is the trial version of the mountains it has the southern bits of.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Because salt is corrosive, and the real estate is expensive.
Why not build in the cold north? Snow, ice breaking stuff, more expensive construction and work.
There’s a common misconception that these data centers are so big to literally suck up all resources… that’s not it.
It’s just corpos cheaping out.
Why the desert? Because evaporative cooling is cheap as heck, and low power, and works best in dry air. And the land is cheap.
Why local power plants and generators? Because it’s cheaper than grid energy; it cuts out the middle man. And it increases reliability. Not because there’s literally not grid capacity.
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Speaking of the north, the answer is yes. You totally can, and should, use the heat for something like district heating.
TehBamski@lemmy.world 1 day ago
www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https%3A%2F%2Fww…
heavyboots@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
One thing I will say is here in the desert, we don’t actually want them either. Water is already an issue. Power costs are already an issue when you’re cooling your house all summer/heating it all winter. Data centers provide minimal jobs for the amount of resources they use in a community and the downsides have been discovered in a number of places around the country all ready (ranging from noise to increased costs to resource shortages). Keep your data centers off our cactii!
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It would be fine if they developed solar, used closed loop systems, distributed waste heat and such as compensation. It honestly wouldn’t be a bad plan compared to other places, seeing how the copious sun, dry winters, and still relatively cheap land would be great for operations.
But no, they only want the cheapest route out there.
tdawg@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The answer, as always, is profit.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Short term gain, specifically.
They want the data center up and cheap to make next quarter look good, not lower their costs long term.
MintyFresh@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Fuck man… I’m so over capitalism. Shits just exhausting…
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Exacrly ehy every idiot that defends capitalism as “the best” basically by definition either doesn’t understand capitalism and economics in general, or is a hateful greedy shitstain that couldn’t do something good for humanity if they tried.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
The boiling method is used when there are industrial processes that generate a lot of waste heat. You can make it reasonably efficient by taking the heat away on the cooling side and recirculating it back to the hot end.
But yes, datacenters don’t really generate enough heat for that to work without heat pumps concentrating it. All your other points stand.