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Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

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Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#131

Post by ineedasername »

rabscuttler wrote: post #68

Bravo to Google for this show of corporate leadership. Their pledge to purchase renewable energy to match their real-time demand really is impressive, especially the note that it must create new renewable generation (discussed on the Google blog announcement not this article) . It is also prudent, as these long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with new renewable generators will be very competitive, probably much…

> avoiding price fluctuations from e.g. future gas supply shocks.

Yes, especially in Europe where the dominant natural gas supplier, Russia, has shown itself more than willing to use their position as a political hammer. And I know, that's not just a Russia issue, other countries do the same, they're just the most applicable when talking about gas in Europe.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#132

Post by ineedasername »

cheez wrote: post #78
cameronbrown wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, would it be feasible for them to use wind power to run time insensitive batch jobs in the daytime - crank down the processing power on these jobs when there's less green energy around?

Google has insane optimization for power consumption at data centers, if there is something you can think of, they will have either done it or will be trying it.

Do they openly share these advances & techniques? I know, it's a competitive advantage so I wouldn't fault them too much if they don't, I'm just curious.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#133

Post by umeshunni »

josephpmay wrote: post #89
grezql wrote: post #3

This is not relevant to the article, but why is there so many full screen popups with newsletter on american websites? I have never ever written my email on such form. The first thing I do when I see it is to close it and think its a low-budget website or something.

Newsletters can be incredibly profitable for media organizations because it 1) gets people to return to your content on a regular basis 2) can allow for more targeted advertising I personally hate this trend, but almost everybody's doing it these days

and (3) are vastly cheaper than other forms of advertising since they are not paying any platform provider for the ads.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#134

Post by ineedasername »

davedx wrote: post #64
nabla9 wrote: post #30

The Hamina data center is close to Russia without being in Russia. I guess it's the closest Google is comfortable at being when serving Russian customers. In the north data centers can double as heating power plants when coupled with district heating. It's unfortunate that Google puts the excess heat into the sea. Yandex has a big data center in Mäntsälä. Their cooling water is used for heating the area. There are al…

Hah that's amazing. I remember when I did bitcoin mining (only 1 GPU) and thinking it was getting noticeably warmer upstairs in our house, and how actually the bigger miners could use the heat to heat buildings. Great to hear this is being put into action. Computing -> heat.

I remember being able to mine on a single Nvidia GPU on my laptop, significantly less efficient than an AMD one (at least at the time) and giving it up as pointless when it only generated a single bitcoin in a week. And then a year or so later being thrilled when I read an article that the price skyrocketed to $200 and I remembered that one coin, and sold it. Oh well!

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#135

Post by ineedasername »

bigbaguette wrote: post #67
davedx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah that's amazing. I remember when I did bitcoin mining (only 1 GPU) and thinking it was getting noticeably warmer upstairs in our house, and how actually the bigger miners could use the heat to heat buildings. Great to hear this is being put into action. Computing -> heat.

Following this logic, I often thought electric heaters are a waste of energy since they perform no computation. But a French company is having a go at this: https://www.qarnot.com/computing-heater_qh-1/

Couldn't the heat also be used to generate more electricity?

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#136

Post by jonas21 »

rndgermandude wrote: post #99
jonas21 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's datacenters are already carbon neutral. This is about going one step further and using locally-generated renewable energy to power the datacenters.

No they are not. They use energy, a lot of it. They want to run their data centers off of renewable, "carbon-free" energy sources and made some great strides towards that. But they aren't there yet. On top of that, renewables aren't carbon neutral per se, either. And the hardware you put into those things isn't free either. Now you might argue the services google is able to provide with them warrant the environmental…

Google has purchased 100% of its energy from renewable sources since 2017.

They have been carbon neutral since 2007, though prior to 2017 some of that was done with carbon offsets.

https://sustainability.google/projects/announcement-100/

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#137

Post by ineedasername »

wolco wrote: post #116
on_and_off wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it does something more useful than mining bitcoins. There are many research projects that could use some more computing power and that would bring a gain to humanity.

Powering billions of dollars worth of bitcoin not worthy enough? I get the feeling if money was not involved it may qualify as a worthy research project.

It's not the money. Dedicate the computational power to @Folding and it would be worthwhile even if they also paid people. Personally if I had to choose between generating data for medical research or hash functions for proof of work, I'd go for the medical research. Though I'm not sure we really have to choose-- aren't there coins in the works that are trying to address the massive power consumption issue?

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#138

Post by mehrdadn »

Sharlin wrote: post #101
mehrdadn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confused, could you explain? A heater that puts its energy into something other than heating is just being inefficient at heating, right? Shouldn't you want it to put 100% of its energy into heating?

To very good approximation, 100% of the energy used by a contemporary computer is turned to heat. The amount of negentropy generated by the computations is utterly dwarfed by the increase in entropy in the computer's surroundings. Computers are space heaters that happen to do some calculations as a side effect.

I do realize that and I still don't get how doing computation is supposed to increase the energy efficiency of heating. Are you trying to reduce wasted energy while heating by diverting it to computation, or are you trying to avoid wasted energy in computing by utilizing the otherwise-wasted heat? It seems like you're optimizing the cost efficiency of computation while claiming it improves the energy efficiency of heating...

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#139

Post by ineedasername »

ithkuil wrote: post #124
repiret wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A heat pump is basically an air conditioner running backwards - it runs uncompressed refrigerant through a radiator outside to pick up heat from the outdoors, and compressed refrigerant through a radiator indoors to release the heat. Because they can move more heat than they dissipate (and some of the dissipated heat is indoors anyway) they can be more than 100% efficient. (edited to fix compressed/uncompressed sides…

(disclaimer: physics noob) If a Stirling engine can be operate at 50% efficiency and a heap pump can operate at 400% efficiency, could we take a source of heat (e.g. heat side product of computation instead of burning fuel) use it to power the Stirling engine and use the movement of the Stirling engine to power a heat pump and thus turn computation into house heating at effective 200% efficiency? (under whatever assu…

That would probably qualify as a perpetual motion machine, which are decidedly not possible.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#140

Post by enneff »

cameronbrown wrote: post #74
rabscuttler wrote: post #68

Bravo to Google for this show of corporate leadership. Their pledge to purchase renewable energy to match their real-time demand really is impressive, especially the note that it must create new renewable generation (discussed on the Google blog announcement not this article) . It is also prudent, as these long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with new renewable generators will be very competitive, probably much…

I wonder, would it be feasible for them to use wind power to run time insensitive batch jobs in the daytime - crank down the processing power on these jobs when there's less green energy around?

A big challenge for Google, and any large DC operators in general, is utilization. Ideally you want the entire fleet working at 100% all the time, so there's no real benefit to ramping up or down with energy supply.
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