231–240 of 386 posts
It seems an additional hurdle is anti-fouling. Those barnacles and algae act as an insulator, making the cold-water cooling advantage less and less of an advantage.
Maybe there’s a temp at which it’s too warm for barnacles —question is can the systems within operate at that temperature?
In none of the articles do I see the power consumption of the pod.. But it looks packed with a lot of servers, and the surface area is quite minimal given there don't appear to be any cooling fins/etc. So, that many servers are definitely many KW of power, and its all being conducted away via what appears to be a fairly minimal surface area. So the problem probably isn't the exterior so much as the interior which app…
https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-...
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The issue is CO2, though, not heat per se. Yes, the two are correlated, but if you use renewables to power your things, it doesn't really matter how much heat you generate. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
You're right that renewably-generated waste heat isn't a big deal all-else-being-equal; but all else usually isn't equal, and climate change is a always question of numbers (my favourite example: extracting a barrel of oil from the air/flue using renewable energy and sequestering it long-term, compared to the cost of leaving a barrel's worth of oil where it is in the ground; the latter is free, except for opportunity…
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The issue is CO2, though, not heat per se. Yes, the two are correlated, but if you use renewables to power your things, it doesn't really matter how much heat you generate. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Also consider cost (in terms of CO2, resource consumption, etc) of building and maintaining the renewable energy sources. I don't know how this would compare between underwater datacenter, solar panels, wind.
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> but if you use renewables to power your things, it doesn't really matter how much heat you generate. Thermodynamics should really be emphasized in schools. You are getting some amazing responses that are completely ignoring the fact that our renewable energy solutions are not increasing the overall heat in our planet. They are just moving energy around. The only thing that really matters is how are the emissions go…
That's faulty. Solar installations change the albedo of the planet. That's not a problem if the fraction is a very small one and it is spread out. But if it is concentrated or relatively large it certainly could have an effect.
In none of the articles do I see the power consumption of the pod.. But it looks packed with a lot of servers, and the surface area is quite minimal given there don't appear to be any cooling fins/etc. So, that many servers are definitely many KW of power, and its all being conducted away via what appears to be a fairly minimal surface area. So the problem probably isn't the exterior so much as the interior which app…
There's probably an internal heat exchanger that they pump seawater through. This article says they pump seawater through heat exchangers on each rack (and presumably shows the piping): https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-...
The thing is that if putting data centers underwater solves the cooling problem, all the heat produced is wasted, so it this really a good solution?
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There's probably an internal heat exchanger that they pump seawater through. This article says they pump seawater through heat exchangers on each rack (and presumably shows the piping): https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-...
Seems kind of strange to put the whole thing underwater if they're going to pump seawater through internal heat exchangers. At that point there's not a lot of difference between putting the "submarine" underwater and leaving it out of -- but near to -- the water and pumping seawater through the same exchangers. With the added benefit of people being able to access things if something goes wrong.
On the seafloor, they get constant low temperature water with ~0 external pipe and no head to pump against, so it might not obviously be better to have access.
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After reading GP's comment multiple times, I do not see any place where he mentioned turning back climate change. So whether or not your comment is true, it doesn't seem to contradict anything GP said. If we wanted to accelerate climate change, we could obviously do so (as proven in the last century). Meaning we have an impact on the acceleration of climate change. Meaning we can make decisions to make that accelerat…
https://climate.nasa.gov/