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Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

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Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#281

Post by whimsicalism »

sophacles wrote: post #268
WarmWash wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.

It's incredibly disingenuous to wonder why people would be concerned about projects that: * Take a bunch of their tax money with no benefit to them * lower their property value * Make electricity and water more expensive (both of which make other things they use more expensive also) * can cause other environmental impacts that raise inconvenience and expenses both directly and indirectly so some AI douchebags can hav…

i don't think either of the first two things are generally true (usually tax positive, new usecases generally raise property value).

it sounds like you just want to ban American industry altogether, we've quietly let extreme conservatism sneak up on us in the US it seems.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#282

Post by Ydarbleoj »

mr_00ff00 wrote: post #155
kennywinker wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?

People say this and then use AI for literally everything they do.

[flagged]

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#283

Post by whimsicalism »

stryan wrote: post #83
dwoldrich wrote: post #35

I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ... *BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter ma…

Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent. It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI compani…

> The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.

You view this as a measure of data center construction, I view this as a measure of how challenging we've made it to do absolutely anything in the US unless there are massive stacked financial incentives in favor of it.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#285

Post by criddell »

namibj wrote: post #256
criddell wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a better alternative for on-demand, on-location power generation?

You can use fuel cells; I'm sure external steam reforming based hydrogen (in protein exchange membrane fuel cells) works very well, but I'd not be surprised if some hydrocarbon or alcohol fuel cell beats it in TCO; also I'd expect liquid oxygen to be readily suited to be trucked-in with the fuel they feed these turbines and by the power of a simple dry heat exchanger exchanging between ambient air and combustion "air…

Thanks for the information. I never knew about those kinds of fuel cells and they look like an excellent alternative.

From what I've just read, the only real downsides other than initial cost are slow startup time (hours) and they are physically larger than gas turbines. In exchange for a higher upfront price, you get a more efficient and reliable power generator. Very cool.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#286

Post by brikym »

dwoldrich wrote: post #35

I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ... *BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter ma…

I'm definitely annoyed about electricity usage in my back yard in NZ. There are plans to build some DCs to suck our 24h hydroelectric dams dry which will starve the country of winter renewable electricity. It's not like you can keep building these dams. If they paid tax (e.g. on energy) I wouldn't mind so much but they'll pay next to nothing as the profits will be transferred to a tax haven and the jobs will be temporary. The hydroelectric dams are half owned by the govt, so the govt will make some more profit, but electricity prices the public pay will rise so it's kind of like a stealth tax on the public. There is an aluminium smelter already doing something similar using 13% of New Zealand's electricity and it employs only 800 staff. That's just corporate welfare at the expense of everyone else.

Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#288

Post by whimsicalism »

ipdashc wrote: post #232
babelfish wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. Time has already shown that the datacenter for training is also just creating something people want.

> All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK. Like others…

i think this sentiment comes from a deep misunderstanding of how our modern society is the product of transitive satisfaction of wants. the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn....

This is how economies work and the alternative strategy of enumerating morally correct wants/needs and assigning the correct price from on-high has been a demonstrable failure. It is a cognitive failure of humanity that this strategy is so intuitively appealing to us.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#289

Post by jplusequalt »

mediaman wrote: post #123
stryan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent. It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI compani…

What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers. Just make them pay! Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowat…

>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.

Well maybe if you were in community with the people protesting them you'd understand their perspective.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#290

Post by overfeed »

varenc wrote: post #34

Using energy always raises nearby temperatures since all energy becomes heat. If any facility is using 36 MW of electricity, then 36 MW of heat is going to be entering the environment somewhere. Though I think what's interesting here is that the effects of this extra heat is highly localized to urban areas. But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is goin…

> But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment

The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc.

The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county.

Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal.

1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.

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