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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

#341

Post by ben_w »

jacquesm wrote: post #333
ben_w wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear you may be correct. On the other hand, how does that combine with his apparent narcissistic need to be seen? Is his need so simple it can be met with "line go up"?

Why would it have to be consistent? I've seen so many things be said and be done that do not mesh at al that this is really a very minor thing. Think about it, the list is just about endless by now it's hard to tell the lies from the intentions and the character deficits.

I want to understand how his mind works. Not sure what value this is, now I think about it: I'm unlikely to time a bet against him well enough to win it.

So, for this point, I don't care that the words and actions he emits have no apparent rational long-term coherency, but I do care about the coherency of the system behind them which generates them.

Think of it like me wanting to learn how an LLM works so I don't get surprised by it doing more than a Markov chain.

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

#343

Post by throwaway2037 »

rpdillon wrote: post #316
joaovnunes wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't one glass a night already lack of moderation? by drinking a glass a night, or even weekly such as every friday night you're creating habit and dependency.

It works very differently for different people, I think. Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. Risk factors like ADHD increase this. All that said, no one I've ever met said a glass of wine on Friday nights isn't "drinking in moderation…

    > Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive.
I never heard this theory before, but on the surface, it sounds reasonable. Is there any published literature about it?

One thing to keep in mind when discussing "drinking in moderation": I think people will surprised to learn that each country has their own (often, very different) idea of what it means. For example, healthy alcohol consumption levels are persistently higher from UK public health sources, compared to the United States (mostly CDC). My sense (that I cannot prove): If your median alcohol consumption is higher than global average, your national health agency will have higher values for "drinking in moderation". I would love to see a comparison of wealthy (primarily) Judeo-Christian countries and their recommended limits.

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

#344

Post by user43928 »

elictronic wrote: post #60
duplessitous wrote: post #10

> The mean air temperature on the upwind side of the facility was approximately 42.7 °C, increasing to 43.5 °C in the neighborhood near the eastern boundary of the data center campus on the downwind side. The observed ΔT of approximately 0.8 °C extended roughly 500 m downwind Seems like we do observe heating but a much smaller average delta T than the title would hint at; I didn't see a max distance they evaluated ov…

The title is correct. You are looking at average temperature rise. The article states by up to which is the maximum temperature rise. If you catch me on fire my average temperature rise doesn't go up very much, but I have the barest of hints that it might have an impact.

No it's not correct, because no causal relationship has been established between the data center and the most extreme difference measured.

I understand that the study only showed that this was the maximum observed difference downwind of one data center during one run.

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

#345

Post by arjie »

whimsicalism wrote: post #309
bryan0 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is technically explicitly a rule violation. Yes, yes we've been hearing it for years but it is much more true in the past 2-3 years than anytime in the past imo. Frankly, it's a shame that the only high quality discussion I can find is on gross platforms like 'the everything app' or more obscure forums.

It’s just reversion to the mean / Eternal September. I use blocklists to manage my consumption of the site and the experience is much nicer.

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

#346

Post by chasd00 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #185
john_strinlai wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up? demand goes up + supply remains steady = price goes up.

Why should supply stay steady? You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply! Putting up everyone’s prices is a hard impact on a community.

> You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply!

they want to, hence all the natural gas turbines. However, and this is pretty funny, you don't just order those using doordash or turn up a knob like on AWS. It takes years, if not decades, for those things to get manufactured, delivered, installed, and on line. He who shall not be be named here mentioned in a interview how all these software guys are going to get painful lesson in hardware when they start trying to build behind the meter power generation.

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

#347

Post by wat10000 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #332
wat10000 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both sides of the debate are guilty of being too vague about it, probably because being more precise is pretty difficult. "Data centers already existed." "The scale is vastly larger than before." OK, this exchange contains zero new information. "Already existed" doesn't mean it's fine now, and "vastly larger" doesn't mean it's bad now. This DC buildout is massive? Yep. So massive that it merits substantial pu…

I’m not saying anything about opposition. I’m just saying I’m tired of “well people made unwanted porn before” or whatever as if the tools haven’t radially changed.

Your comment sure makes it sound like you think there's a problem with the new scale of things. And I'm not saying that's incorrect, just that it needs to be backed up with something more than "it's way bigger than it was."

Completely agreed that the "this existed before" argument is tiring. But so is the "it's a lot bigger now" argument. Neither one actually says anything interesting. They're both statements of opinion (this is fine, versus this is bad) hiding inside obvious statements of fact.

I just want something concrete to judge. The data center debate rages but almost never in terms that help me figure out what to think about it. RAM prices going through the roof is something I can easily contextualize and shows the impact on the broader world. Data center construction spending going up a few hundred percent isn't and doesn't, and when I look up the numbers to contextualize it then it doesn't really look all that significant.

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

#348

Post by throwaway2037 »

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…

    > I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
This seems naive. You are missing the point. If you don't offer tax incentives, then you don't get data centers (or other important industrial facilities). The internal United States market competition to attract these projects is intense. If you look at when a major foreign auto manuf wants to build a new plant in the US, there is a line of communities hat-in-hand offering all kinds of tax rebates and cheap loans.

    > Loudo[u]n County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
I looked up the reason why Loudoun County has so many data centers: (1) favorable zoning laws passed in year 2000 and (2) sales tax break specific to data centers.

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

#349

Post by freeone3000 »

dylan604 wrote: post #128
harimau777 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kind of feels to me like a big element of this is that the social contract in America has broken down. Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? If they do get built and someone suffers an externality, why would they believe that society will do anything to make things right? Basically, I think that the the capitalist class are find…

> Why should an individual accept any sacrifice whatsoever if all of the profit is going to go to the billionaires who own it? At some point, their 401Ks are going to depend on it.

45.7% of Americans don’t have a 401k. That’s not a convincing argument.

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

#350

Post by throwaway2037 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #296
everdrive wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers. Noise, pollution, energy costs (which you cover in your comment!) and water usage / contamination. I don't want more of those things. I don't want a bunch of strip malls of golf courses in my community, either.

> Noise, pollution Both of these are complaints about gas turbines rather than data centers. Data centers can pretty easily do the opposite by offering to curtail load during energy supply shortfalls, both through region shifting and by temporarily operating backup generators, which allows the grid to add more renewable generation without having intermittency issues, and thereby operate fewer gas turbines. Obviously…

    > Both of these are complaints about gas turbines rather than data centers.
Regarding noise, industrial gas turbines are pretty quiet. By comparison, the cooling infrastructure for the data center is much louder.
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