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Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

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Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#101

Post by pests »

lostlogin wrote: post #80
pests wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt 3000x more per day, the same as 3000x more per year? Or 3000x more per unit price? I have a smaller house, we use about 13kWh per day. 4kw highest spike during the day around 5-7pm when people are cooking and doing laundry.

I was trying to work backwards to see what they were using as their ‘per house’ measure. Your usage is very low. Do you use electricity for water heating and cooking? If so, that’s impressive. We do, and charge a car.

Oh I see okay yeah.

Used to have one electric car but it was on a separate meter with unlimited charging for $40/mo (just looked, now its $46). Added a few hundred to the charger install originally.

We really don't do too much around the house. Three people. One TV running maybe two sometimes. Two desktops (well one is laptop with a dock). A random PC as a server. Everything electric (oven, range, water heater, filtration, etc) besides furnace (nat gas), although I will say they are all new and pretty energy efficient. Random lights (all LED, Hue). Someone turns on an electric heater or blanket here or there. Some outside heated cat house and water heaters and stuff. In Michigan so its pretty cold right now.

I recently bought a bunch of (used) solar panels and was doing our load calculations for peak draw and selecting battery size.

How much of your usage is the car? I could imagine that would be a lot. A single model 3 refill (57kwh) would be almost 5 days of my usage.

edit: I'm dumb. We replaced our electric water heater a few months ago with a tankless gas. I don't feel like rewriting this reply but just keep in mind.

I would eventually like to replace the furnace and the water heater with electric so I can end gas service to my house. I do feel its the safest and in the future we will be looked back on as backwards. "They used to pump a flammable gas directly into their houses!"

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#102

Post by mnemotronic »

Can infrared energy be reflected like light? What would a good reflector be? (THEORETICALLY) Would a parabolic dish over this facility be able to focus the heat to a single point and, if so, what would the temp be? Is it additive? Like X joules of Y degrees over Z square meters focused down to 1 Sq cm?

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#104

Post by flave »

spyder wrote: post #95
stouset wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat. If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.

Only true for our current computers and not true with reversible computing. With reversible computing you can use electricity to perform a calculation and then "push" that electricity back into a battery or a capacitor instead of dumping it to the environment. It's still a huge challenge, but there is a recent promising attempt: "British reversible computing startup Vaire has demonstrated an adiabatic reversible comp…

Actually pretty cool - I was about to comment “nice perpetual motion machine” but looked into a bit more and it’s much more interesting than that (well, a real perpetual motion machine would be interesting but…)

Thanks for posting. Pretty cool.

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#105

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

tasuki wrote: post #100
stouset wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat. If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.

> every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat. Yes it ends up as heat, but with some forethought, it could be used to eg heat people's homes rather than as waste.

You can say that about any waste heat.

In really, it’s not convenient to move all waste heat to where it’s more needed.

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#106

Post by usrnm »

stouset wrote: post #37
dangalf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.

Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat. If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.

If I turn my fan on and 100% of the electricity is converted to heat, where does the kinetic energy of moving fan blades come from? Even the Trump administration cannot just repeal the law of conservation of energy.

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#107

Post by YetAnotherNick »

dangalf wrote: post #17
theamk wrote: post #2

"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet... That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.

Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.

No its not. It would be waste only if the there is a high temperature gradient, which is minimized in mining operation through proper cooling.

It's that computation requires electricity. And almost all of the heat in bitcoin mining comes from computation, technically changing transistor state.

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#108

Post by epolanski »

JungleGymSam wrote: post #98
tempodox wrote: post #96

Climate pollution on this scale should be rated a crime against humanity.

[flagged]

Why such a stance? We're going through global warming, such a scale of waste to solve crypto sudokus can definitely raise eyebrows.

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#109

Post by epolanski »

andai wrote: post #3

So I don't have any context for this. The article says it uses as much power as 300,000 homes. Is that a little? Is that a lot? How much does one steel foundry use? Edit: One steel foundry uses about 3,000 more than that, according to my napkin math

To solve crypto sudokus I would say it's a lot.

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#110

Post by dirkt »

andai wrote: post #3

So I don't have any context for this. The article says it uses as much power as 300,000 homes. Is that a little? Is that a lot? How much does one steel foundry use? Edit: One steel foundry uses about 3,000 more than that, according to my napkin math

Isn't "you can waste energy and heat up our planet and make live for everybody else harder just to make money for a few" enough?
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