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Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

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Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#181

Post by shadowgovt »

hinkley wrote: post #122
shadowgovt wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But again, that's the thing. There is only 1/Y work to do in the day; it's batch work. The work in this case is constrained on the input side, not the CPU resources side; building 1 or 2 or 1,000 nodes to do the work won't decrease how expensive it is to do the work (in fact, building more computers than you need will make it cost more!). ... so why does Google build more computers than they need? Keep in mind that a…

If I have 2 hours of work to do a day, I could sell 90% of my servers, the racks, the networking hardware, one of the air conditioning units, backup generators, and battery backups, lay off some of my IT staff, and just let the thing run 23 hours a day. What people are trying to tell you is you can’t make having a glut of equipment work out for any reason, let alone environmental. It costs you a dozen times over to h…

> What people are trying to tell you is you can’t make having a glut of equipment work out for any reason, let alone environmental.

Google has a glut of equipment for two reasons: variable loads and experimental.

The batch loads are predictable and constrained by input rate. What the coal ends up used for is spikes in demand for compute power (i.e. "Michael Jackson died and now everyone needs to watch Thriller right now") and ceiling to develop and experiment with new projects.

This optimization means that while, yes, the fossil fuel resources would be feeding those use cases, it's a net gain because those use cases are less common than the predictable batch-job work.

> You are so overprovisioned in fact that someone will steal your promotion by pointing this out to your boss, which is also a pretty big cost.

Remember the context. Nobody ever got fired at Google for adding more compute power to the behemoth, because it's all fungible and will all be used eventually. if you're trying to argue "Google is a net polluter because they continue to build machines in a fashion only bounded by land and hardware costs under the assumption more compute power is always better than less" it's an argument you could make but (a) you should factor in the carbon offsets they buy and (b) you're tipping close to arguing "All human activity is pollution; kill the species."

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#182

Post by labawi »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #147
mint2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see nuclear making it big any time soon. There’s too much up front costs, but in theory one could make use of any excess heat during off peak hours. For example desalination, hydrogen production, indoor growing with the light cycle at night or whenever the low demand period is, etc... For the near future I’d only expect small modular reactors to see much use in areas with unreliable sunlight for chunks of the…

Nuclear with hydro/pumped storage is an interesting combo: use the extra nuclear power to pump water up into a reservoir and then when extra energy is needed, move the water down through a turbine. The reservoir is basically a battery in this context. Waste heat isn’t really recyclable, or it wouldn’t be waste heat :).

To generate electricity you need a hot side and a cool side.

The huge towers on power plants are for cooling the warm (waste) output. If you can get someone to cool your warm waste water even further than the cooling towers would, it would both increase efficiency of electricity generation, and use the boatloads of low grade heat for something useful.

You still need independent cooling capability either way.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#183

Post by shadowgovt »

bizzleDawg wrote: post #166
shadowgovt wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But again, that's the thing. There is only 1/Y work to do in the day; it's batch work. The work in this case is constrained on the input side, not the CPU resources side; building 1 or 2 or 1,000 nodes to do the work won't decrease how expensive it is to do the work (in fact, building more computers than you need will make it cost more!). ... so why does Google build more computers than they need? Keep in mind that a…

> Google's cost of manufacture is fixed. That may well be the way you (and most likely Google) currently look at it, but the argument presented seems to be that everything other than where you run some batch tasks is all fixed. Assuming everything else is fixed does make the optimisation easier, though surely nearly everything is up for debate if we're actually talking about minimising the overall footprint of a comp…

Is the question on the table whether, all other things being equal, this change would decrease carbon output per unit work completed, or is the question whether Google is greener after this change?

For the latter question, we have insufficient data. Google's datacenter infrastructure is huge and complicated, and if one factors in all the interdependencies and purchased carbon offsets, one needs way more data than this announcement blurb gives out to answer that question. Maybe they have an additional process to determine whether their most carbon-negative datacenters can be switched off during peak coal-use and this work unblocked them from enabling that feature? We don't know.

For the former question, yes.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#184

Post by bluntfang »

BurningFrog wrote: post #137
WalterBright wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine when your fridge can do this I've been posting for years that an effective grid "battery" is internet connected refrigerators, water heaters, A/C, car chargers, etc., that only run when power is cheap, i.e. when solar/wind is providing excess power. A great deal of our demand for electricity is elastic and shiftable, which will eliminate a huge chunk of the need for grid batteries. Glad to see this finally…

How much of energy consumption even is by households though? I think people have a strong bias for thinking the things they see and touch during the day are environmentally important. But most "pollution"/energy use happen out of sight from our everyday lives. Or so I think. Happy to be disproven!

Just because something isn't "environmentally important" (whatever that means) doesn't mean you can't optimize it. We need to shift into the mentality of thinking about the environment. Don't slap the hand that's interested in making a difference.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#185

Post by jdm2212 »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #150
jdm2212 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would AI solutions help the fossil fuel industry burn more oil and gas? The fossil fuel industry sells oil and gas to others to burn, it doesn't light the stuff up itself for fun.

Almost all the oil we extract must be burned. There's far too little need for oil as a non-energy source, and there's a very good reason why the price of WTI is so low these days. The industry simply cannot find enough customers to burn it. How can Google, while helping others extract as much oil as possible, can still pretend it may not end up being burned? It's like a a drug dealer saying "I'm definitely not helpin…

You can make this argument more general (and IMO, even more ridiculous):

Fossil fuels are global commodities. Anyone who reduces their oil consumption is reducing demand for those global commodities, which makes them cheaper. Making them cheaper makes renewable energy less competitive, which discourages investment, which means as a society we keep using fossil fuels for longer, which means in the end we produce more carbon.

Ergo, anyone who tries to reduce their fossil fuel consumption by not flying, not driving, or turning off the A/C, is actually more responsible for destroying the planet.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#186

Post by labawi »

hansvm wrote: post #121
harikb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fridge is typically placed inside a house, unless we are talking about some alternate kitchen style. If so, ambient temp inside an apartment/house that is already heated or cooled is somewhat constant I assume. If so, where is the savings? Also freezing it more in day doesn’t allow me to freeze less at night. If I don’t open the door at all, then the insulation is already taking care of this. What am I missing?

There are a few things going on here. First we need to address the basic premise that could allow this to make sense at all in some house or environment -- that one can afford to freeze less during the day if they freeze it more at night (or vice versa). For a fridge this is hard because you're usually targeting a narrow temperature band (don't want to accidentally freeze your veggies), but for a freezer it usually d…

It might not be a good idea to temperature cycle your freezer contents, as it speeds up degradation.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#187

Post by BurningFrog »

bluntfang wrote: post #184
BurningFrog wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of energy consumption even is by households though? I think people have a strong bias for thinking the things they see and touch during the day are environmentally important. But most "pollution"/energy use happen out of sight from our everyday lives. Or so I think. Happy to be disproven!

Just because something isn't "environmentally important" (whatever that means) doesn't mean you can't optimize it. We need to shift into the mentality of thinking about the environment. Don't slap the hand that's interested in making a difference.

You can optimize small things, but it will only have a small effect.

Better than nothing, sure, but the danger is that you only deal with the small things because you're not even aware of the big ones.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#188

Post by manfredo »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #141
lightgreen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is nuclear power, and when companies buy hardware they use it at max performance around the clock because energy is cheap and does not depend on weather. There’s huge lie (by omission) about renewables: nobody explained how to convert the world to 100% renewable energy without coal backup.

Coal and nuclear are both inflexible power sources, they are either on or off, and they are hard to turn on and off. Nuclear does have the benefit of being cheap after very high initial capital costs. Natural gas is a much better backup to renewables however, since it can turned on and off at will. Dam hydroelectric also has that nice quality (send water through the generator when you need it, otherwise let it stay i…

Nuclear's inflexibility is not a barrier to countries like France generating over 70% of its electricity from it. Energy demand fluctuations throughout the day are significant but not huge - usually ~20% different from peak to trough.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#189

Post by manfredo »

phaemon wrote: post #167
lightgreen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is nuclear power, and when companies buy hardware they use it at max performance around the clock because energy is cheap and does not depend on weather. There’s huge lie (by omission) about renewables: nobody explained how to convert the world to 100% renewable energy without coal backup.

> There’s huge lie (by omission) about renewables I live in Scotland. We now get around 90% of our electricity from renewables. We closed our last coal power station in 2016. Perhaps you should consider checking your theories against reality before accusing others of lying?

Don't cut off quotes mid sentence:

> There’s huge lie (by omission) about renewables: nobody explained how to convert the world to 100% renewable energy without coal backup.

Because not everywhere in the world has access to hydroelectric power. The point remains: there is no plan to power the world with renewables without a fossil fuel backup. At least not any feasible plan - batteries don't scale, and the Sabatier processes has well below 50% round trip efficiency.

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