I have a bunch of servers in an apartment I use as a secondary office space. Monthly electricity cost increased by 230%. It’s like that since January. Hetzner’s 10% seems too low, although the increase is calculated on the total price of the server, so I guess it could be sufficient. I won’t be surprised if they further increase their prices in the near future.
Hetzner Price Adjustment
181–190 of 312 posts
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#182The result of shutting down nuclear plants. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
While I'm a fan of nuclear power myself, I don't think this is true. Nuclear is only good for base loads, current high prices are mostly driven by peak demand.
Wouldn't it be the case that the nuclear portion would be price stable, so any fluctuations in say the last 30% of power to reach peak power would be less severe in the final bill?
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#183While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…
I wouldn't talk about "clouds" as being limited by energy prices, as though they're uniform. Hetzner is much, much cheaper than AWS/Azure/Google. There's a huge amount of fat/gross margin that could be cut from the pricing of the big ones.
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
ARM on desktop => ARM for development => ARM on servers => ARM on cloud. Apple's multi-billion contracts with AWS are ending this or next year, Apple has their own power efficient systems and will compete with AWS, as they have to maintain/increase growth.
> Apple has their own power efficient systems and will compete with AWS Are you saying Apple is going to roll out an AWS competitor to the public? I find that highly unlikely.
They don't have anywhere close to the capacity to produce the necessary amount of silicon
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is 1€/year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more something like 3€/year. The increase is so important I am still not sure if my calculations are right! 1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh My current price: 0.33€/kWh (100% renewable) 8.76kWh x 0.33€/kWh = 2.89€
You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas. With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever. New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
The rush out of nuclear fission power still shocks me.
It's a miracle fuel. It really is wonderful. It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima not been reported so irresponsibly.
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas. With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever. New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
It's possible to pay extra for only renewable electricity.
There isn't enough renewable energy yet to cover all consumption. Which means that you paying extra is only an administrative move. You're just swapping places with the party that would otherwise have consumed the renewable energy.
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to pay extra for only renewable electricity.
I'm curious what that actually accomplishes in non marketing terms. That just means someone else is getting less renewable electricity, right?
It depends on what other market forces there are. If the utility has a government mandate to install more renewable energy than there are renewable energy customers, then it is like you say - just a book-keeping exercise.
On the other hand, if there is no government mandate, or if customer demand for renewable energy exceeds that mandate, then it provides a profit incentive for the utility to install/purchase more renewable energy.
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#188While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…
4) Cloud computing and the electricity used is impacting housing provision: https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/london_electricity_su...
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Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#189[deleted]
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to pay extra for only renewable electricity.
No you can't (unless you do it yourself but the price is extremely high if you want uninterrupted power). What happens is: your provider purchase "green energy certificates" which means that some green electricity was generated on a sunny and/or windy day. When it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else. No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy on day-to-day scale, let…
There's a massive business opportunity for someone willing to produce low density batteries for home use.
In a lot of countries customers are billed significantly less during the night than during the day for electricity, so the incentives already exist to make it financially worthwhile if a home battery pack that can provide a days typical use can be installed at a reasonable cost.
This would substantially smooth out base load requirements and mean that renewables could make up substantially more of the energy mix.