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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

#21

Post by drivingmenuts »

msisk6 wrote: post #12
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

This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site. Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing com…

How many people did the smelter employ vs how many people do the bitcoin miners employ?

The smelter was providing jobs that fed money into the local economy. I'm sure much less money is coming out of the mining operation.

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

#22

Post by mr_toad »

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.

There’s a minimum level of energy consumption (and thus heat) that has to be produced by computation, just because of physics. However, modern computers generate billions of times more heat than this minimum level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

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

#24

Post by RhysU »

mr_toad wrote: post #22
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.

There’s a minimum level of energy consumption (and thus heat) that has to be produced by computation, just because of physics. However, modern computers generate billions of times more heat than this minimum level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

It'd be super fun to take that as an axiom of physics then to see how far upwards one could build from that. Above my skills by far.

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

#25

Post by UltraSane »

RhysU wrote: post #24
mr_toad wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a minimum level of energy consumption (and thus heat) that has to be produced by computation, just because of physics. However, modern computers generate billions of times more heat than this minimum level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

It'd be super fun to take that as an axiom of physics then to see how far upwards one could build from that. Above my skills by far.

The minimum amount of energy needed to compute decreased asymptotically to 0 as the temperature of space goes to 0. This is the reason a common sci-fi trope where advanced civilizations hibernate for extremely long times so that they can do more computation with available energy.

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

#26

Post by cruffle_duffle »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #21
msisk6 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site. Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing com…

How many people did the smelter employ vs how many people do the bitcoin miners employ? The smelter was providing jobs that fed money into the local economy. I'm sure much less money is coming out of the mining operation.

Not to mention the aluminum plant was making something actually useful to society at large. What is there now is a giant space heater used to scam people.

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

#27

Post by TGower »

kanemcgrath wrote: post #15

I always wondered if anybody has calculated how much of our global heating could be attributed, if any at all, to every electronic device, server, and engine outputting heat as a byproduct.

I did a quick alalysis and it actually matched the ~1.5 degree celcius rise pretty accurately. It required a bunch of incorrect simplifying assumptions, but it was still interesting how close it comes.

Estimated energy production from all combustion and nuclear from the industrial revolution onwards, assumed that heat was dumped into the atmosphere evenly at once, calculate temperature rise based on atmosphere makeup. Ignores the impact of some of that heat getting sinked into the ground and ocean, and the increased thermal radiation out to space over that period. In general, heat flows from the ground and ocean into the atmosphere instead of the other way around, and the rise in thermal radiation isn't that large.

On the other hand, this isn't something that the smart professionals ever talk about when discussing climate change, so I'm sure that the napkin math working out so close to explaining the whole effect has to be missing something.

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

#28

Post by msisk6 »

dajt wrote: post #20
msisk6 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site. Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing com…

Where is the upside here? An alu plant probably provided more jobs and produced something of actual utility. This is burning power for no benefit to society. It's burning less power than before, but it's not producing anything of value. The world cannot reasonbly run without alu, it got along better without crypto currencies.

Oh, I agree. I lived nearby (working for ERCOT; the Texas Power Grid operator) when Alcoa was still there and was planning the shutdown. It seems about half the people in Rockdale worked for either Alcoa, the nearby coal power plant, or the nearby coal mine that fed the power plant.

I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of Texas. Of course it didn't go that way.

Aluminum smelting is an incredibly energy intensive operation. A lot of places in the US that used to host aluminum smelters now host large datacenters, include the Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon on the Columbia river near a hydro dam. It's a shame that Rockdale didn't get something useful like these other places.

As far as Al smelting in the US; I don't know. I'd imagine it produces a lot of air pollution by itself and uses huge amounts of power that is usually generated by cheap methods like burning rocks (coal) or large hydro operations nearby to minimize transmission costs. Then you gotta get ore to the site. The only Al smelter I recall being left in the US is up near Puget Sound in Bellingham, WA and I think it's currently shutdown.

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

#29

Post by mmooss »

msisk6 wrote: post #12
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

This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site. Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing com…

A mercury refining plant or uranium enrichment facility would also be worse neighbors, but that has nothing to do with the benefits and costs of the crypto farm.

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

#30

Post by kelnos »

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.

I would definitely call that an inefficiency. Heat is wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work. The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose.

It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new electricity.

(And this is before getting into the fact that I believe mining cryptocurrency is a wasteful use of electricity in the first place.)

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