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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

#51

Post by whatsupdog »

vondur wrote: post #23

Wow. Is there still enough money to be made in crypto to justify this kind of investment?

You are kidding right? I'm sorry for assuming. But you have to be kidding. Bitcoin has been around 100k USD all this year. And about 450 Bitcoin are mined everyday, and this doesn't even include the Bitcoin miners get from transaction fees. So, there's about 45 million USD worth of Bitcoin being mined per day. I can go into profit calculations, but at the end of the day it comes down to how much you are paying for electricity.

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

#52

Post by jesse__ »

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

I think a large steel foundry uses approximately 1/10 of the power of this facility.

Arc furnace foundry : 500 kw/tonne

Production : 150 t/hr

500*150 = 75 MW/h

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

#53

Post by whatsupdog »

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…

Yes, and I'm assuming the power plant that was providing electricity to the aluminum plant also wants to recover their investment.

It would be cool if all this residual heat could be concentrated to smelt aluminum!

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

driggs wrote: post #11
nullc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home energy usage is knocked down people that don't that don't do anything at home and where almost their energy use is externalized (at places that make the goods they use, or other places where they spend most of their their waking hours). So it's a useful figure if you want to make a shocking headline. "Uses as much power as infinity of something that uses no power!"

Have you considered that it's used as a unit to represent capacity of our power grid? As in, we have now have the energy capacity for 300,000 fewer homes given this operating data center. So not only is it a relatable unit, but it's an incredibly meaningful unit for those who care about ensuring that energy availability actually support something of value (families) rather than something wasteful (crypto mining).

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by ctmnt »

UltraSane wrote: post #25
RhysU wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s a common trope? Can’t say I’ve run into it. But I’d like to! What are some good examples?

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

#56

Post by ruined »

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.

it's called the first law of thermodynamics

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

#57

Post by thegrim000 »

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.

I read it as the inefficient part isn't the compute efficiency, the inefficient part is dumping all the resulting heat into the environment without capturing it and using it in some way to generate electricity or do work.

On a related/side note, when there's talk about seti and dyson spheres, and detecting them via infrared waste heat, I also don't understand that. Such an alien civilization is seemingly capable of building massive space structures/projects, but then lets the waste heat just pour out into the universe in such insane quantities that we could see it tens/hundreds of light years away? What a waste. Why wouldn't they recover that heat and make use of it instead? And repeat the recovering until the final waste output is too small to bother recovering, at which point we would no longer be able to detect it.

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

#58

Post by adonovan »

hephaes7us wrote: post #16
userbinator wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's enough heat being produced for it to act as a district heating plant.

There absolutely is, but of course it's nonzero cost to capture.

Also, the temperature is not high enough (compared to the steam coming out of a gas/oil/nuclear plant) to obtain much work from the waste heat.

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

#59

Post by TGower »

marcosdumay wrote: post #46
TGower wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your math is completely wrong. We use ~20 TW, while solar radiation is ~500 PW and just the heating from global warming alone is 460TW (that is, how much heat is being accumulated as increased Earth temperature).

Well the math is correct, the methodology has obvious flaws some of which I pointed out. If you took all the energy that has been released by humanity burning things since the industrial revolution and dumped it into a closed system consisting of just the atmosphere, it would rise by about 1.5 C.

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

#60

Post by bigiain »

msisk6 wrote: post #28
dajt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've heard of aluminium referred to as "Frozen Electricity". (yes, I know, but that's the .au spelling)

Relatively speaking, bauxite is practically worthless. But mix it in with a few gigawatt hours and you get out a fairly valuable commodity.

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