Funny how all the people in my rural community are against wind and solar farms being built in the surrounding counties, but cry about how AEP keeps jacking up energy bills amid rising oil, coal, and gas prices.
Woke energy.🙄 It should be criminal to make sustainable energy a partisan issue.
They made a virus a partisan issue. Are you really that surprised?
I live on the edge of town and have some swamp out in the sticks. We’re going balls out on solar.
Don’t forget that large data centers also use lots of water for cooling. Maybe if all this data that’s harvested off of users is deleted we can save power and water
They use water for cooling, but do not consume water for cooling. Yes, they’ll use water as a heat conductor medium so it goes to where it can be cooled and sent back, but it’s a loop.
You may find the actual usage to be quite low.
Data centers use evaporative cooling which has the water turn to steam. The steam can recondense and be sent back into the system, but a non-negligible amount is lost to the environment. This is why recently Chile partially reversed Google’s permit for a new data center
they are very secretive about it, which means its probably a lot.
Interesting, what do you think they turn the water into?
maybe a lot of evaporation.
or the temperature difference might be bad in some way to the surroundings.
the secrecy is what makes me suspicious
I’m wondering if there are losses of water. Like leaks etc. If it’s a really large amount of water even a small percentage could be a lot. I’m really just spit balling here though really. I think that’s a pretty efficient use of water actually. The thermal conductivity is high compared to air and any cooling techniques which don’t include AC are surely better overall.
A water leak would either ruin the equipment if indoors or ruin the equipment if outdoors and not refilled on time. Considering those servers are their bread and butter, I’m going to assume they’re going to fix any leaks pretty quickly.
There’s lots of places these systems can leak that aren’t a big deal. They almost definitely leak to some degree. They also likely leak less than the municipal water supply does.
When I tried hitting that link, through the image, I got a screen demanding payment.
Apparently finance.yahoo.com is making mobile-users land on a money-harvesting page, tied with Google?
Does the entire fediverse need to blacklist finance.yahoo.com ?
First of all yahoo finance is a money-harvesting page itself. And secondly I as a mobile user can read the article just fine.
You think yahoo can afford it’s chatgp3 subscription to write these articles without a pay wall
If you have problems with paywalls, use the mobile web browser Brave and go into settings and enable Bypass Paywalls Clean.
Maybe they shouldn’t be shutting down all those coal and nuclear plants to placate the global warming cult.
It can be challenging to pick it out, but, if you read the article, the problem is “Transmission Capacity”. This does not mean that energy supply is the problem, rather, that the power grid has a finite, limiting ability to transmit the power generated in one place to another place, far away.
It would be nice if this were not the case, as the construction of remote gigawatt-scale power plants would, as you suggest, solve this problem. However, adding more supply won’t change the transmission capacity of the grid serving the utility, especially if the power generation is tens or hundreds of miles away from the demand centers.
One way to relieve the inevitable shortages is to upgrade the power lines and grid infrastructure. The core problems with this are that 1) it’s expensive and 2) there’s no good way to recoup the costs, as there would be with a plant. Accordingly, few people are eager to dump billions dollars into new grid infrastructure.
An alternative way is to provide power is to accelerate residential solar arrays. Residential PV generates large amounts of excess power that can be metered back into the grid immediately adjacent to neighbors who may not have solar power, but might need power for things like air conditioning during hot days. Crucially, the power for these consumers is being generated immediately adjacent to them, without encumbering the “transmission capacity” of the grid that the distant thermal plant needs to get their energy to the consumer.
Also, residential PV is purchased, installed, and insured by a private home owner at their own expense. Liability for loss or damage to the residential PV array is held by the homeowner, not the utility. As a result, the residential PV array is allowing the utility to sell more power to their customers without requiring that same utility to pay for an upgraded grid.
Residential PV should be viewed as a godsend for the thermal plants generating power that their grids can’t transmit.
There would be less need for transmission capacity with more local sources of power.
