Having worked in the data centre sector until quite recently, I have a little knowledge of the subject.
Energy consumption is vast, almost all of which is rejected as waste heat. Unfortunately, most of this is low-grade heat that is very hard to re-use. All new data centre planning applications talk up the opportunity to connect to District heat networks, but the reality is that nowhere actually has in this country, as it just isn't practical. I believe that there is one operational example in Scandinavia.
Some cooling technologies are more energy efficient, but guess what, they use vast quantities of clean water for evaporative cooling.
I believe the Microsoft underwater data centres were basically shipping container sized. Components obviously could not be upgraded during the lifetime of the units, so they quickly became obsolete and more to the point were insignificantly small in thd first place. Not to mention the fact that data centres need to be located close to point of use in order to maintain connection speed.
Then you get onto the power backup. Obviously, people can't accept a 10s delay on their cat video, so a 100% reliable power backup is required. This generally involves a grid-scale battery bank (think of the environmental damage caused producing these), which provides power for long enough for the diesel generators to start up. The diesel generators (while never likely to be used in anger, due to triple redundancy power supply) need monthly testing, chugging through thousands of gallons of diesel.
All this to cater for the near zero chance of a few seconds of power outage.
The industry is growing at an exponential rate, encouraged by the government, all the while, they bleat on about net zero and penalise us for driving to work or heating our homes. Not to mention pumping all that heat into the atmosphere and rivers while talking about man-made global warming. Talk about messed up priorities!
Yes it is depressing that about 0.1% of the world’s CO2 is apparently generated by people mindlessly scrolling through pictures of cats, or whatever.
But just a couple of points on the above.
Data centres are not unique in dumping all their energy in the form of low grade heat.
Virtually all of the energy we use is in the form of low grade heat within a very short time – seconds usually, rarely more than a few minutes.
The rest follows on a longer timescale. The people who built the pyramids and Stonehenge did well – some of their energy still hasn’t made it there yet. But eventually…..
The suggestion at the end that the heat is making global warming worse.
The sun delivers an average about 240W to each square metre of the earth’s surface, according to various sources on the internet.
Humans consume about 180,000 TWh per year, which I think is an average power consumption of about 20TW, there being about 9000 hours in a year.
If you divide that by the earth’s surface area of about 5*10^14 square metres you get about 0.04W on each square metre, or about a 6000th of the sun’s contribution.
So Tik Tok’s contribution to the heat will be much less than a millionth of that of the sun.
It's the CO2 that matters.
To my mind a more immediate problem with phone use is what I see on my Monday evening trips into town on the bus, to get my 3 pints and a curry.
The majority of people are doing nothing but staring at their phones and skimming through pictures with blank expressions on their faces. I remember when it used to be normal to see many people reading newspapers, looking around or even talking to each other. Getting information from different sources.
I dare say it’s a small(ish) proportion of people doing this, but it doesn’t take many – it’s only a few years since 5% more people understanding a bit more would have spared us all a lot of grief.
Very soon some of the people I see on the bus will have to decide whether to cut down on their scrolling (and their flying, meat eating, patio heaters, central heating etc) in the interests of everybody, and I suspect they won't understand enough then either.
www.digitalcameraworld.com
