I've been thinking about this a lot where here in BC we just finished a new dam which could benefit 1.7m EV owners, 250k households........ Or the LNG plant just down the road. At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra. I get that the plant will positively impact GDP but how much? And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry? It's such a common trope "we don't have enough power to meet our climate goals" well yeah especially when it's being used to support carbonized resource processing.
> At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra.
I don't think these industries get power for free.
It's typical for high capacity customers to be paying a flat fee monthly for capacity in addition to the rates for usage. And when they desire things like redundant feeds from separate substations, that's likely to require payment for engineering and construction as well as extra cost for maintenance.
OTOH, large users can get discounts, sometimes substantial discounts if they participate in demand response programs. It's a benefit to the grid operator if they can have large users rapidly reduce their load if needed to maintain grid stability... it's historically been much easier to reduce demand significantly at a few large user sites than to reduce demand across a large number of households ... and the alternative to opt-in reduction is brownouts and rolling blackouts.
A sophisticated multi-region datacenter operation is a good candidate for demand response, as it's relatively simple to quickly migrate traffic away from a power constrained data center.
No, I know the plant will pay for its usage. But to me, the net benefit of the dam is effectively zeroed out from the onset. The province was barely able to carry the project through to completion in the first place. Now we gotta start the process over again with a new government and people on both sides are upset at the completion.
Likely, we'll simply build a bunch of LNG facilities which kind of defeats the purpose of the dam in the first place.
>At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra.
Isn't that what the usage fees are for? If the utility isn't charging enough to pay for the infrastructure and make a profit, it's doing something terribly wrong.
>And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry?
Why are you using public finance for utilities there?
Because, socialism ! We can’t get private business to invest in infrastructure in Canada, because like Venezuela, we might just take it over and socialize it. Like the pipeline Canada now owns and might give to the natives… lol
So then all the districts fight over who gets the power plants and the 50 jobs
> And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry?
Where I live generation is owned by privately owned/listed companies or for-profit government owned entities (we call these entities a State Owned Enterprise or SOE). The grid is owned by an SOE and local distribution is owned by for-profit corporations owned by local governments (cities or regional councils).
So energy consumers pay for the generation, other than Rio Tinto which has gotten subsidies from successive governments (but this is the last time, we promise) and lower income consumers who get a winter angry payment, and maybe some smaller industry subsidies I am unaware of.
By default, I don't believe your claim. Hydro power would be a horrible match for a LNG liquification plant. The strength of hydro is that it's renewable energy with flexibility on the timing of energy production. It means hydro power plans can be run at a low load when energy is cheap, and high load when it's expensive. (And thus, the average Watt of power generated by hydro is more valuable/expensive than the average Watt of power generated by solar.)
LNG liquification would have the opposite pattern. They'd either want to run the plant 24/7 to get maximimum utility from the capital investments into the plant, or if they are demand-constrained, they'd want to time their production runs to when energy is the cheapest. They're most likely to use electricity exactly when the dam isn't producing any. And conversely, there will be a lot of times when the dam is producing way more electricity than the plant is using.
So it seems totally impossible to believe that production from the new dam is getting allocated 1:1 to a specific LNG plant. It's just not how any of this works. If there's some kind of kernel of truth to your claim, I'd imagine it's some kind of greenwashing where they're buying the rights to claim the LNG was created with renewable energy.
Sorry for the confusion. It's not necessarily preallocated but it just so happens that the new dam will generate x mwh per year and the LNG plant will consume close to x mwh per year. They are also within a few hundred km iirc. The public utility says that the dam's generation goes into the provincial pool and the plant's draw comes from the pool and I have no reason to not believe them...
But effectively private industry gets the benefit and we have to start the process over again to build another generation source.
14,975,435MWh for one year (8760 hrs) = 1709 MW load. Or about 1.7 mil servers using 1kW each (total, including its share of data center cooling). That's a lotta servers.
Another way to look at it.. they say they have about 3.14 bil daily active users across all platforms. So that's about 13Wh per daily user session. At $0.15/kWh, that's about $0.002 of electricity which doesn't seem that horrible.
Plus ~1/2000th of a server, divided by the life time of a server on their premises in days. Let’s say a millionth of a server. At $1000 a server, that adds about $0.001 a day, if my math is correct. Actual numbers may be higher. What do they pay for their hardware, at the scale they buy it?
Plus installation and management, plus the cost of the building.
> However, water withdrawal from groundwater increased 137 percent to 88 megaliters. Water withdrawals from areas with high or extremely high baseline water stress increased 20 percent to 1,360 megaliters.
IOW, Meta just doesn't care about people around its server farms.
> Electricity intensity per monthly active person also grew to 0.0041MWh, up 32 percent.
Means that Meta doesn't read the IPCC report telling us to decrease our consumption (I certainly doubt that FB users have increased their usage time by 32%).
My first instinct was to say that this isn't much, but actually, it's not insignificant.
Say there's a billion users.
14975GWh implies then that each user has used 14975Wh or 15kWh. Per year.
Fairly spicy I think. It's about the equivalent of a full charge of a laptop once per two days, so it's at least as much as many (most?) end users would consume "by themselves".
Probably it depends, on when and where. In areas with excess existing capacity like hydro it could periodically increase the prices. In other areas it could develop power infra and generation capacity making it cheaper.
By the law of economics it makes it more expensive because now the 75-years old pensioner has to compete on the free market against the likes of Meta, Amazon or Alphabet for access to the same money-exchanged finite resources (electric power, in this case). More demand generates a bigger price. Of course that these big corporations and their fans/share-owners will come up and say that said bigger demand is more than offset by the bigger offer being made available only because of said big corporations, but that’s just bs.
Electric power is not a finite resource though, so classical supply and demand would say the cost goes down - because Meta needs more power, people build more power stations, the power station builders (solar, wind, nuclear, etc.) sell more so they can benefit from economies of scale and they put their prices down.
Including providing free social networking for everyone on the whole planet?
(Not that I'm a fan of Facebook, and many of their practices are questionable. But if we want to think in a less biased way, it's not correct to leave out the part of the equation where they also do good. We may find that it's nowhere near the bottom of the humanitarian scale.)
I think that the vast majority of the power usage is actually spent on crunching the data for advertisers so a social network with no need for monetization could be a lot more energy efficient
The better part of Facebook's network traffic is there to serve ads.
A utilitarian social network (similar to this site) would probably only use a fraction of the resources.
In that case We don't have enough work to do. Automating agriculture and distributing produce for free ( or at low margin ) is the last nail in to the coffin. This all is just dopamine, real work needs bombastic goals.
We destroy more than enough food to end world hunger, but actually distributing that food to the people that need it would undermine the authority of lots of well-armed organizations.
De-weaponizing food distribution would do a heck of a lot more than further reducing the percentage of the population that works in agriculture.
Put another way, 10% of the US works in agriculture-related fields (including restaurants, food processing and textile manufacturing), but only 1.2% works on farms:
Imagine if we used all of our resources to develop artificial general intelligence which could multiply our prosperity and solve problems across many domains…
…or we could allocate it against economic gradients, to things which don’t actually maximize net impact but instead allow us to feel good
Better yet, we could develop an artificial general intelligence that achieves consciousness, and decides we're a toxic infestation of the planet, and works to wipe us out. The AI wouldn't even be wrong in its assessment of us.
Right now those who have power to develop AI aren't in a hurry to do good for the humanity. They'd rather destroy it if it makes their profits grow. So a more likely future is a corporation like Meta Facebook creates a real AI, asks it how to increase profits and the AI finds a way: a horrible, disgusting way, but a way that works. Other corporations follow and we enter the era of AI dystopia.
The second most likely future is humanity creates a commonwealth AI, under the rule of United Nations or similar organisation, and immediately asks the AI: how can we make humanity better? And AI finds a solution based on a crooked understanding of what we need. So it creates a dead-end utopia where humanity slowly degrades in total comfort.
Assuming they're at least a good a judge of what makes them happy as you are, how is this resource not being used for whatever "humanitarian" purposes are? Or are we only allowed resources as far as FEMA tents?
Sure, maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy, but I put it to you the burden of proof for that's on you.
I'd further put it that the resources used for these data centers, like Meta engineers, would in fact be pretty bloody useless at solving Sudanese famine, even if by some miracle they're actually good at the farming part, so can we please drop this weird argument that the cost of these things is automatically an opportunity cost in humanitarian purposes? Because it isn't.
Facebook has literal psychology experts on staff to make the platform as addictive as possible. Treating it as matter of willpower is uneducated and naive.
75% of the west is obese/overweight thanks to their own free will too. Because A: free will doesn't exist and B: the top mind of the world are all paid $$$ by companies to make sure you consume their shit no matter the social/health cost
> maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy
Is that all there is to life ? Then high fructose corn syrup must be paradise
I've been thinking about this a lot where here in BC we just finished a new dam which could benefit 1.7m EV owners, 250k households........ Or the LNG plant just down the road. At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra. I get that the plant will positively impact GDP but how much? And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry? It's such a common trope "we don't have enough power to meet our climate goals" well yeah especially when it's being used to support carbonized resource processing.
> At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra.
I don't think these industries get power for free.
It's typical for high capacity customers to be paying a flat fee monthly for capacity in addition to the rates for usage. And when they desire things like redundant feeds from separate substations, that's likely to require payment for engineering and construction as well as extra cost for maintenance.
OTOH, large users can get discounts, sometimes substantial discounts if they participate in demand response programs. It's a benefit to the grid operator if they can have large users rapidly reduce their load if needed to maintain grid stability... it's historically been much easier to reduce demand significantly at a few large user sites than to reduce demand across a large number of households ... and the alternative to opt-in reduction is brownouts and rolling blackouts.
A sophisticated multi-region datacenter operation is a good candidate for demand response, as it's relatively simple to quickly migrate traffic away from a power constrained data center.
No, I know the plant will pay for its usage. But to me, the net benefit of the dam is effectively zeroed out from the onset. The province was barely able to carry the project through to completion in the first place. Now we gotta start the process over again with a new government and people on both sides are upset at the completion.
Likely, we'll simply build a bunch of LNG facilities which kind of defeats the purpose of the dam in the first place.
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> OTOH, large users can get discounts, sometimes substantial discounts if they participate in demand response programs.
In a lot of countries companies also pay much less for electricity, usually due to a lower tax on said electricity.
>At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra.
Isn't that what the usage fees are for? If the utility isn't charging enough to pay for the infrastructure and make a profit, it's doing something terribly wrong.
>And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry?
Why are you using public finance for utilities there?
Because, socialism ! We can’t get private business to invest in infrastructure in Canada, because like Venezuela, we might just take it over and socialize it. Like the pipeline Canada now owns and might give to the natives… lol
So then all the districts fight over who gets the power plants and the 50 jobs
> And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry?
Where I live generation is owned by privately owned/listed companies or for-profit government owned entities (we call these entities a State Owned Enterprise or SOE). The grid is owned by an SOE and local distribution is owned by for-profit corporations owned by local governments (cities or regional councils).
So energy consumers pay for the generation, other than Rio Tinto which has gotten subsidies from successive governments (but this is the last time, we promise) and lower income consumers who get a winter angry payment, and maybe some smaller industry subsidies I am unaware of.
Sorry... FOR PROFIT government entities? Where do profits go?
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Do you have a source for that?
By default, I don't believe your claim. Hydro power would be a horrible match for a LNG liquification plant. The strength of hydro is that it's renewable energy with flexibility on the timing of energy production. It means hydro power plans can be run at a low load when energy is cheap, and high load when it's expensive. (And thus, the average Watt of power generated by hydro is more valuable/expensive than the average Watt of power generated by solar.)
LNG liquification would have the opposite pattern. They'd either want to run the plant 24/7 to get maximimum utility from the capital investments into the plant, or if they are demand-constrained, they'd want to time their production runs to when energy is the cheapest. They're most likely to use electricity exactly when the dam isn't producing any. And conversely, there will be a lot of times when the dam is producing way more electricity than the plant is using.
So it seems totally impossible to believe that production from the new dam is getting allocated 1:1 to a specific LNG plant. It's just not how any of this works. If there's some kind of kernel of truth to your claim, I'd imagine it's some kind of greenwashing where they're buying the rights to claim the LNG was created with renewable energy.
Sorry for the confusion. It's not necessarily preallocated but it just so happens that the new dam will generate x mwh per year and the LNG plant will consume close to x mwh per year. They are also within a few hundred km iirc. The public utility says that the dam's generation goes into the provincial pool and the plant's draw comes from the pool and I have no reason to not believe them...
But effectively private industry gets the benefit and we have to start the process over again to build another generation source.
14,975,435MWh for one year (8760 hrs) = 1709 MW load. Or about 1.7 mil servers using 1kW each (total, including its share of data center cooling). That's a lotta servers.
Another way to look at it.. they say they have about 3.14 bil daily active users across all platforms. So that's about 13Wh per daily user session. At $0.15/kWh, that's about $0.002 of electricity which doesn't seem that horrible.
It also corresponds to 2-3 nuclear reactors.
I am also not shocked. But somewhat surprised by the choice of unit in the article.
> It also corresponds to 2-3 nuclear reactors
One reactor, if you use a modern design! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
(Or maybe 2 anyway, to deal with downtime)
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What is the output of the three reactors worth of electricity? Hot takes and shit posts ?
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> So that's about 13Wh per daily user session
Plus ~1/2000th of a server, divided by the life time of a server on their premises in days. Let’s say a millionth of a server. At $1000 a server, that adds about $0.001 a day, if my math is correct. Actual numbers may be higher. What do they pay for their hardware, at the scale they buy it?
Plus installation and management, plus the cost of the building.
1.5 B$ per year at $0.15/KWh.
Some of those servers are located in north Sweden, where electricity is cheaper (for now [1])
I expect it to be even cheaper for example on Iceland with an abundance of hydro power.
[1] They are also trying to redefine steel-processing there and that will use a lot of electricity if they succeed.
>3.14 bil daily active users
That's about 2 in 5 people on the planet. Astonishing.
FTA:
> However, water withdrawal from groundwater increased 137 percent to 88 megaliters. Water withdrawals from areas with high or extremely high baseline water stress increased 20 percent to 1,360 megaliters.
IOW, Meta just doesn't care about people around its server farms.
> Electricity intensity per monthly active person also grew to 0.0041MWh, up 32 percent.
Means that Meta doesn't read the IPCC report telling us to decrease our consumption (I certainly doubt that FB users have increased their usage time by 32%).
My first instinct was to say that this isn't much, but actually, it's not insignificant.
Say there's a billion users.
14975GWh implies then that each user has used 14975Wh or 15kWh. Per year.
Fairly spicy I think. It's about the equivalent of a full charge of a laptop once per two days, so it's at least as much as many (most?) end users would consume "by themselves".
Is data center electricity usage making electricity cheaper or more expensive for the domestic user? Or neither
Probably it depends, on when and where. In areas with excess existing capacity like hydro it could periodically increase the prices. In other areas it could develop power infra and generation capacity making it cheaper.
By the law of economics it makes it more expensive because now the 75-years old pensioner has to compete on the free market against the likes of Meta, Amazon or Alphabet for access to the same money-exchanged finite resources (electric power, in this case). More demand generates a bigger price. Of course that these big corporations and their fans/share-owners will come up and say that said bigger demand is more than offset by the bigger offer being made available only because of said big corporations, but that’s just bs.
Electric power is not a finite resource though, so classical supply and demand would say the cost goes down - because Meta needs more power, people build more power stations, the power station builders (solar, wind, nuclear, etc.) sell more so they can benefit from economies of scale and they put their prices down.
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by what law of economics?
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I read the headline "metadata center" and envisioned a facility that only stores timestamps, call logs, and inode pointers
Imagine if we used all of our resources for humanitarian purposes
Including providing free social networking for everyone on the whole planet?
(Not that I'm a fan of Facebook, and many of their practices are questionable. But if we want to think in a less biased way, it's not correct to leave out the part of the equation where they also do good. We may find that it's nowhere near the bottom of the humanitarian scale.)
If anything, this planet would be a better place if we could get rid of Facebook.
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I think that the vast majority of the power usage is actually spent on crunching the data for advertisers so a social network with no need for monetization could be a lot more energy efficient
The better part of Facebook's network traffic is there to serve ads. A utilitarian social network (similar to this site) would probably only use a fraction of the resources.
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Ah yes, the famous "everything new is progress and progress is good". I wish I had such simple views on the world
The polarization of society may show that social media are net negative.
on facebook you are the product, though. If facebook were mastodon, and also didn't have ads, maybe.
In that case We don't have enough work to do. Automating agriculture and distributing produce for free ( or at low margin ) is the last nail in to the coffin. This all is just dopamine, real work needs bombastic goals.
Hunger is a political problem at this point.
We destroy more than enough food to end world hunger, but actually distributing that food to the people that need it would undermine the authority of lots of well-armed organizations.
De-weaponizing food distribution would do a heck of a lot more than further reducing the percentage of the population that works in agriculture.
Put another way, 10% of the US works in agriculture-related fields (including restaurants, food processing and textile manufacturing), but only 1.2% works on farms:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
Driving farm jobs from 1.2% to 0% isn’t going to move food costs or availability very much, and it’d barely be perceptible to the economy at large.
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Automating agriculture is a current trend, but there's so many components that it's hard to say when such a project would be considered "completed".
So turn off the lights and give the planet a respite.
You mean "artifiacly preserve life on places that would naturally vanish beacuse of unhabitable conditions for it"?
Imagine if we used all of our resources to develop artificial general intelligence which could multiply our prosperity and solve problems across many domains…
…or we could allocate it against economic gradients, to things which don’t actually maximize net impact but instead allow us to feel good
Better yet, we could develop an artificial general intelligence that achieves consciousness, and decides we're a toxic infestation of the planet, and works to wipe us out. The AI wouldn't even be wrong in its assessment of us.
Right now those who have power to develop AI aren't in a hurry to do good for the humanity. They'd rather destroy it if it makes their profits grow. So a more likely future is a corporation like Meta Facebook creates a real AI, asks it how to increase profits and the AI finds a way: a horrible, disgusting way, but a way that works. Other corporations follow and we enter the era of AI dystopia.
The second most likely future is humanity creates a commonwealth AI, under the rule of United Nations or similar organisation, and immediately asks the AI: how can we make humanity better? And AI finds a solution based on a crooked understanding of what we need. So it creates a dead-end utopia where humanity slowly degrades in total comfort.
People use facebook of their own free will.
Assuming they're at least a good a judge of what makes them happy as you are, how is this resource not being used for whatever "humanitarian" purposes are? Or are we only allowed resources as far as FEMA tents?
Sure, maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy, but I put it to you the burden of proof for that's on you.
I'd further put it that the resources used for these data centers, like Meta engineers, would in fact be pretty bloody useless at solving Sudanese famine, even if by some miracle they're actually good at the farming part, so can we please drop this weird argument that the cost of these things is automatically an opportunity cost in humanitarian purposes? Because it isn't.
Facebook has literal psychology experts on staff to make the platform as addictive as possible. Treating it as matter of willpower is uneducated and naive.
> People use facebook of their own free will.
75% of the west is obese/overweight thanks to their own free will too. Because A: free will doesn't exist and B: the top mind of the world are all paid $$$ by companies to make sure you consume their shit no matter the social/health cost
> maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy
Is that all there is to life ? Then high fructose corn syrup must be paradise