Comment by Aurornis
1 hour ago
> and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area
There was a study posted here on this exact topic a few weeks back. The most they could measure was a little over 1 degree C near the datacenter.
> But the point is they suck up land and resources
Land use for a datacenter is kind of negligible. Even the largest data centers are barely a rounding error compared to all of the other commercial and industrial operations around me.
Like it's not even close.
> They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.
For what it's worth, all of the data center projects I've looked up near me are being built in remote or industrial areas. It hasn't stopped the protestors, who are arranging for bus transport to get to the sites because they're so far away.
That paper was 100% garbage. It hinged entirely on the observation of 1 huge industrial park in Bajio, Mexico, which contains one AWS data center and about 3000 auto parts factories. The before/after breaking point of the effect was during the time that the park went from bare ground to industrial park. It has nothing to do with the data center.
Interesting. So the minimal heat rise observed was from the total transformation of the entire area and they blamed it all on the datacenter?
Yes. And just on the arithmetic it should be crystal clear that no data center is anywhere near energetic enough to heat the countryside for miles around. The effect comes from the man-made surfaces facing the sun instead of natural ground cover. Only the sun has the energy to do this.
I used the paper's data to investigate some of their claims. The top figure shows the temperature in the area surrounding Google's Oklahoma data center, in the middle of the figure. I think you can clearly see that the effect is totally dominated by the nearby coal power station and its huge, black pile of slag.
https://observablehq.com/@jwb/data-center-temperature-effect...
The scene is roughly here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@36.2154925,-95.3281217,13968m/d...
Edit: fixed notebook access. Sorry.