If you take it as a given that we should have giant warehouses full of computers using tons of energy while doing mostly pointless tasks during a climate emergency, then yes, it’s a great idea.
Where do you think your lemmy account and the comment you just wrote live
That’s a bad faith gotcha and you know it. My lemmy account, the comment I just wrote, and the entire internet you and I care about and interact with are a tiny sliver of these data warehouses. I have actually done sysadmin and devops for giant e-commerce company, and we spent the vast majority of our compute power on analytics for user tracking and advertising. The actual site itself was tiny compared to our surveillance-value-extraction work. That was a major e-commerce website you’ve heard of.
Bitcoin alone used half a percent of the entire world’s electricity consumption a couple of years ago. That’s just bitcoin, not even including the other crypto. Now with the AI hype, companies are building even more of these warehouses to train LLMs.
Fair enough
Even LLMs are fuzzy though. Some are used in programming/code generation now for example, would that be also a waste?
What about other AI, like generating and testing software for ADAS/self driving cars? A bunch of those datacenters are HPC crunching.
I didn’t say there are no good uses for data. Of course there are! I even wrote “useless things” in the comment to distinguish from real uses.
Personally I think self driving cars are never going to happen and the LLM coding hype fundamentally misunderstands what software does and is actually for, but even though I don’t agree with your examples, only a complete fucking moron would think computing in general is useless. My point is that current computing practices are insanely wasteful.
In theory, sure. But, realistically I can’t picture an economically feasible way to transport it.
This kind of district heating is not terribly uncommon. The question here is how hot can you get the water and if you have to ‘top it off’.
Heat pumps can be used to move heat around in a building. If the data center is directly adjacent to housing, this would be trivial to implement efficiently. The same system cooling the data center would be heating homes.
In the summer though, you’d have to push that heat to atmosphere, so this only helps in colder climates
Proximity is a huge issue. I’ve worked at a dozen or so datacenters over the years, and none are all that close to residential areas…l
I’ve been inside of data centers that are in an otherwise normal office building. Hospitals and stuff too. This could be a useful technology.
Yep, we’re working close to guys from Energy Machines company, they do solutions exacrly like that - use heat from one part of the building in another one, no matter, data center or something else.
There’s a thing called industrial symbiosis, where the waste products from one business become the inputs for another business. It takes a bit of effort and planning, but it can result in a much more sustainable world. There’s a place in Denmark called Kalundborg that’s really been working on it and has some nice examples.
I think the problem is that the temperature of the heat source is too low. It’s quite hard to recuperate energy from low temperature waste heat economically. With waste heat from high temperature sources, you can use steam, which can ‘store’ a lot of energy because of the latent enthalpy difference, which results in low mass flow rates. With water, you would need higher mass flow rates, so bigger tubes, pumps …
Water or steam.
If your server room generates steam you may have a bit of overheating issue.
Hot water is possible, but you’d need crazy insulated pipes and/or close buildings to heat before the water cools down too much.
With this scale you probably can’t get that much or go too far. You’re probably looking at partially heating a nearby office building or large apartment. I’d like to know for sure.
You could use the warm water to cool down some other factory that could turn it to steam.
In winter, you can preheat drinking water from 4 °C to 10 °C for many households, which will decrease their heating bills. This is how low-temperature geothermal sources are utilized in my country.
As for summer, there are facilities/industries that need warm or hot water, such as swimming pools.
You use water as a thermal agent. All you need to transport it is some insulated pipes.
Most of the comments are about the technical or logistical challenge of making this work, but I’ve got a separate concern. Who would want to pay Amazon for their heating bills? Facebook? Google? They already turned the internet to shit and made fortunes for the privilege, why would I want to pay them for waste heat? What regulations exist to make sure they don’t reroute the heat away from my house or apartment while I freeze? What halts them from gouging prices for heat that is a literal byproduct of their actual business? Like I already have enough problems that come from my power and heating company being an effective monopoly on my region. I don’t trust data center corps from creating the same, or worse, problems.
As heating network, they are and will be regulated like other energy suppliers: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-security-bill-factsheets/energy-security-bill-factsheet-heat-networks-regulation-and-zoning
Money is a human concept and “expendable” (to some limit of course inflation) Energy is not. If this consume less energy than just venting it out then I think it is a great idea
Money is (a very imperfect proxy for) value, be it the value of energy, human labor and time, limited resources, etc. It’s somewhat arbitrary, but not completely.
A lot of people don’t realize that this has been implemented and been used for a long time. In Romania, during communism, most major cities had infrastructure for using heat produced in factories and thermal (usually coal) power plants.
There are 2 ways in which it was implemented. One was to heat water into steam and to transport the steam using insulated pipes to local facilities that heat water. This can be more efficient, but the disadvantage is that working on pressurized steam pipes is really dangerous for the workers. There have been numerous accidents in the news about those.
Alternatively, you can simply transport hot water through insulated pipes to local facilities, these can heat the water additionally if the water isn’t hot enough, and then it’s distributed to homes.
The main issue in Romania is that these systems haven’t been properly maintained in at least 30 years, a lot of heat gets lost and they tend to fail a lot, people get frustrated and disconnect from the network, the neighbors get a worse service because not enough hot water is consumed for the water in the pipes to not go cold and they disconnect too, and the system just gets worse and worse. Some cities have enacted a policy not allowing people to disconnect.
We had a guy in our lab growing pepper plants beside the computers that he kept running for simulations
I expected the article to make a case for it being a waste of money, but they didn’t.
How would you transport it? If its not a lot hotter than the ambiant it moves slowly. As an example, its been cold here recently at night (45F). My house is currently 67F and the outside temp is 78F. I have the door open which does allow the outdoor temp to warm the house, but its incredibly slow since its only an 11F difference. I have a few computers mining crypto in my bedroom and the heat from those has kept me from really having to use my heater. I have had to use it, but not nearly as much as i would otherwise.
Note: i call this the temperature delta, though that may not be the correct term for it.
Water and insulated pipes.
You’d probably use water as a thermal conduction medium, similar to how old buildings had a boiler in the basement which heated water which was then sent to rooms through radiators.
But servers couldnt get the water to boiling point. I have lived in several apartments (Minnesota) that used the boiler method you described. Heck, my office was the old pilsbury mansion and used it. I even had to monitor the boiler pressures during maintainence once.
Ever heard of heat pumps?
Heard of them, yes. Know anything about them, no.
Just watched a heat pump install vid and that looks a bit complicated. Something like window AC units just require you to install it and turn it on. Shouldnt heat pumps be simple like that too?
The only way it makes sense is within the same facility. You could use water or refrigerant in heat exchangers, and run insulated lines to other parts of the building. Wouldn’t do too much, but might see a slight reduction in heating costs.
