Another one for the books

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begreen

begreen

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Nov 18, 2005
104,656
South Puget Sound, WA
This belongs in the WTF?! chapter.
Another great Microsoft invention, the underSurface heater. This is a very lame idea. Just when the critical concern is the warming of our oceans and the catastrophic effect that can have on weather and sea life, here comes along the brilliant plan of putting heaters in the ocean. Sheer genius! Let's put thousands of them in the oceans! Just so that we have a faster Bing!

As an alternative there are huge data centers in caves that stretch for miles. The caves are a constant 58F and the heat is absorbed deep in the earth. Or better yet, directly address the power consumption of big data.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10883866/microsoft-underwater-data-centers

"Data centers are one of the largest and fastest growing consumers of electricity in the United States. In 2013, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity -- enough electricity to power all the households in New York City twice over -- and are on-track to reach 140 billion kilowatt-hours by 2020."
http://www.nrdc.org/energy/data-center-efficiency-assessment.asp
 
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Would be nice to think of a way to recapture the heat they put off ...
 
I like your thinking. If nothing else put them alongside pellet plants to dry out the sawdust.
 
You're over-reacting. The heat produced:

1.) Is utterly trivial in comparison to the solar heating of the ocean - All of the data centers in the US combined have total heat production (assuming equal to energy consumption) equivalent to ~0.00001% of the solar heating of the Pacific Ocean. Greenhouse gases are hundreds of times more significant of an issue.

2.) That heat ultimately is within the earth's thermosphere regardless of whether you initially deliver it to the air, where it is transferred to the ground and sea, the ground, where it is transferred to the air and sea, or the sea, where it is transferred to the air and ground.

The only real way to reduce the overall heat input is to improve efficiency, including the efficiency of displacing waste heat. It is almost always more efficient to dump waste heat into a lower temperature heat sink than a high one. That could include the ground, but water is substantially easier to drill through.

The main thermal concern about data centers in water, or at least cooling lines for data centers in water would not be the bulk warming of the whole ocean, but the localized warming in the immediate surroundings, since some marine species are very temperature sensitive. Increased temperatures could stress some species or cause over-population of other species.

Waste heat reuse would be fantastic, except there doesn't seem to be many interested in 90 degree heat. At best, there have been some efforts to plan the heat of on-site servers into the heat management of some office buildings, and a few attempts to utilize heat from urban data-centers, which are increasingly rare, for heating adjacent buildings.
 
Of bigger concern would be the amount of electricity that is generated by non-green means ...
 
These are all concerns. The amount of power used by data centers (that we know of) is extraordinary and growing. The example of using the oceans to dump waste heat is a flagrant waste that could have negative effects, especially in closed waters and in mass quantity. In some ways it's like flaring off gas from thousands of wells. 140 billion kWh is not a trivial amount of power consumption.
 
I don't think mixing salt water and electronics is a good idea...period.
I like the liquid bath idea but they should use pure water or some other non-conductive medium.
The low grade heat a water cooled terrestrial installation would create would be great for domestic or commercial hydronic heating.
 
Yes, data centers do use a surprising amount of energy, but I wouldn't actually call it extraordinary. The 2013 figure works out to about 2.4% of our overall national electricity consumption. Lighting is supposedly around 11%. I wouldn't be surprised if lighting consumption is actually going down faster at the moment than data center usage is going up. Not that it wouldn't be better if both could go down, but it seemed like a perspective worth mentioning.

And when those data centers reduce other forms of consumption, such as paper communications, they potentially reduce net energy consumption.

Semipro, if you click the article, the description indicates they don't immerse the electronics directly in salt-water, but rather put them in a sealed capsule filled with nitrogen (could almost as easily be air, although you'd want to be sure it was dry air), and put that in the water. The water keeps the whole unit cool. Seems like hardware failures would be an issue though. You'd have to take an entire capsule with dozens of servers offline to fix one of them.
 
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Exactly. It is the rate of increase that is disconcerting. It may be far from reducing paper though, in some cases they are increasing paper usage to document all that new data. We are collecting, storing, analyzing, distributing (including printing) and mining data at an unprecedented rate in human history and this is increasing at an incredible rate. On another note, I certainly am getting more junk mail than ever now.
 
I saw a documentary last night that said an iPhone uses the same amount of power as a refrigerator. The comparison includes the energy required to manufacture the iPhone plus the energy required to power all the servers, microwave towers, cell towers, etc. that an iPhone uses.
I haven't researched the facts but I can see that it might be possible. The infrastructure that all of us use constantly but never see is staggering.
 
DougA said:
I saw a documentary last night that said an iPhone uses the same amount of power as a refrigerator.
Click to expand...

The figures in one of begreen's sources above work out to 33 Watts per person on a continuous average for all the servers in the US. That's just shy of 0.8 kW-hours per day. The phone itself uses very little power - a full charge is only 0.007 kW-hours. The towers and backend of the connection infrastructure presumably use more and push the total into the 1-2 kW-hr per day range of a fridge. Manufacturing energy isn't likely to be very high compared to the fridge. Sure the manufacturing processes are more complex, but the hundreds of pounds of material that go into the fridge will dominate the manufacturing footprint.

By a rough estimate, though, that claim sounds about right.
 
begreen said:
Exactly. It is the rate of increase that is disconcerting. It may be far from reducing paper though, in some cases they are increasing paper usage to document all that new data. We are collecting, storing, analyzing, distributing (including printing) and mining data at an unprecedented rate in human history and this is increasing at an incredible rate. On another note, I certainly am getting more junk mail than ever now.
Click to expand...
And yet I'm still missing several critical tax forms... go figure..maybe they are at the bottom of the sea
 
Gives a new meaning to deep sixing data.
 
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