Skeptics of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County are sweating about a lot more than its energy demands and potential toll on water supplies.
Listen guy, maybe you haven’t noticed, but we have some serious fuckery we are trying to deal with here. While I agree that metric is a more logical system. We’re trying to get a grip while everything around us is crumbling. Switching to metric is in like volume 17 of our todo list right now, sandwiched between end daylight savings time and making the my pillow guy eat a sock.
Well, everyone knows it’s at least a lot. That’s the point. Most people don’t know what 9GW means, in terms of heat. Even a small nuclear bomb it’s enough to vaporized a large area. This tells even the least informed person that it’s an amount of energy that should be concerning.
At least in this case it gets across the truly stupid amount of energy being wasted. As a general rule I think that if you can boil one of the great lakes with your daily thermal output you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
17gw is about the same size as the Hiroshima bomb - 63 terajoules is 17 GWh and the 9GW data centre produces at least 16GWs of heat. Pretty scary when looked at like that.
3,600 of those industrial-scale generators to power Stratos
Caterpillar 2.5mw generators have maximum efficiency of 45%, and so 19gw is peak thermal power. that is roughly 26 hiroshimas per day.
It’s an over estimate because datacenter cpu/gpu capacity utilization is on average under 10%. It could still produce all that power for export to trap all that heat in a valley.
Not that it would matter for this conversation, but at hyperscalers levels, the energy required for mechanical loads is under 20% of the compute load. Wouldn’t surprise me if ~10% can be achieved at multi GW scale. Thus about 11GW total energy.
9GW should be the compute load goal, to which you need to add the mechanical and administrative loads. At higher scales they gain significant efficiencies which translates to market advantages.
Let’s assume Costco size hot dogs (1/4 lb, or 0.11 kg), with an internal temp increase from fridge temperatures (37 F, or 276 K) to 165 F (347 K). Let’s also assume the heat capacity of the hot dog is about 3000 J/kg*K. To heat up a single hot dog takes this much energy:
q=mc*deltaT => q=(0.11 kg)*(3000 J/kg*K)*(347K-276K)=23,430 J of energy.
The heat capacity here is 9GW. That is 9 gigajoules of energy per second, or 9 billion joules every second. Divide this by the number of joules to cook each hot dog gets us the number of hot dogs that could be cooked every second:
9,000,000,000/23,430=384,123 hot dogs/second
With this hot dogs per second figure, we can find how long this energy source would take to feed the entire US population a Costco hot dog.
342,000,000 people/384,123 hot dogs per sec=890 seconds
Converting this to minutes:
890/60=14.8 minutes
So, this source of energy could feed the entire population of the US a Costco hot dog in less than 15 minutes if properly harnessed.
“How many hot dogs a day? Well, gosh, I don’t know. Some days it’s just two. Other days…it could be up to, and I’m just ball parking here you understand, it could be…up to seven?”
This is USica, it doesn’t matter where you’re pumping it, just that it’s out of where you’re pumping it from. Doesn’t really even matter what you’re pumping, USians gotta pump something.
Americans will do anything but use the metric system.
Listen guy, maybe you haven’t noticed, but we have some serious fuckery we are trying to deal with here. While I agree that metric is a more logical system. We’re trying to get a grip while everything around us is crumbling. Switching to metric is in like volume 17 of our todo list right now, sandwiched between end daylight savings time and making the my pillow guy eat a sock.
Who’s this ‘we’ you’re speaking for. Do you have a frog in your pocket?
Sounds like he’s talking about Americans. I don’t think “frog personhood” has been established there at this time, unless one owns a corporation.
9GW is first. That’s metric. The other number is to give an estimate that is more relatable.
but first is peak power, not waste energy, we’re still missing the SI estimated number of Wh wasted per day
If they can tell us how many “atom bombs” per day it takes to power it, at least we could figure it out!
Yeah, who doesn’t know the heat of an atom bomb? (which famously can vary by 4 orders of magnitude)
Well, everyone knows it’s at least a lot. That’s the point. Most people don’t know what 9GW means, in terms of heat. Even a small nuclear bomb it’s enough to vaporized a large area. This tells even the least informed person that it’s an amount of energy that should be concerning.
That’s why “Hiroshima” is now a unit. We’re lucky “Tsar Bomba” isn’t.
At least in this case it gets across the truly stupid amount of energy being wasted. As a general rule I think that if you can boil one of the great lakes with your daily thermal output you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
Is that a realistic Approximation of energy usage? This seems a lot to me, even over the span of one day
Definitely off by a few orders of magnitude.
17gw is about the same size as the Hiroshima bomb - 63 terajoules is 17 GWh and the 9GW data centre produces at least 16GWs of heat. Pretty scary when looked at like that.
17gw of heat is both under and over estimate.
Caterpillar 2.5mw generators have maximum efficiency of 45%, and so 19gw is peak thermal power. that is roughly 26 hiroshimas per day.
It’s an over estimate because datacenter cpu/gpu capacity utilization is on average under 10%. It could still produce all that power for export to trap all that heat in a valley.
Not that it would matter for this conversation, but at hyperscalers levels, the energy required for mechanical loads is under 20% of the compute load. Wouldn’t surprise me if ~10% can be achieved at multi GW scale. Thus about 11GW total energy.
Does “9GW data center” not mean “a data center that consumes 9GW of power”?
Or is it “9GW of computers + 5GW of cooling + something”?
its 9gw of consumption. 19gw of total heat generation.
9GW should be the compute load goal, to which you need to add the mechanical and administrative loads. At higher scales they gain significant efficiencies which translates to market advantages.
I still don’t quite understand. Can I get a conversion into how many hotdogs the heat could cook?
Let’s assume Costco size hot dogs (1/4 lb, or 0.11 kg), with an internal temp increase from fridge temperatures (37 F, or 276 K) to 165 F (347 K). Let’s also assume the heat capacity of the hot dog is about 3000 J/kg*K. To heat up a single hot dog takes this much energy:
q=mc*deltaT => q=(0.11 kg)*(3000 J/kg*K)*(347K-276K)=23,430 J of energy.
The heat capacity here is 9GW. That is 9 gigajoules of energy per second, or 9 billion joules every second. Divide this by the number of joules to cook each hot dog gets us the number of hot dogs that could be cooked every second:
9,000,000,000/23,430=384,123 hot dogs/second
With this hot dogs per second figure, we can find how long this energy source would take to feed the entire US population a Costco hot dog.
342,000,000 people/384,123 hot dogs per sec=890 seconds
Converting this to minutes:
890/60=14.8 minutes
So, this source of energy could feed the entire population of the US a Costco hot dog in less than 15 minutes if properly harnessed.
Finally someone speaking english.
The math you just did terrifies me and I have no way of verifying it, so I’ll just say good job and leave it at that.
I think it’s also important to have a hotdogs per day figure, and the math from here is super simple, so I can do it.
384,1236060*24 = 33,188,227,200 hot dogs per day.
Well, there you go, free lunch for every schoolkid. Silver lining.
More than two
“How many hot dogs a day? Well, gosh, I don’t know. Some days it’s just two. Other days…it could be up to, and I’m just ball parking here you understand, it could be…up to seven?”
“So…seven hot dogs a day.”
“Yeah, probably safe.”
Depends how well done you like them.
A lot
!anythingbutmetric@discuss.tchncs.de
I wonder how many football fields long this thing is?
Well… It’s 9GW of waste heat. Same as the energy supply.
No, 9GW of electricity, and they claim 16GW total. With a greater than 50% efficient gas plant.
Probably like 8GW of waste heat, and 1GW of infrasound
Ok, but that will still need to be handled otherwise it’ll shake the building to it’s knees.
They just pump it outside of the environment
…into another environment?
No, outside of the environment.
There’s nothing out there but birds, (poor)people and 1 gigawatt of infrasound.
This is USica, it doesn’t matter where you’re pumping it, just that it’s out of where you’re pumping it from. Doesn’t really even matter what you’re pumping, USians gotta pump something.
Don’t know if you’re trying an obscure reference to the shadoks, an absurd french tv cartoon from 1968
No but I know what I’m watching after getting my daughter on the school bus!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
How many is that, in bananas? Or school buses?
Sometimes you have to cater to the lowest common denominator (the AI booster).