Aug

29

How Big Data Centers Are Slowing the Shift to Clean Energy
In Virginia’s data-center alley, rising power demand means more fossil fuels

An explosion of so-called hyperscale data centers in places such as Northern Virginia has upended plans by electric utilities to cut the use of fossil fuels. In some areas, that means burning coal for longer than planned.

These giant data centers will provide computing power needed for artificial intelligence. They are setting off a four-way battle among electric utilities trying to keep the lights on, tech companies that like to tout their climate credentials, consumers angry at rising electricity prices and regulators overseeing investments in the grid and trying to turn it green.

Ground zero for the fight is Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley.” About 70% of global internet traffic passes through the area’s data centers. A spider web of power lines connecting data centers to the grid crisscross neighborhoods and parks. More are coming.

Henry Gifford provides some analysis:

There are about three laws of thermodynamics, the first says that energy cannot be destroyed or created.

I’ve seen photos of data centers that allegedly use huge amounts of electricity. If that is true, all that energy enters the building as electricity and somehow has to leave as heat. I saw one photo of part of a building that looked like it had cooling equipment, but mostly I just see ominous looking buildings – maybe the photos are darkened in photoshop. If the building does not have a huge cooling system, such as a large row of large cooling towers – those machines on the roof that evaporate water, putting off a cloud of visible water droplets – or some other large cooling system - then either they don’t use much energy or the buildings are cooled by politics or magic or etc.

No, they can’t use geothermal cooling systems, those systems that put the heat into the soil under the building, because very soon that soil would heat up, rendering the cooling system inoperable. That works for a single-family house, especially if they take heat back out of the ground to heat the building during the winter, but a large building that dumps heat into the ground all year long? No, it doesn’t work.

Yes, liquid cooling is part of the picture; the liquid takes the heat from the computers, then the liquid gets pumped to something to cool the liquid. Cooling towers are a common way to cool the liquid - this is how office buildings are usually cooled. Geothermal uses the ground as a heat sink to cool the liquid. The heat goes from the computers to the liquid and then to someplace else.

Given the enormous amounts of electricity data centers are typically described as using, the someplace the heat goes cannot be very small - that something must be large.


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