Hacker News Reader

Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

Given how much heat racks of servers on land generate, I don't understand how they can claim that there is no heat being added to the ocean.

View on HN

I came here to say exactly the same thing ... it requires a lot more calories to heat up water one degree Celsius than it does air but the heat still has to go somewhere.

An interesting question would be, how much heat do all of the world datacenters produce and how much energy would it take to raise the average temperature of the Ocean by 1 degree?

1 degree is a pretty large change

The world's oceans contain 1,335,000,000 km^3 of water. Heat capacity is 4.2 KJ / liter / C. So it requires 5.6e24 joules to heat the oceans by 1 C.

The world generates 20,000 TWh of electricity per year, and maybe 10% is for IT. That's 7.2e18 joules of electricity / year in IT.

So it would take 780,000 years to heat by 1 C. Or 780 years to heat by 0.001 C.

Other sources of global warming are far, far worse.

And that's if it was a closed system with no other sources or sinks of heat.

The problem I'm concerned about isn't raising the average temperature of the ocean. The problem I'm concerned about is localized heating. Marine life is far more vulnerable to rapid temperature changes than life on land. We've seen dead zones developing in the past downstream of power-plants, as the warm water discharge from the steam turbines raises the temperature of the water and reduces its oxygen carrying capability. My concern is that if we put datacenters in the ocean, they'll create localized hot-spots with much the same result.

The data center generates the same amount of heat no matter what. It doesn't matter where it's generated. So unless you're arguing that we shouldn't have data centers, I don't understand your point.

I agree that the data center generates the same amount of heat no matter where it's placed. But like we've seen with power plants, heating water tends to have far more serious environmental consequences than heating air. If we place a full-scale datacenter in the ocean, will we end up with fish-kills and dead zones like we see downstream of powerplants from time to time?

Simply put, the ocean is a massive place with so many factors at play (like underwater currents bringing in cold water), that the heat generated by a ton of small "micro" datacenters will be pretty inconsequential.

This is precisely the sort of logic that has since the beginning of time led to us treat the ocean as a huge garbage can, and a massive amount of it has died in the past 100 years.

Seriously, watch Mission Blue. Sylvia Earle has more dive hours than anyone, ever, and thusly personally mapped a great deal of the ocean and has since watched those places die.

Because it's powered by wave energy.

They take the energy (Ie heat) from waves and power computers.

Energy (heat) in = Energy (heat) out.

If you had some electricity left over and shipped it out you'd be able to cool the oceans.

I think at a more simple level, why exactly would anyone want to establish a data center in one of the more inhospitable corners of the globe for any reason other than heat exchange?

Land costs?

Why not put data centers in Antarctica? Plenty of cold cold land there.

International treaties have established that Antarctica is exclusively for science, and not for private use.

Latency for one thing, as the article mentions

Last I heard, Microsoft actually was thinking of putting a data center on greenland back in 2007-08.

Maybe they already have a 'secret' unannounced private data center there.

Exactly - this is probably a very bad idea, even if it seems like only muck-dwelling worms and the like will be affected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com