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Comment by ktpsns | Hacker News Reader

Something I notice regularly on large companies and universities, literally any organization which is bigger then a single building: The vast amount of energy waste.

This starts at heating rooms like crazy (because it is unmanaged), having unneccessary equipment, computers and lights running all night (because they are unmanaged) and goes up to transportation. It's so simple things like truck drivers who prefer to keep their diesel running during loading/unloading. I guess they do so because either they were told by incompetent managament, have the wrong belief that their batteries could not power the lights, or some other disbelief.

Saving energy starts in the small, also if started by something big. Having said that, I guess a company of the size of Microsoft will have a huge potential to save energy.

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The most ostentatious waste that I've seen has been in Las Vegas, where they had gigantic pools of water and gigantic fountains running all day, in 120 degree heat.

All that water evaporating for nothing in the desert, where every drop of water is (or should be) precious, just seemed like such a gigantic waste.

Well, it does cool people walking on the sidewalks. It is also more comfortable to breathe than 120 degree dry air.

Wasteful of energy? Probably. But the water evaporating into the atmosphere is not really lost either. It's short circuiting one major step in the water cycle to become usable (by us surface dwellers) again.

It's lost in the sense that water used for one purpose is not immediately available for something else, even if it will eventually turn into usable water again.

Neither is toilet water, shower water, most tap water, water used to humidify the hotels, or any of a thousand other uses of water.

The water in the fountains is closer to grey water (toilets, shower, etc) than drinking water.

Definitely Microsoft has got some low-hanging fruit. From what I've personally seen:

* Connector buses idle all of the time while waiting for passengers

* Certain cafeterias have gas ovens running 24/7 even if nothing is being cooked

* Dev boxes with huge Xeon chips being left on all night

I also wonder if we'll see a greater push toward remote-first work, given the high carbon costs of physical facilities.

I wonder if there may also be a push to reduce some compute-intensive workloads, like training/scoring ML models or refreshing analytics dashboards that are not mission-critical and maybe not even actively being used.

Indeed, also at every tech office I've worked at, late at night I'd see all the lights in the entire building on until 11pm on the chance the cleaning crew might still be emptying a wastebasket.

Not to mention the nightly vacuuming of entire floors. A waste of energy and time, that also made it really hard to get work done without noise cancelling equipment.

Most of the Microsoft buildings I’ve worked in have lights automatically turn off at 8pm, with motion sensors to turn on again if needed.

In MN, “daylight harvesting” must be provided for fixtures within 15’ of a window, this can be automatically done by a photocell connected to a dimming relay, or manually with a dimmer switch. Offices with windows must also have controls, either photocell or manual-on/auto-off (vacancy sensor). Interior enclosed spaces are allowed to have standard single-pole switches, but these days we’re putting in occupancy sensor switches, the tenants prefer them.

Many or most of the installs have occupancy sensors for general lighting, or a time clock that shuts them off during non-business hours.

A 32w LED 2x4 is roughly equivalent to a 96w 3-lamp CFL 2x4, or 3x as efficient. You can power roughly 135-140 32w fixtures on a 277v 20A circuit [(277x20x.8)/32] which will illuminate ~11k sq ft. With 2 20A circuits, you can light up an entire office tower floor (floorplates are generally 18-23k sq ft). Assuming a ~10,000 watt load, and $0.08/kWH, it costs $0.80/hr to illuminate 20,000 square feet. It’s not as big of an energy waste these days, but it’s still a waste.

LED lights are incredibly efficient though. Large buildings are creepy if you turn off most of the lights.

The worst is just empty buildings waiting for a tenant that blaze lights 24/7

salt on the wound is when you see a new mixed use apartment with the vacant retail on the ground floor being a pit of coarse gravel before a tenant (and their custom floor) are found, but lit up like a target all the same.

> It's so simple things like truck drivers who prefer to keep their diesel running during loading/unloading

Well, one reason is that it might not turn on again. A lot of mechanical faults happen at startup (or shutdown).

In the US Air Force, C-5s are notorious for not turning back on again once you power them off. Hence, if you just landed in a remote area, you better keep those engines going, because if you power everything off to save energy you might be stranded until a repair crew can fly out.

What's worse, is the lack of control the actual tenants have over their building. My old professors office got so hot he had to open the window all winter. The thermostat on his wall didn't do anything, by design.

There was a women in an unknown and unadvertised location on campus who controlled all the climate controls in every building on campus directly. A supremely powerful position, almost like being the wizard of Oz. However, due to everyone emailing her constantly complaining about it being boiling hot or freezing cold every day, she opted to go dark and not answer any emails. So now nothing gets done.

It really depends on the building. Office buildings generally have heat pumps or VAVs w/ reheat coils (in MN) with tenant controls. Older buildings/facilities/institutions may have older HVAC or boilers that don’t have automatic controls, but when this gear gets replaced, it usually gets replaced with kit that has building automation controls for much more efficient energy usage.

Most cities these days have regulations limiting the amount of time you can idle (and rental trucks shut the engine down after a certain amount of idling). This of course become annoying if you don't want to drain the battery when using the liftgate...

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