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Comment by jdswain | Hacker News Reader

I live in an area of New Zealand surrounded by hydroelectric dam's, and I've often thought it would be a great place for a datacenter. They'd be electricity savings from avoiding the transmission losses to get the electricity all the way to Auckland, and land is cheaper, but mainly because there ought to be a way of using the cold water for cooling rather than electrically powered coolers. The data center could even be built underwater, possibly in a canal to benefit from the existing water flow.

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The problem is that the underwater cables land in Auckland, and for most applications, lower latency (both to the local populations and to the rest of the world) is a very important consideration.

I did hear that someone is putting in a 10MW cryptocurrecny mining "datacenter" right next to Clyde dam. I'm not exactly happy about that.

Interesting. Do you know which crypto they will be mining? Is it Chia?

It would be pointless to put Chia mining operation next to a hydro power plant, the entire point is that they use very little electricity.

They haven't even admitted it's crypto.

All that's really known is that it's a 10MW "datacenter", hooked directly into the power plant, in a part of the country without a commercial fibre backbone, and will allegedly be running workloads that can be turned off depending on power demand.

Reading between the lines, that's a crypto mining operation.

Ahh, you had datacenter in quotation marks, I didn't catch that.

I still like the idea of running a trans-Tasman cable to Southland and building data centres down there when Rio Tinto closes down. Plenty of cheap and green power, and the extra cable would solve the latency issue and provide some extra resiliency for NZ (all international cables currently land in the North Island.)

> Plenty of cheap and green power

Incorrect. All of the hydropower is used as present, so any extra marginal load added to NZ causes extra gas usage (or coal sometimes). If the lakes are full and water is being sent down spillways, then perhaps you can get free power, but that is rare.

Also note that lots of people think transmission losses are heavy, but actually they are less than 10%. For example HVDC transmission losses are ~3% per 1,000km (the DC link from Benmore to Wellington)

Rio Tinto aren’t closing the smelter down. They can’t just shoot people like in other countries so they have to be crafty to get what they want.

The whole “give us cheap power or we close this plant down” is just a genius power play.

People don’t want to be out of jobs and govt want a good excuse to get the deal done. The politicians look like savvy negotiators keeping this massive corporate begging and rio tinto get discount rate power. It’s really a win win ruse for them.

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