Comment by flower-giraffe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flower-giraffe | Hacker News Reader

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>> As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created

Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ?

A quick search suggests FB consume on average about 1 gigawatt globally. The original article calls it a 200 megawatt DC. That would be 20% of facebooks global energy consumption.

Given FB seem to have 18 existing Data center locations it would imply huge growth or consildation plans for that DC to consume 200 megawatts all the time.

In 2020 the global renewable energy supply capacity was approximately 2500 gigawatts so facebook used less than 0.5% of that capacity.

There are lots of valid reasons to oppose facebook, but it doesnt seem that monopolising the consumption of renewabel energy is a credible one.

https://sustainability.fb.com/report/2020-sustainability-rep...

https://www.irena.org/publications/2020/Mar/Renewable-Capaci...

Green energy production is highly location dependent. Global production is irrelevant - this is about the Netherlands. The Netherlands is a densely populated country that does not have a lot of space for renewable energy, neither does it have large mountains or water reservoirs that can easily be used for hydro power.

This data centre alone was going to use 10% of all wind power capacity in the NL [1].

It is not only about this data centre either, this was merely the largest and most egregious. There have been a number of new data centre construction plans in the Netherlands by other tech giants, all planning to use government subsidised wind parks. All so that these companies can pretend to be green and put up nice websites like the one you linked, while the actual wind parks and green energy generation is paid for by the taxpayers.

> Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ?

This was supposed to a colossal data center, the largest data centre in Europe [2]. They bought 166 hectares of ground (23M square feet) for its construction. It consuming as much as three of their other data centres would not be terribly surprising.

[1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2409557-megadatacenter-facebook-zet-e...

[2] https://siliconcanals.com/news/europe-largest-data-centre-ne...

On a local scale monopolising the consumption of renewable energy is certainly an important consideration. Keep in mind that The Netherlands is a rather dense country. Every windmill is in someone's proverbial backyard, and has thus been fought over. Also, like in many places, the grid has trouble keeping up with the load.

0.5% globally is MASSIVE in this context.

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