Meta data center electricity consumption hits 14,975GWh
datacenterdynamics.com
datacenterdynamics.com
Isn't that what the usage fees are for? If the utility isn't charging enough to pay for the infrastructure and make a profit, it's doing something terribly wrong.
>And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry?
Why are you using public finance for utilities there?
So then all the districts fight over who gets the power plants and the 50 jobs
Where I live generation is owned by privately owned/listed companies or for-profit government owned entities (we call these entities a State Owned Enterprise or SOE). The grid is owned by an SOE and local distribution is owned by for-profit corporations owned by local governments (cities or regional councils).
So energy consumers pay for the generation, other than Rio Tinto which has gotten subsidies from successive governments (but this is the last time, we promise) and lower income consumers who get a winter angry payment, and maybe some smaller industry subsidies I am unaware of.
I don't think these industries get power for free.
It's typical for high capacity customers to be paying a flat fee monthly for capacity in addition to the rates for usage. And when they desire things like redundant feeds from separate substations, that's likely to require payment for engineering and construction as well as extra cost for maintenance.
OTOH, large users can get discounts, sometimes substantial discounts if they participate in demand response programs. It's a benefit to the grid operator if they can have large users rapidly reduce their load if needed to maintain grid stability... it's historically been much easier to reduce demand significantly at a few large user sites than to reduce demand across a large number of households ... and the alternative to opt-in reduction is brownouts and rolling blackouts.
A sophisticated multi-region datacenter operation is a good candidate for demand response, as it's relatively simple to quickly migrate traffic away from a power constrained data center.
Likely, we'll simply build a bunch of LNG facilities which kind of defeats the purpose of the dam in the first place.
In a lot of countries companies also pay much less for electricity, usually due to a lower tax on said electricity.
By default, I don't believe your claim. Hydro power would be a horrible match for a LNG liquification plant. The strength of hydro is that it's renewable energy with flexibility on the timing of energy production. It means hydro power plans can be run at a low load when energy is cheap, and high load when it's expensive. (And thus, the average Watt of power generated by hydro is more valuable/expensive than the average Watt of power generated by solar.)
LNG liquification would have the opposite pattern. They'd either want to run the plant 24/7 to get maximimum utility from the capital investments into the plant, or if they are demand-constrained, they'd want to time their production runs to when energy is the cheapest. They're most likely to use electricity exactly when the dam isn't producing any. And conversely, there will be a lot of times when the dam is producing way more electricity than the plant is using.
So it seems totally impossible to believe that production from the new dam is getting allocated 1:1 to a specific LNG plant. It's just not how any of this works. If there's some kind of kernel of truth to your claim, I'd imagine it's some kind of greenwashing where they're buying the rights to claim the LNG was created with renewable energy.
But effectively private industry gets the benefit and we have to start the process over again to build another generation source.
Another way to look at it.. they say they have about 3.14 bil daily active users across all platforms. So that's about 13Wh per daily user session. At $0.15/kWh, that's about $0.002 of electricity which doesn't seem that horrible.
I am also not shocked. But somewhat surprised by the choice of unit in the article.
these are newer and more efficient. so they are likely producing more than the average reactor. So its closer to 1.25 reactors worth of electricity.
but data centers are a HUGE driver of electricity consumption.
Or in the future - "how many SMRs is that?".
I should call it the law-of-something.
I feel reasonably comfortable with the estimated 2-3 reactors.
I could have said 1-4 but...
(there are lots of reactors around 4-500MW too)
2 to 3 is accurate for Canada, where the last nuclear plant to connect to the grid was 31 years ago. For the US, the range is 1.25 to 3.5 (four reactors in the last 30 years). For China, the range is 1.05 to 8 (56 reactors built in the last 30 years, but the 200 and 300 MW reactors are kind of special, so 1.05 to 4 is a reasonable range). For France, 1.15 to 2.0 (five reactors in the last 30 years).
One reactor, if you use a modern design! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
(Or maybe 2 anyway, to deal with downtime)
My viewpoint (having involvement with many large (>$100M) construction projects, but not power plants): I don't believe the constructability issues with the EPR have anything to do with the size, specifically. I suspect the root issue is design and construction being too separated on the EPRs.
For example OL3 in Finland has to limit its max power because if it trips, the grid needs to shed enough load to stay up: (in finnish) https://www.fingrid.fi/kantaverkko/sahkonsiirto/olkiluoto-3-...
Kind of beside the point of meta using the equivalent of 1-4 nuclear plants of capacity.
I expect it to be even cheaper for example on Iceland with an abundance of hydro power.
[1] They are also trying to redefine steel-processing there and that will use a lot of electricity if they succeed.
Plus ~1/2000th of a server, divided by the life time of a server on their premises in days. Let’s say a millionth of a server. At $1000 a server, that adds about $0.001 a day, if my math is correct. Actual numbers may be higher. What do they pay for their hardware, at the scale they buy it?
Plus installation and management, plus the cost of the building.
That's about 2 in 5 people on the planet. Astonishing.
> However, water withdrawal from groundwater increased 137 percent to 88 megaliters. Water withdrawals from areas with high or extremely high baseline water stress increased 20 percent to 1,360 megaliters.
IOW, Meta just doesn't care about people around its server farms.
> Electricity intensity per monthly active person also grew to 0.0041MWh, up 32 percent.
Means that Meta doesn't read the IPCC report telling us to decrease our consumption (I certainly doubt that FB users have increased their usage time by 32%).
Say there's a billion users.
14975GWh implies then that each user has used 14975Wh or 15kWh. Per year.
Fairly spicy I think. It's about the equivalent of a full charge of a laptop once per two days, so it's at least as much as many (most?) end users would consume "by themselves".
Electric power is most definitely a finite resource, otherwise we wouldn't have had this conversation and we would have all lived in a Startrek-like utopia.
> so they can benefit from economies of scale and they put their prices down.
That is the bs I was calling out against. I'm saying that because Meta needs more power then Meta will pay whatever will need in order to get access to that power, in effect out-competing those domestic users. Those power stations and the like would have already been built absent Meta's needs in order to server those domestic users and existing industrial users, you're saying that the incoming Meta new demand would be offset by the new offer (new power stations) generated by said new demand which is, again, the bs I was calling out against.
You're getting caught up on two things:
1. We can build new power stations! Power may be limited in the very short term, but generation capacity is increasing all the time.
2. Eventually we'll run out of nuclear fuel and space for solar farms and wind turbines, but we are so far away from that point that it has no effect on the market currently.
> the incoming Meta new demand would be offset by the new offer (new power stations) generated by said new demand
Uhm yeah that's exactly how it works. Why do you think this is bs?
Those things cost money to build and to operate, that is until we get to their own externalities, which adds other (hidden) costs. Nothing is free, which is the whole point of the science of economics.
We destroy more than enough food to end world hunger, but actually distributing that food to the people that need it would undermine the authority of lots of well-armed organizations.
De-weaponizing food distribution would do a heck of a lot more than further reducing the percentage of the population that works in agriculture.
Put another way, 10% of the US works in agriculture-related fields (including restaurants, food processing and textile manufacturing), but only 1.2% works on farms:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
Driving farm jobs from 1.2% to 0% isn’t going to move food costs or availability very much, and it’d barely be perceptible to the economy at large.
If you could remove the somebody from the chain then the entire cost to produce food at that point would be "fiction", ie it would be possible to make it free. But as long as human labor is involved in the production it cannot be free.
I’d argue that production labor is close enough to free for all practical purposes.
Focusing on distribution or environmental impact would have significantly more practical impact.
…or we could allocate it against economic gradients, to things which don’t actually maximize net impact but instead allow us to feel good
The second most likely future is humanity creates a commonwealth AI, under the rule of United Nations or similar organisation, and immediately asks the AI: how can we make humanity better? And AI finds a solution based on a crooked understanding of what we need. So it creates a dead-end utopia where humanity slowly degrades in total comfort.
(Not that I'm a fan of Facebook, and many of their practices are questionable. But if we want to think in a less biased way, it's not correct to leave out the part of the equation where they also do good. We may find that it's nowhere near the bottom of the humanitarian scale.)
Assuming they're at least a good a judge of what makes them happy as you are, how is this resource not being used for whatever "humanitarian" purposes are? Or are we only allowed resources as far as FEMA tents?
Sure, maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy, but I put it to you the burden of proof for that's on you.
I'd further put it that the resources used for these data centers, like Meta engineers, would in fact be pretty bloody useless at solving Sudanese famine, even if by some miracle they're actually good at the farming part, so can we please drop this weird argument that the cost of these things is automatically an opportunity cost in humanitarian purposes? Because it isn't.
75% of the west is obese/overweight thanks to their own free will too. Because A: free will doesn't exist and B: the top mind of the world are all paid $$$ by companies to make sure you consume their shit no matter the social/health cost
> maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy
Is that all there is to life ? Then high fructose corn syrup must be paradise