9GW datacentre approved.
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
Yeah, but it's even worse than that. The UK grid is decarbonising, but the article says this new #DataCentre will run entirely on natural gas, i.e. fossil fuels. Right now, about an eighth of UK electricity is generated from fossil fuels:
National Grid: Live
Shows the live status of Great Britain’s electric power transmission network
(grid.iamkate.com)
So the new DC will emit about twice as much carbon as all the UK's electricity generation.
Does the sun not shine in Utah? Does the wind not blow in the desert? Is the climate not changing as fast as the Americans would like?
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek I would like to bring in a completely different aspect:
As the data centre runs entirely on natural gas, sabotaging the whole facility seems to be quite an easy thing to do. -
Yeah, but it's even worse than that. The UK grid is decarbonising, but the article says this new #DataCentre will run entirely on natural gas, i.e. fossil fuels. Right now, about an eighth of UK electricity is generated from fossil fuels:
National Grid: Live
Shows the live status of Great Britain’s electric power transmission network
(grid.iamkate.com)
So the new DC will emit about twice as much carbon as all the UK's electricity generation.
Does the sun not shine in Utah? Does the wind not blow in the desert? Is the climate not changing as fast as the Americans would like?
@CppGuy you'd need 45km² of solar to generate 9GW or solar, but assuming the sun is only out for a ⅓rd of the time, you'd probably need closer to 135km², plus the battery storage...
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Based on an estimate of 500g CO2/kWh, the one facility would emit ~40MT of CO2 a year. If this one facility was a country, it would rank about 67th, just behind Bulgaria.
Concentrating this much energy use in a single location is going to change weather patterns. The environmental impact is just mind boggling.
The AI bubble can't burst soon enough.
@quixoticgeek Perhaps if the changed weather patterns included a few tornadoes?
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek disperse invasive mollusks upstream and use the intake of the plant to 'filter' the water.
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@quixoticgeek I would like to bring in a completely different aspect:
As the data centre runs entirely on natural gas, sabotaging the whole facility seems to be quite an easy thing to do.It's a sitting duck for drones.
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Based on an estimate of 500g CO2/kWh, the one facility would emit ~40MT of CO2 a year. If this one facility was a country, it would rank about 67th, just behind Bulgaria.
Concentrating this much energy use in a single location is going to change weather patterns. The environmental impact is just mind boggling.
The AI bubble can't burst soon enough.
@quixoticgeek lol 9GW, that'll never get built. they can barely get 1GW DCs off the bloody ground, half of them are literally piles of scrap metal and construction trash, last I checked. worst this'll do, funnel a bunch of bloody money to some kind of AI DC construction company that's entirely a scam, and go precisely nowhere.
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@CppGuy you'd need 45km² of solar to generate 9GW or solar, but assuming the sun is only out for a ⅓rd of the time, you'd probably need closer to 135km², plus the battery storage...
@quixoticgeek
Solar & wind are still cheaper than gas though, so still a weird choice
@CppGuy -
@quixoticgeek lol 9GW, that'll never get built. they can barely get 1GW DCs off the bloody ground, half of them are literally piles of scrap metal and construction trash, last I checked. worst this'll do, funnel a bunch of bloody money to some kind of AI DC construction company that's entirely a scam, and go precisely nowhere.
@freya @quixoticgeek yeah this pretty much a scam project, considering that AI usage is falling and crash is inevitable
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek@v.st
Sounds not unlike what's going on in the US.
Datacenter builders love deserts:
* Land is cheap
* Large, contiguous chunks of land are easier to come by
* Fewer neighbors to contend with
* Generally less stuff that needs to be bulldozed to build the datacenter, itself, and the infrastructure that feeds it. -
@quixoticgeek@v.st
Sounds not unlike what's going on in the US.
Datacenter builders love deserts:
* Land is cheap
* Large, contiguous chunks of land are easier to come by
* Fewer neighbors to contend with
* Generally less stuff that needs to be bulldozed to build the datacenter, itself, and the infrastructure that feeds it.@ferricoxide Utah being in the US. Yes, it's very similar to what's going on in the US...
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek that's ~45 CERNs?! WTF?
Forty five of the thing they joked might be able to create a black hole and end the world, in a single site?
~ one Saturn 5 F1 main engine burning constantly for the life time of the site not just a few hundred seconds
This is a stupid amount of energy use. -
@ferricoxide Utah being in the US. Yes, it's very similar to what's going on in the US...
@quixoticgeek@v.st
Oop. I saw the UK mention and didn't see that my instance had hidden the link behind a "more" button. So, assumed reference was to the UK allowing similar idiocy to what's going on in the US. -
Based on an estimate of 500g CO2/kWh, the one facility would emit ~40MT of CO2 a year. If this one facility was a country, it would rank about 67th, just behind Bulgaria.
Concentrating this much energy use in a single location is going to change weather patterns. The environmental impact is just mind boggling.
The AI bubble can't burst soon enough.
@quixoticgeek Cast iron proof that it's a boondoggle: they're powering it with fossil fuels because they know the bubble will burst before the TTBE of renewables.
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@quixoticgeek that's ~45 CERNs?! WTF?
Forty five of the thing they joked might be able to create a black hole and end the world, in a single site?
~ one Saturn 5 F1 main engine burning constantly for the life time of the site not just a few hundred seconds
This is a stupid amount of energy use.@quixoticgeek hang on the thing runs on gas, so an f1 engine gives a vague idea of how much gas its going to need. ~A Saturn five first stage fuel tank every fifteen minutes (rounding to a nice round number)
If you've ever seen a person standing next to a Saturn five you have an idea how utterly absurd an amount of fuel that is.
With out the pipeline that places shuts down. And we thought the back hoe through the fiber link was a bad problem. -
@quixoticgeek@v.st
Sounds not unlike what's going on in the US.
Datacenter builders love deserts:
* Land is cheap
* Large, contiguous chunks of land are easier to come by
* Fewer neighbors to contend with
* Generally less stuff that needs to be bulldozed to build the datacenter, itself, and the infrastructure that feeds it.@ferricoxide @quixoticgeek "Datacenter builders love deserts"
..and deserts usually have such a plentiful supply of water for cooling.
Presumably they will take the water from Lake Powell?
The costs of surging water into drought-depleted Lake Powell will be widespread
Lake Powell is at just 23% capacity and approaching the point where water won't be able to flow into its hydroelectric turbines without air causing damage.
KUER (www.kuer.org)
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@quixoticgeek
Solar & wind are still cheaper than gas though, so still a weird choice
@CppGuyThey're building the thing in a desert, i.e. an expanse of unused space. If they had to build this monstrosity at all, they could have used some of that space for renewable energy generation.
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@quixoticgeek
Solar & wind are still cheaper than gas though, so still a weird choice
@CppGuy@syklemil @quixoticgeek @CppGuy
They will be building power plants for that because no state has 9GW power lying around or spare, not even talking about the cables and infrastructure you'd need to even get the energy there.
And since this is a desert, i assume there isn't much water around for cooling.
Also, i can only guess the number of backup generators they'd need to secure operation. Gas powered of course. And are they talking about carbon neutrality? Being the good greenwashing company? -
9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek and isn't 'natural gas' just the most newspeak name for a fossil fuel.
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@quixoticgeek and isn't 'natural gas' just the most newspeak name for a fossil fuel.
@artemis ok. So natural gas is because for many years the gas network in most places was derived from coal gas, or town gas, whereby coal was heated up to produce coke, which was used in things like steel production, and the gas was then piped locally to homes and businesses. Natural gas as a fuel source is relatively recent. In the UK we're talking later half of the 20th century.
