OK... so data centres are all in the news at the moment.
Putting aside their current use case (more AI ensloppificiation) I see two major issues being talked about:
* the amount of power they consume...
@nprofile1q... It's cost.
It's much cheaper to dump the heat in a river and buy power off the grid than to make power out of heat.
If you can use the heat directly, that's fine, but that works better if it's very hot in transit. But the cooling on computer hardware is not very hot, it's just very high volume, which is worse for cost.
You can think of it, a modern coal plant runs a steam piston, and the cooling for that is another steam piston, and the cooling for that is a third steam piston, all nested inside each other, and in really cold countries they sometimes use the cooling on that to heat nearby buildings, because it's too cold by then to do much useful work.
But no one builds giant Rankine engines to work that last bit because it's much cheaper to just burn a little more coal, and you'd still be dumping almost all that heat in a river anyway.
It's much cheaper to dump the heat in a river and buy power off the grid than to make power out of heat.
If you can use the heat directly, that's fine, but that works better if it's very hot in transit. But the cooling on computer hardware is not very hot, it's just very high volume, which is worse for cost.
You can think of it, a modern coal plant runs a steam piston, and the cooling for that is another steam piston, and the cooling for that is a third steam piston, all nested inside each other, and in really cold countries they sometimes use the cooling on that to heat nearby buildings, because it's too cold by then to do much useful work.
But no one builds giant Rankine engines to work that last bit because it's much cheaper to just burn a little more coal, and you'd still be dumping almost all that heat in a river anyway.