Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Vlad's posts Post Back to profile
Top-level
Reinald Kirchner

@isotopp @vladh datacenters are converting electricity to heat. 100%. And are investing even more energy to get rid of the heat.

We need to convert heating of buildings from fossil fuel to electricity.

What, if we combine this two issues: a fridge sized blade center, running at 5kw, selling compute power for cloud-edge-compute, providing local heating/hot water energy. Maybe combined with a heat pump. Would that make any sense?

4 August at 8:12 | Wall-to-wall | Open on nrw.social
5 comments
Kris replied to Reinald

@Reinald @vladh

No.

There is a long answer, but it boils down to

- this has been tried MANY TIMES
- household bandwidth sucks
- if household bandwidth didn't suck, latency still matters. That is bad, because bandwidth = engineering problem, latency = physics problem.

theregister.com/2023/01/12/hea,

and many times before.

""We literally put a Bitcoin miner in a barrel of mineral oil and plumbed it up to a radiator," he told The Register.|
In case you weren't believing the bitcoin numbers above.

@Reinald @vladh

No.

There is a long answer, but it boils down to

- this has been tried MANY TIMES
- household bandwidth sucks
- if household bandwidth didn't suck, latency still matters. That is bad, because bandwidth = engineering problem, latency = physics problem.

theregister.com/2023/01/12/hea,

4 August at 8:14 | Open on chaos.social
Kris replied to Kris

@Reinald @vladh

There are attempts to use data center waste heat for domestic heating, but that is not easy at all.

Data center waste heat is around 50 C at most, often less, so you can use it to drive a heat pump, but you can't transport it very well.

If you transport it, it still has to be used very locally. Data centers are often not built on expensive ground close to where people live, though.

4 August at 8:20 | Open on chaos.social
Kris replied to Kris

@Reinald @vladh

People need heat in winter. Not in summer.

What are you doing in summer?

What are you doing in winter, if the need for this data center happens to be low and it does NOT produce sufficient waste heat?

You just built a tight coupling of one piece of critical infra with another piece of critical infra. This is usually not a winning strategy.

4 August at 8:20 | Open on chaos.social
Tobias Denkinger replied to Reinald

@Reinald
Newly built data centers are sometimes used for district heating.
@isotopp @vladh

4 August at 8:18 | Open on mastodontech.de
Kris replied to Tobias

@denki @Reinald @vladh

Correct, and to some limited amount it even works.

It completely does not scale and it is impossible to retrofit (you can, but tearing down the DC and rebuilding elsewhere, close to where people live, will still be cheaper)

4 August at 8:35 | Open on chaos.social
Go Up