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We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]

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156 points xbmcuser | 3 comments | 04 Sep 25 12:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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fibers ◴[04 Sep 25 13:17 UTC] No.45126940[source]▶
I was looking into energy markets and how they work and it is truly a cluster of moving parts all along the Eastern Interconnect. The question is when is the shoe going to really drop? You can only keep prices going up on an inelastic good before something really bad happens, and this doesn't even touch climate tail risks like heat sagging tx lines across the grid.
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Covzire ◴[04 Sep 25 13:27 UTC] No.45127051[source]▶
This is a tangent, but one untapped source of energy savings that seems to be invisible to climate activists is Microsoft Windows' constant drain on resources relative to Linux and MacOS. It's shocking how energy inefficient Windows is even when it's doing absolutely nothing noticable for a user.
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1. foobarian ◴[04 Sep 25 13:42 UTC] No.45127198[source]▶
Way to bring up Linux power management into an unrelated discussion x_x
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2. fibers ◴[04 Sep 25 14:25 UTC] No.45127635[source]▶
It's true. There are more Windows desktops used in enterprise environments and households than linux and there are so many insane design choices like making the taskbar clock slider thing be written in react. How many useless clocks does that waste? That is a very easy optimization that can be remediated instead of being lazy and waiting for the next node from Intel or AMD.
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3. const_cast ◴[04 Sep 25 23:22 UTC] No.45133351[source]▶
Computers use up extremely small amounts of electricity. Most people don't actually know this. Your washing machine is a good ~100 computers. A lightbulb? If it's not LED, that's a few computers. For one lightbulb.

Of course it depends on the computer, but if we're talking laptops or corpo computers it's like 25 - 50 watts. Supercomputers, like those used for AI, are different of course.