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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 | 4 comments | 04 Sep 25 12:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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bee_rider ◴[04 Sep 25 14:27 UTC] No.45127661[source]▶
This seems unlikely to me. Most of these machines are laptops nowadays. While my Linux system idles at 4W, the plug is only capable of going up to 60W. So even if Windows brought it to the point of nearly overheating the power brick (I’m no Windows fan, but I’m pretty skeptical there!), it would only be 1/10’th of a typical 600W window air conditioner.

The untapped energy savings is, IMO, getting people to run their climate control less. We should toughen up a bit, tell our brains that 50F-80F is the comfortable range. (Depending on humidity and your workload).

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bluGill ◴[04 Sep 25 15:03 UTC] No.45128093[source]▶
For any individual the difference is not noticeable. But across the several hundred million laptops in the US even 1 watt adds up.
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1. bee_rider ◴[04 Sep 25 15:26 UTC] No.45128351[source]▶
I compared to air conditioners though, which would also be multiplied by that several hundred million factor (well, maybe the laptops get an additional factor of, like, 4 because a room can fit multiple people with laptops, and you don’t need an air conditioner in every season).

If we’re looking at choices a person can make, every choice is multiplied by millions when applied to the entire population of a country, so the 1W differences are swamped by the equally scaled 10W differences.

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2. bluGill ◴[04 Sep 25 17:15 UTC] No.45129661[source]▶
Every watt into laptops means a watt the air conditioner needs to move out.

you cannot ignore small things in the grand scheme as they add up.

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3. bee_rider ◴[04 Sep 25 18:15 UTC] No.45130385[source]▶
It doesn’t make sense to talk about “adding up” unless we define what we’re aggregating over. Residential energy consumption, for sure, is a significant chunk of energy consumption.

If we’re looking at the things we can do to reduce our individual consumption, it absolutely makes sense to prioritize the things which are large relative to our other individual contributions, first.

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4. bluGill ◴[05 Sep 25 13:11 UTC] No.45138134{3}[source]▶
Fine, but I have already upgraded to the most efficient heat pump, and so I'm at the end of where I can go there. Likewise my insulation cannot be improved without a major remodel (My house is not built to modern standards so there is a lot of improvement, but those require thicker walls and a higher attic ceiling) and so while I'd like to do them they are not possible. What is left is the smaller things.