> uses far more energy than a data center ever will.

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2015/11/p...

"Power shift: Data centers to replace aluminum industry as largest energy consumers in Washington state"

Large custom data centers draw on the order of 300MW, a non-scientific survey of aluminum smelters on the web has their draw around 400-700MW, so I'd be careful about 'ever will'.

Your first argument is about aggregate demand which is irrelevant. Home lighting uses a lot of power in aggregate but it’s very low per home.

Smelting issues a lot of power in a very small space resulting in a lot of heat, where computing it not getting anywhere close to that in terms of density, just in aggregate over giant data centers.

The fact that data centers don’t get hot enough to melt aluminum is by design.

But I’m not sure I understand your point. I look Google Maps images of the Wenatchee Alcoa works and the Google Data center in the Dalles and they seem order-of-magnitude the same size to my eyeballs.

You seem to think I don’t appreciate how much energy aluminum smelting requires - I do. But imagine the heating element of your aluminum crucible broken into a million pieces, each piece with a cooling system to keep its temperature down. That’s a data center.

The point is aggregate demand is not that difficult to deal with, just look at say New York City.

Large data centers are huge building, the density is very much limited by heat issues and while the building might get bigger the power demand per square foot does not. We can move lots of power through very small areas consider individual steam turbines are up at 600 MW.

Even if we start talking about GW for a single datacenter, the single Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant is already 8GW.

They are in large ventilated rooms (bigger than an airplane hanger) with strict OSHA controls regarding heat exposure.

A data center is a much more domesticated space and are often near commercial and residential areas not Industrial.

This is what they look like inside: https://www.genisim.com/website/fig2cfd2001.jpg

Yeah that’s a good question. Smelters don’t generate their own power generally, right? But I believe they also use a lot of air cooling so most of that draw is going to be electrolysis.

Wikipedia has a list of aluminum smelters and I notice none of the biggest are in the US. Is that just because, or due to code limitations?

The Pacific Northwest used to have a lot more Aluminum smelting than it does now - the power was provided by large hydro power contracts.

Not sure if it was changes in these contracts or other market forces that caused the decline.

Decided to answer my own question - here's a great history of the NW aluminum industry:

https://www.nwcouncil.org/reports/columbia-river-history/alu...

The last active NW aluminum smelters closed in 2016. Most of the rest were victims of Enron and the 2000 energy crisis.

Aluminum smelting is dirty and uses a ton of power -- we generally don't subsidize power here (in stark contrast to China / Argentina / etc.) and have increasingly strict environmental controls so we're offshoring most production and pollution associated with smelting from ore. We do have a lot of 'secondary' production which is much cleaner since it uses aluminum scrap as the input.