If electricity cost $0.1/Whr, a cup of tea would cost ~$10 just to run the kettle. You've overestimated the cost of electricity by roughly a thousand-fold.

Residential electricity prices in California are more like 0.19 USD/kWh, which is 0.00019 USD/Wh.

Found the Brit.

I wonder what the cost is when taking second order effects into the equation. Leverage hides the true cost, burying the reality further and further from the obvious.

I’ll have to do a writeup sometime explaining why these numbers aren’t as surprising as they seem. They’re also not as wasteful as they seem.

Roughly, the boxes would be turned on anyway. Might as well put them to work.

And yeah, it draws more power when in use (by a lot). But the data center probably isn’t paying a huge premium on top of what they would already pay for electricity.

So all that’s left is feeling generally queasy about using so much electricity, rather than a practical feeling of “this is bad because it costs a lot.”

Economies of scale have some dramatic effects at the high ends: I doubt the datacenter’s costs are anywhere near linear for the amount of Whr they’re consuming. And even if they are, it’s still a rounding error considering the profitability of GoogSoftBook.

At some point it becomes linear though, there is a base cost to electricity. Google builds datacenters near coal power plants specifically to get (literally) dirt cheap electricity.

This is true. But researchers are divorced from those realities. The day-to-day researchers almost never have to think like "If I run this, will it cost a ton?" Those kinds of agreements are usually made on a company basis, i.e. there's no cost to just leave a model running and see what happens. (Which is a huge advantage, by the way.)

Just a correction here: we build datacenters near large sources of renewable / hydro plants (I consider hydro a borderline case). We buy renewable credits for everything and are even trying to timeshift load now to match renewable generation peaks.

tl;dr: not coal plants :).

Is it just a coincidence that the Eemshaven (eu-west4) datacenter is close to a coal plant then?

I'm pretty sure we're going to close that plant soon though.

> Is it just a coincidence that the Eemshaven (eu-west4) datacenter is close to a coal plant then?

Presumably, since:

"Our data center in Eemshaven was the first to be powered by 100% renewable energy from day one."

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/eemshaven...

I appreciate them buying credits, but as nice as those windmills and solar panels are, when the sun doesn't shine, and the wind doesn't blow, what gets burned is coal. Anyway I suppose that's more a policy issue of The Netherlands, I think it's quite shameful we still have coal plants. Those credits hide the real cost of renewable energy.

I'm not sure - they say the data center is "the first Google datacenter to be powered by 100% renewable energy from day one."

https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/dutch...

And they seem pretty serious about removing non-renewables altogether.

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-sustainability.appspot.c...

Electricity rates are kWh, so I think it would be 120k for electricity, not 1.2 mil.

$1200, off by a factor of 1000.

$.1 for KWhr not When, so $1200 electricity.

Good use of units makes it easy to spot and fix the mistake.