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.
Re:Image GPT
by sillysaurusx on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @09:50PM
(#23558960)
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...
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.