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Re:Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two y... by ithkuil on Monday September 14, 2020 @12:50PM (#24472311)
this! another way to look at it: your solar panels are temporarily "stealing" heat generated by sun rays hitting a surface of equivalent color. When you use electricity to do some work, it will be turned back to heat. so if you want to be 100% "heat neutral", all you have to do is to ensure that for every square meter of solar panels you also paint an proportionate area with a color that reflects the right amount of sunlight to compensate the difference between the color of the solar panel and the area that was there before you installed the solar panel.

If you think that's silly (and rightfully so), then perhaps that can sharpen your intuition on how insignificant is the total amount of heat produced by our devices (even if cumulatively they are a big looking number); the total amount of radiation that comes from the sun down to earth is staggering.

Re:Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two y... by jacquesm on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @04:58AM (#24479216)
Solar panels don't work on IR, they work on visible light.

IR might be reflected or absorbed.

The visible component is absorbed. Whether it would have turned into heat or reflected back in to space is about a 1 in two chance.

Re:Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two y... by ithkuil on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @04:29AM (#24490683)
sorry I don't understand the comment; visible light carries energy too and thus can heat materials it hits. what happens to the IR part of the spectrum is irrelevant and can be captured by the general concept of "color of the object", defined as the spectrum of reflected vs absorbed EM radiation