Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

Re:Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two y... by mlyle on Monday September 14, 2020 @01:53PM (#24473044)

Fair points. IMO, the 460% metric is a bit of a wacky number, though, because of not counting the carbon and efficiency involved in the original 100%. Assuming the 100% comes from the same power source, it's still only 25-30% "worse".

Also I think you're a bit pessimistic about modern power plant efficiency-- combined cycle plants do better than 50%, and that's before we're considering any benefit from renewables.

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Re:Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two y... by gpm on Monday September 14, 2020 @02:00PM (#24473121)

> Assuming the 100% comes from the same power source, it's still only 25-30% "worse".

Fair point, I guess my argument makes more sense if we were discussing moving naturally occurring heat out (i.e. household ac) than with respect to cooling a datacenter.

Nitpicking the numbers used in the estimate... is probably not worth it. Every bit of it is a very rough order of magnitude number. If you're somewhere with 95% renewable energy it should be an order of magnitude better, if you're somewhere where energy production is dominated by an inefficient coal plant it should be an order of magnitude worse.

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