Re:Meta suspends Netherlands data center due to political pu...
by hnaccount_rng on Thursday March 31, 2022 @03:13AM
(#30864656)
How do you get to 2kW per household? Even the (ridiculously high) comparisons provided by German utilities don’t claim more than 4500kWh/year for electricity. That’s about 10 kWh/day so about 0.5kW per household (yeah I’m lazy sue me). So the 200 MW kind of fit (factor of 4 off from your calculation).
In practice I’d be surprised if it’s even that much. The 4500kWh number is for a 4 person household, and there aren’t 400k 4 person households in Amsterdam. And city apartments tend to be newer (aka more efficient) than the rural parts that also contribute to that average, which is also quite historic.
So I would be surprised if that DC doesn’t require more energy than Amsterdam (at least the population, not sure how much heavy industry is there, but probably not too much)
Re:Meta suspends Netherlands data center due to political pu...
by jeffbee on Thursday March 31, 2022 @08:08AM
(#30866273)
Would you accept the city of Amsterdam's own official renewable energy policy?
""400 MW is equivalent to the electricity consumption of 200,000 households""
https://www.amsterdam.nl/en/policy/sustainability/renewable-...
Re:Meta suspends Netherlands data center due to political pu...
by hnaccount_rng on Thursday March 31, 2022 @11:15AM
(#30868140)
That's certainly interesting, but it just doesn't fit with the yearly consumption data available. Even if you take a look at [1], which distributes all electric energy consumption onto citizen you barely get 6000kWh/year. Which brings us (barely) to 2kW per household (btw. I find it kind of surprising, that there is a factor of 3-4 between total and private consumption).
So either they are taking all electric energy consumption and not the consumption of the household as their basis or (and more likely) they are talking about installed peak capacity necessary to provide the required electric energy over the year. But we would have to look where their marketing got their data from.
[1] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/netherlands/energy-consump...
Consider that the EIA says NL consumed 3.818 quad BTU in 2019 ... this is about 1.1e12 kW-h, or 800x what a 160MW data center would consume. This size of data center, though fairly large, would still be much less than 1% of the energy story of that country.
Generally, data centers use far less energy that people suppose, compared to transport and industry.