Energy infrastructure

Every job "offloaded" to a datacentre incurs a pretty heavy overhead. It makes sense to do this only when the DC alone has the means needed to perform the operation (e.g. web search and other heavy computation with large datasets), but I've seen local client applications offload trivial calculations to "the backend" for the sole reason that it's less hassle than doing it locally.

As an industry, Web-based services have as much interest in energy efficiency as the US car industry did in the 1960s when petrol was ten cents a gallon…

Come on, very little energy required to send data - compute at both ends dominates the energy consumption.

Moving servers and services out of DCs and into on-prem racks is not going to reduce the aggregate consumed energy - it will increase it as well as hugely increase the amount of electronic waste. Just because it's easier to measure DC energy consumption and difficult to measure aggregate "local" compute energy consumption doesn't mean you can discount the latter.

Whether modern software is bloated and inefficient is a separate issue and affects all software regardless of the topology/architecture.

Yes, youtube is wasteful of energy, as is computer gaming, running TV stations, hosting big sports events, eating out in restaurants, travelling anywhere, etc. But which of these "wasteful activities" are justified and which are not, again is not an argument that has anything to do whether we'd be better off in term so aggregate energy consumption if we moved more to on-prem from DC .

"Very little energy". Do you know how much, or are you assuming that it's not much because "everyone does it"?

Do you imagine that a datacentre CPU is more energy efficient than the one in your mobile phone? And that's before considering the transmission costs inside and outside the DC.

YouTube isn't actaully that big an energy user per client: it pulls data from a filestore and copies it into a transmission buffer: there's very little computation needed, and this can be (and is) done in hardware to save even more energy. The big hogs are the medium-usage services behind your mobile apps that aren't big enough that optimisation would be commercially beneficial, but are still big enough that their inefficiency is significant.

However, the energy efficiency of software, while of nterest to me, is off topic in this thread, so I'll leave my comments at this, except to say that because DCs are such a big part of our energy consumption, the inefficiency of that software does have an impact on our environmental targets, and it's one over which we have little control.

I don't know how much energy is required to send a packet but it's not what's flowing through the cables which use the most energy. It's the routers switches gateways and firewalls which consume a tonne. Touch them and you'll find that they are very much hot and are critical in sending data. Also the surface area of a cpu is much lower than that of a cable so even if both had the same power running through them the temperature would not be the same.

That said I have no problem with data centers. They pay for the power they use so are paying for the expansion of the network. As long as they don't cause Brown outs or black outs of course.

"They pay for the power they use so are paying for the expansion of the network. As long as they don't cause Brown outs or black outs of course."

It just means competition for those electrons and higher prices. But then we should discuss how we could use that extra money and direct it towards green energy investment. A bigger market should also get bigger players involved.

Electricity is not a finite resource, in a normal market you supply more of the needed goods and both make a profit.

This is of course true - big switches and routers consume significant amounts of energy. On the other hand, that big router is probably sitting in front of hundreds or thousands of machines. Amortized over each machine, the energy remains relatively insignificant.

The rule of thumb is 5-15 kW per cabinet, depending on what's in the cabinet (storage is lower, compute is higher, switching and routing is in between) - some applications can use as much as 25 kW, and the absolute limit for power supply is around 50 kW. To that you have to add the energy costs of cooling all of that equipment. The biggest DCs have thousands of such cabinets.

Between switching, firewalls, load balancers, processing and data-stores, making one request to a datacentre could involve ten or more pieces of equipment, each with its own power overhead. The DC operators try to keep that overhead as low as possible, but it's still there.

So, that's as much about DCs as is relevant here.. I don't want to drag the thread off topic. Suffice it to say, they are really power hungry, and there's a lot of scope in software to reduce that power use, but nobody bothers unless they're the size of Meta or Google..

Even if many of us don't really believe in the resource we have, the Germans do. Germany already knows it will need to import about 70% of the green hydrogen it will require to get to carbon neutral. It sees Ireland as a natural partner as we don't have very much heavy industry. Germany thinks Ireland can produce green hydrogen cheaper than anywhere else and as the sea routes are short, even transhipped hydrogen would be cheaper than producing it in Germany. So interconnectors are not the only show in town to capitalise on our wind resources.

https://www.german-energy-solutions.de/GES/Redaktion/DE/Publikationen/Marktanalysen/2023/zma-irland.html

From the article.…

"CRU officials said in a statement: “From a customer impact perspective, the monthly PSO levy amount that domestic customers will have to pay will be €3.23 per month.”

This works out at €38.76 a year, but when VAT is added the annual cost will be €42.24."

Electrons go almost nowhere. They move at very slow speeds (relatively) and drift in random directions. Even when aligned in a direct current, it would take years for an electron to travel from Woodland (Ireland) to Shotton in Wales (if it ever got there). Just because junior cert science tells you that electricity is the flow of charged particles (which isn't incorrect, but it's not the whole story) doesn't mean that electrons flow when you flick a switch. There's no electron in the multiverse capable of travelling at the speed of light from the generator to wherever it is required. Physics doesn't allow such speeds as they have mass.

Also, today is the first time in over a week that there were any exports. We especially didn't export at the time of your post on the 28th so I'm afraid that your great rebuttal is entirely false. There were two Margin warnings issued in the last 14 days because a number of generators are unavailable and the wind hasn't been blowing.

The PSO levy has been around long before there was wind power. It's a charge that goes into a fund to strengthen Ireland's energy security. It used to be used to subsidise peat generation, but now that renewables give better returns, they are the greatest beneficiary.

Levies like this aren't to "screw the customer", but to improve price stability in the energy market, and almost every country without it's own fossil fuel resource has them (often called an "energy reserve fund").

A planning application gone into Offaly County Council for a Carbon Dioxide energy storage plant in Rhode at the Energy Park.

https://www.eplanning.ie/OffalyCC/AppFileRefDetails/2460289/0

https://www.offalyindependent.ie/2024/08/01/major-air-domes-planned-in-rhode-for-storage-of-carbon-dioxide/

Energy independence?? Point is that Irish consumers are stuffed with the some of the highest energy bills in the EU and get little or no benefit from falling gas prices that back up the wind nonsense