• M0oP0o@mander.xyzEnglish
    8 hours

    So when do we start putting big ice cubes in the ocean?

    (Really this at least makes more sense then land slop centers, still silly)

    • yeehaw@lemmy.caEnglish
      9 hours

      This makes me wonder what is better - underwater DCs heating the oceans, or above water ones with all the pollution creating and water sucking cooling instead. Part of me thinks the underwater one might be better.

      • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9 hours

        The issue with climate change was never with “heat production”. It’s always been the generation of heat trapping chemicals. The sun sends a stupid amount of energy our way. Generally the earth radiates almost the same amount back out into space, with a minor amount captured by various things, like photosynthesis.

        Pollution alters that equation and causes more energy from the sun to get trapped in the atmosphere. That’s the problem. We could never generate as much energy as the sun (even the tiny amount that hits the earth), but we can definitely alter the atmosphere to trap more and more of that heat.

        Also, the ocean is a MASSIVE heat sink. I saw someone work out the calculations recently, I don’t remember the numbers, but the conclusion was that we’d never measure a notable increase in ocean temps if we housed every datacentre in existence in the ocean. The sun hitting the ocean every day dumps more energy into the ocean directly than we’d ever be able to manage.

        It all comes down to pollution.

          • jmill@lemmy.zipEnglish
            5 hours

            That’s true, but water is so much more effective at absorbing heat than air, the effect will be negligible. It takes about 4.2 megajoules to raise one cubic meter of water 1 degree C. That energy would raise over 3 cubic KILOMETERS of air 1 degree C.

            Even putting data centers at the bottom of large lakes would be unlikely to have an effect. It will not be percetable in the ocean. Regarding temperature anyway, other factors are worth considering.

    • TotalCourage007@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8 hours

      Instead of drilling into the core we’re just going to get boiled alive. Pretty poetic for a garbage system like capalitism.

    • Pacattack57@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11 hours

      I wonder how many sq km of data centers it would take to increase the temp of the ocean by 1 degree.

      • sparkyshocks@lemmy.zipEnglish
        9 hours

        This page says the ocean is about 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons, which is about 1.3 x 10^21 liters, and each liter is a kg of water (yeah, yeah, the dissolved salt adds some mass but I don’t think it adds sufficient thermal mass to make a difference). It takes 4.184 kilojoules to raise 1kg of liquid water 1°C, and 1 joule is 2.778 x 10^-4 wh.

        So that’s 1.55 x 10^18 watt hours, or 1,550,000 TWh.

        Global electricity consumption is about 30,000 TWh per year, so if you use the entire world’s electricity consumption for 51 years you’d raise the oceans’ temperature by 1°C.

        Or if you take global data center power capacity of about 125 GW, and ran them at full power 24/7, you’d be producing about 10.8 TWh per day or 3944 TWh per year. It’d take about 393 years of the world’s data centers to raise the ocean by 1°C.

        Just goes to show that much more of the energy heating up our world and our oceans is coming from the sun heating up the planet and the planet failing to radiate it out past our greenhouse blanket, not from the actual heating of our atmosphere from our own energy sources.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11 hours

      Parts of the ocean are colder and several species are having issues locating new spawning grounds.

      I remember hearing of a corodile species or something that recovered due to a new power plant discharging warm water.

      Overall ocean temps rising is a problem, but the real problem is becoming more uniform temps.

      Cold spots are getting warmer. But warm spots are getting colder too. And especially for fish and reptiles. They need warm spots to spawn.

      Ecologically speaking this is likely to be a good thing and within a couple years this could be a very important habitat that people are talking about and acting shocked about.

      Even tho logically it’s obvious

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19 hours

    How many AI datacenters will it take to boil the ocean?

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

      If it’s being powered by wind, it’s not adding additional energy to the environment, at all. It all comes down to conservation of energy, and no chemical changes are occurring.

      Electrical energy is being generated by harvesting kinetic energy in the wind, that’s essentially just moving energy, converting it from one form to another. Energy can be swapped and converted around, but in the end, it almost always ends up turning into heat or light.

      That wind, one way or another was going to convert its energy into heat. Most often it does that by convection, causing water vapor in the air to change state, after condensing, the now warmer water release its heat into the ocean when it falls as rain.

      Turning a wind turbine to generate electricity, to run computers, is a much more elaborate route to take, but the result is the same. The wind is moving slower, a lower energy state, but the ocean is warmer, a higher energy state. It all evens out.

      Edit: I just realized, that sometimes that kinetic energy from wind contributes to storms and sometimes those storms generate lightning, and while most of the energy from lightning does turn into heat, some of that energy generates light, and some of that light shoots out into space (actually escaping the earth). So probably, higher wind speeds do result in cooling the earth a very little bit (but it’s likely negligible)

    • Krusty@quokk.auEnglish
      10 hours

      Around (4 to 6) * 10^(26 to 27) J total

      1 gigawatt is 10^9 J/s (so around 130 billion years to reach the above.) For a terawatt that’s 130 million years. For a petawatt 130,000 years. For an exawatt about 130 years…

      Note: the sun bathes Earth with around 170,000 TW (0.17 exawatts) of energy. That’s about 700-800 years if you could make the oceans sink all that sun energy. Again, this isn’t the total output of the Sun but just what impacts Earth directly.

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      19 hours

      It would probably take more energy than we can harvest on earth, considering the sunlight and geothermal energy doesn’t boil it currently.

      I could see it affecting the temperature on local scales, such as the area immediately around the data center.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12 hours

        I don’t think people mean literally boil the ocean. Just increasing it by few Celsius degrees can be world ending.

        • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
          10 hours

          That’s true, but I still don’t think we can raise ocean temperatures through direct cooling and renewable sources the way that the greenhouse effect can. Water can absorb a lot of heat energy without changing temperature, and that is why regions close to oceans have a more temperate climate.

          While I don’t have enough knowledge in this field to be making any definitive statements, my logic is as follows:

          • outside of nuclear fission/fusion reactions, heat energy on the earth’s surface comes from either the sun or molten rock in the core
          • that energy is responsible for everything that happens on earth, including wind energy

          So we would need to get energy from off planet, use nuclear fission/fusion, or cover enough of the land area in wind and solar farms in order to redirect the sun’s energy over to the oceans.

          I think the bigger concern, when it comes to heating the ocean, is that manufacturing, construction, and transport related to the data centers still releases a lot of greenhouse gases. Those gases trap the sun’s energy within our atmosphere and that WILL heat up the earth. Way more than direct cooling using ocean water.

          • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3 hours

            I’m a scuba diver and you can definitely harm regions of ocean with water pumps. It’s already happening in place where nuclear is being cooled. It’s already happening in ship yards.

            It’s hard to speculate how it would happen at scale though because ocean science is real fucking hard and each location is vastly different. In populated places the damage would be very noticeable if not eventually catastrophic as ocean issues compound real fast as the ecosystem is much more fluid.

            That being said I imagine there would be ways to deploy this safely (ocean is big, lots of boring dead space) but I dont have trust in us to find this way.

        • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9 hours

          If every data centre was passively cooled in the ocean it wouldn’t change temps by even 0.01 degrees. The Sun blasts an entire half of the planet with an absurd amount of energy every day. Energy, which technically originated from the sun, is just converted and being utilized to do work.

          • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3 hours

            Not the same thing. The sun doesn’t concentrate the power in already hifhly populated gulfs and bays where these would be. We’re not building something in the middle of Atlantic Ocean.

      • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nzEnglish
        18 hours

        There are a number of 6-8GWe nuclear plants that dump 15+GW into the nearby sea (or in the case of Bruce, Lake Huron). I don’t see it being much of an issue. Better than virtually any other cooling option.

        The issues are maintenance, energy source, and equipment supply.

        • Bev's Dad@lemmy.caEnglish
          18 hours

          The plants on the lakes so monitor the water temp so they don’t affect the ecosystem during the warmer seasons still.

          But I doubt the one in NB had to worry about that when more water flows by it than all the rivers in the world combined.

          But yes, much better source of cooling at the cost of maintenance and equipment. Just like tidal power but with fewer moving parts.

      • melfie@lemmy.zipEnglish
        17 hours

        Good point, although on the local scale you mention, wildlife could still be impacted. Hopefully, the overall impact on the ecosystem will be monitored and studied before expanding these data centers more broadly.

    • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      18 hours

      Well, if the energy comes from solar on the thingy, then it’s probably going to cool the ocean, could be similar with wind.

      • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.orgEnglish
        18 hours

        That’s a good point. Maybe not cool, but it would warm the water less.
        (I’m guessing solar cells reflect less energy back into space than water, since they’re specifically designed not to.)

        • XeroxCool@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12 hours

          I don’t know how to objectively figure this out, but solar panels only convert energy from radiation down to far infrared of 1100nm. Water can absorb longer wavelengths, but solar output has less and less energy output at these wavelengths. However, the mystery is whether or not the panels themselves absorb or reflect such far infrared energy. I’m torn between “it might be the same” and “I’m wrong”

  • yucandu@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15 hours

    China says

    China, you have lied to me too many times.

  • humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish
    8 hours

    1.15 PUE is considered normal for water cooled datacenters. 1.5 is for air cooling. It might be more tightly packed, or conservative to not very deep water temperatures.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    11 hours

    The world-first part must be the wind-power thing.

    We’ve had small offshore data centers for years, passively cooled but powered by nuclear energy.

    (And if you’re still not getting the joke, let’s discuss how a nuke sub would cool its massive computing power. Big boats are like floating data centers; submarines even more advanced. )

  • frightful5680@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19 hours

    This is pretty impressive. If only China had a good human rights record. But then again there’s only a few countries that do and none of them are superpowers.

    • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18 hours

      So there’s a non-zero chance we will find out later that it’s just a bathysphere full of children doing math.

    • Danitos@reddthat.comEnglish
      12 hours

      To be fair, there’s a huge difference between some countries human rights records and China. China is IMO easily a bottom 25%.

    • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
      17 hours

      But then again there’s only a few countries that do and none of them are superpowers.

      Really? Which ones?

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    18 hours

    China: “We will use the oceans water”. usa: “We will use the citizens drinking water”.