That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century
- Reference: 1706520614
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/01/29/the_datacenter_runaway_power_grab/
- Source link:
Globally, datacenter infrastructure is expected to more than double over the same period, going from two to four percent of all electrical demand and adding the equivalent of a brand new medium-sized European nation.
Datacenters could account for a third of Ireland's electricity by 2026 [1]READ MORE
All this is down to the fashion for intensive data-crunching through cyber currencies, AI adoption, and plain old corporate data hogging. These may seem poor reasons to lumber the environment when we're supposed to be lightening the load, but it also highlights one of long-term facts of life for the big IT shed builders. You can't just plug these things in.
It isn't easy building a datacenter, even if you ignore the bits that chew on the data. Viable installations need big parcels of land that must be near to high voltage supplies and network connectivity. They must also be well away from risk factors like other industrial installations that could go messily wrong, environmental problems like flooding or fire, safely away from residential areas, and so on.
Of all these, the high voltage power interconnects are often the most troublesome. If you're in the market for tens of megawatts, you really need to connect to your supplier at the network's core transmission line voltage, in the hundreds of kilovolts. For redundancy, you need two such connections. The commercial and practical implications of this can lead to many years' lead time. That's if the capacity's going to be there at all in the time frame.
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The nib of the matter is that datacenters aren't like any other electrical load. They're industrial systems that don't fit alongside other industries, they want to be close to financial, business and domestic consumers, just not physically, and their future demands for power absolutely must be sustainable and carbon neutral, but they demand extreme reliability.
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These aren't problems, these are opportunities. Compared to other infrastructures, such as transport or power, information is not beholden to legacy. We can't rip out all the roads and railways and rebuild them to match the needs of the 21st century: we're having enough trouble with replacing internal combustion with electric motors. We can't put Amazon warehouses or FedEx hubs on remote islands. Aviation and marine transport are going to pin that sort of logistics to hydrocarbons for the foreseeable.
The logistics of datacenters, however, rely on photons. These are conveniently massless and thus extraordinarily cheap to transport very long distances. Go out under a clear dark night sky and look at the Andromeda galaxy. That's 24 million trillion kilometers away, yet its photons are delivered to your eyeball without emitting so much as a gnat's belch of carbon dioxide along the way. Admittedly, latency's a bit of a problem - you wouldn't want your gaming server out there.
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You can put a datacenter anywhere you like: as long as it can be hooked up to some glowing glass strands, it can do its job. As for the need for lots of land away from potential harm, there's a near infinite supply of the stuff that's no good for agriculture or gracious living, and most of it is therefore very cheap.
Which leaves power. Everyone in the datacenter and hyperscalar business has an environmentally friendly story to tell, some [6]sensible if limited, and some [7]farcical . What none of them are is proportional to the threat of climate change, a threat which you may have noted is universal and terrifying. It's not something that companies can fix through competition.
[8]Europe's first exascale system will be slotted into modular containerized datacenter
[9]Microsoft hires energy mavericks in quest for nuclear-powered datacenters
[10]Mystery German chip fab sips on Gradiant's ultrapure water
[11]NVMe consortium polishes its specs to support computational storage
If only there was some lesson from history to guide their thinking.
That lesson exists, and is 70 years old almost to the day. The existential threat to humanity was nuclear armageddon, and the strategy to avoid this was mutually assured destruction. That relied on having retaliatory strike platforms that could survive a first attack, and submarines looked very promising. But submarines are vulnerable if they need to surface to replenish the oxygen diesel engines need - so navies seized upon the suggestion to make them nuclear powered. That way, they could run silently, and run deep – for as long as there are tins of beans to feed the crew. The US Navy decided it needed a small, powerful nuclear generator, and by 1954 it had one. USS Nautilus, [12]the world's first fission-powered submarine , launched on 21st January that year. That was just a decade after the Manhattan Project produced its proof of concept: you can do it if you try.
Seventy years on, this technology is being looked at as a [13]civil power source , but is struggling to free itself from the stagnating legacy of earlier, far more massive nuclear programmes. There is cautious optimism and cautious funding. Not good enough. So imagine if the world's datacenter industry got together – yes, a fantasy, but these are needful items - and issued a specification for a standard, modular, small nuclear power plant.
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The key word, as always in IT, is standard. That will define the market and provide a stable financial model against which to raise funding. It has to be created in conjunction with regulators around the world, but none of the concepts are new and those conversations are already well established by those who've been trying to sell the concept for decades. It's the kind of low-risk, low-cost, environmentally positive move that governments can get behind without massive commitment of public funds, and made part of a (whisper it) industrial strategy that includes easing fiber provisioning and simple licensing. We've seen the UK change the rules to encourage [15]spaceports , for heaven's sake, so why not for something that really matters?
There are many more conversations to be had about sustainable datacenter growth, such as discouraging toxic loads and encouraging efficiency beyond just maximizing the bottom line.
But the kudos and practical impact of jump-starting cheap, flexible nuclear power that can be deployed far beyond the datacenter, providing the localized baseline support for renewables that the sector badly needs, would be a shining halo for an industry that badly needs one. ®
Get our [16]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/iea_report/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZbeFXUQwggdJBRC2hUB0iAAAAEE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZbeFXUQwggdJBRC2hUB0iAAAAEE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZbeFXUQwggdJBRC2hUB0iAAAAEE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZbeFXUQwggdJBRC2hUB0iAAAAEE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/29/google_running_on_geothermal/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/22/microsoft_helion_fusion_deal/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/23/modular_containerized_datacenter_to_hold/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/23/microsoft_nuclear_hires/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/22/german_chip_fab_gradiant/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/nvme_specs_get_an_update/
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_(SSN-571)
[13] https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx#/
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZbeFXUQwggdJBRC2hUB0iAAAAEE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/23/space_in_brief/
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Zero
Best news for Net Zero would be no data centres.
Most of the digital offerings are surplus to the requirement, designed to kill boredom, stroke egos and make us over indulge in vanity. I mean if 99% of websites were gone tomorrow, sure the public would have some withdrawal symptoms for a couple of months and then the life would go back to normal.
Re: Zero
The sort of person who believes they are qualified to decide for everyone what services are worthwhile is probably the last person who should make that decision.
Re: Zero
... nearly every politician who is given such decision making power then?
Additional points for going with Thorium
Civilian, and safe, nuclear power production means Thorium. If we are to imagine a world where a datacenter is something that sits on or near a nuclear power plant, Thorium is the best bet.
Thorium reactors produce the least amount of radioactive waste, and doesn't last as long a PWRs. Additionally, you can take waste from PWRs and use it in a Thorium reactor, which has the potential to vastly reduce the amount of radioactive stuff we already have lying around.
Until we get fusion reactors (and that seems to be on its way now), Thorium is our best, safest bet.
And you don't need dozens of operators 24/7. You need one engineer with a beeper, who gets alerted when the reactor auto-shuts-down for some reason. Because the Thorium reactor cannot explode, nor melt down. When it gets too hot, the salt plug simply melts, the radioactive slurry is deposited in reservoirs and the whole reaction stops. After that, it's just a question of putting in a new salt plug, scooping the slurry back into the chamber and starting up again.
If datacenters could push for that design, that would be real progress.
Data centers accounting for two to four percent of total electricity usage - on the other hand data centers may have lead to decreased energy usage in others ways: e.g., less paper wastage, work from home, remote meetings instead of getting on an airplane.
By all means though, go ahead and nuke crypto, please.
I dunno...
...intensive data-crunching through cyber currencies...
We could maybe wean ourselves off Bitcoin, that would be a good start.
Duck and cover, run for the exit ;)
Iceland
There is one obvious location with easy cooling and carbon neutral geothermal generation available - Iceland.
The low outside temperatures make cooling far easier than (for example) a datacenter located in Arizona.
There is a lot of untapped geothermal energy available in Iceland due to its location on the mid Atlantic ridge.
As existing datacenters take years of planning to arrange power etc, the requirement to build a small geothermal plant for each datacenter should not add much delay to the process of building a datacenter.
A lot of datacenter activities (eg AI training) can easily tolerate the additional few milliseconds latency for the data transfer from Iceland to mainland Europe or the US.
So, just buy of a small fleet of nuclear submarines and wire them up to the data network.
This will never happen in the UK
As Whitehall squashes any attempt to build anything other than huge mega-reactors, which will never be finished.
I suspect this is a mixture of leftover-hippie "Nuclear power? No thanks!", and an attempt to stall all other energy sources until "we have enough wind power never to need it".
Not only have Rolls-Royce effectively been told to do one, but a proposal to make use of Sellafield waste by a new company was dismissed. They are now going to build in France.
A fine idea but...
...people fear nuclear. They fear it to the point of irrational panic.
It's become one of those things about which it's basically impossible to have a reasoned discourse because so very few people actually properly understand it. I was at least taught physics at highschool by a qualified nuclear physicist who had worked on nuclear power plants in the 80s, so I like to think I have some grasp on the complexities of the issue. The reality is tho, that I think nuclear power is good because someone I have reason to believe understands the subject told me it was. I don't really understand it myself.
A lot of people got told it's really, really bad, and at this point that's going to be a really hard notion to dislodge because they don't understand it any better than I do.
Nuclear power is regulated to the moon and back - which is probably for the best, given the potential for it to do harm if we cock it up - but given how many people are just plain scared of it I rather suspect that getting regulations relaxed enough to allow any kind of small modular power plant to actually be built is going to require a great deal more than a bunch of large companies agreeing that they'd like one and setting out a standard for what it should look like.
I have no idea how we get enough of those people on board that the issue isn't so politically toxic that no one with the power to do anything wants to touch it.
1954...
Not only would this help data centres, but it could put a substantial distributed base load to the grid, a couple at each motorway service area... waste heat can be used by the services, and the electricity can supply the grid, or local storage, or local chargers... that fat grid connection can work both ways.