Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.green/@gerrymcgovern/116334729524665446

I'm just a touch skeptical about the claims here. I can believe that large data centers may raise temperatures around them, but the claim about raising nearby temperatures up to 16.4F and that the changes could be felt up to 3.3 miles away.

To be clear, I'm not questioning the concept that data centers may raise temperatures -- I'm just a bit skeptical about the, no pun intended, degree of the changes.

However, I do think we should be hard applying the brakes on building new data centers, etc., to study their environmental impacts before just blindly building out more.

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tschenkel

@jzb

I think the confusion with these numbers comes from assuming that it will be only the heat output of the data centre that causes the heating, but there are more effects at play than just the heat from compute and cooling systems:

1. the electrical energy input ia directly converted to heat that is dumped into the environment (both from compute and auxiliary systems). Total P_electric = Qdot_heat. This is worse if the data centre uses gas turbines to cover peak demand, as some do!

2. the cooling system will likely be evaporation cooling, i.e. it will introduce water vapor into the air, which adds additional thermal capacity to the air.

3. sealed (concrete) ground and buildings cause a heat island effect (also happens in towns, green field shopping malls, etc.) because which is a well understood effect and has been shown that it can be double digit degrees temperature difference between built up and surrounding green belt areas.

So, overall, the quoted numbers are very realistic from a thermodynamics analysis (and - to me, who teaches thermodynamics - not surprising at all).

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Joe Brockmeier 1d ago

@tschenkel Thanks so much for the reply - very much *not* my area of expertise.

Which is not to say I actually have any areas in which I am an expert, possibly excepting music trivia and cats, but this one can be ruled out entirely...