In Ireland, data centers now consume more electricity than all their homes!

[thewayne]

Ireland has been becoming a popular site for the tech industry due to favorable tax laws and cheap electricity. I'm hoping they turn some of those laws around. The data center population grew by more than a third, and now they eat more electricity than the entirety of their residential population!

The problem is, data centers don't create a lot of jobs. They generate construction jobs for building them, and once built, the jobs go away or on to the next gig. They're mostly dark operations: no lights on except when someone is in the building. They might have some security guards who sweep around the exterior of the site occasionally. They maintain internal spares for when disk drives or arrays or servers go bad, they just fail over to new units. So these server farms do not generate a lot of jobs.

From the article, Metered electricity consumption by data centres increased from 290 gigawatt hours in the period from January to March 2015 to 1,058 in October to December 2021.. Six years. 3x fold in consumption. Dublin has stopped allowing construction and connection of data centers because they can't increase power production in the area.

Some tax money pours in, but it doesn't do much for the employment situation. Meanwhile, electricity is consumed, strain is put on the power grid, and heat and carbon are generated.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/data-centres-now-consuming-more-electricity-than-rural-homes-cso-1.4868221

Comments

[armiphlage]

Data centers and housing would make a good combination; you could use the waste heat in winter to heat the homes (and vent to the outside in summer). And unlike using waste industrial heat, data centers won't increase the traffic or noise in residential neighbourhoods.

[thewayne]

I wonder if the waste heat could be channeled in a geothermal heat pump fashion to produce cooling in the summer.  It's not my field, so I only have the vaguest knowledge of the area.  We looked into getting a geothermal heat pump once upon a time.

[armiphlage]

Technically yes. However, you'd need to have heat pipes attached to every processor (close to 100 C), instead of just using the heat being vented from the overall center (probably not much warmer than outdoor air temperature). That'd require cooperation from all the major suppliers of equipment to incorporate that in their designs, which would be painful.

[thewayne]

Ah, true.  Not nearly enough to be effective from the ambient.