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Before and after data centers (discuss.online)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
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Original comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1uyyywv/comment/oy3cgd7/

Trees vs. Data Centers

Photo 1: Memphis, TN (top)

Photo 2: Sandston, VA


Photo 3: Abilene, Texas


Photo 4: New Albany, OH


Photo 5: Fayetteville, GA

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[–] 27 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Because solar on the roof won't even be noticable against their power footprint. Given current practices, each square foot of a datacenter would need about 1,000 times more square footage worth of solar.

It's just that somehow if they get to go to space, they decide they suddenly just need like two servers in a 'datacenter' instead of thousands. And they need to go to space because Elon says (checks notes) that it's too hard to make more natural gas turbine parts....

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  • [–] 32 points 3 months ago*

    Because solar on the roof won’t even be noticable against their power footprint. Given current practices, each square foot of a datacenter would need about 1,000 times more square footage worth of solar.

    But (as I'm sure you realize) this would mean every watt from on-premises solar could get put to use immediately, no batteries, no power-grid buy-back schemes. Making those solar panels an unusually good investment.

    Unless they're not planning to keep it running for very long.

    It smells un-serious, somehow.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Even if it's nowhere near a majority of the power, I'm surprised passive cooling from solar plus some electricity isn't worthwhile enough to be universal. It's a small impact, but also cheap enough it'll pay for itself, and many orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to get a datacenter into space, and figure out how to cool it

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Especially since they're looking for space for solar installations, farmers have started installing them, power companies and coops. Seems financially stupid to leave that much space unused when solar farms would go right on top.

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