• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Putting on my ME hat. Power systems are designed to extract the most amount of energy of their fuel sources. This leads for waste heat to not be significantly above ambient temperatures as they have extracted about as much as they can from it.

    I assume now many high end servers are now water cooled, so that probably improves their cooling performance of their system, vs the older ways of aisle cooling and having hot and cold sides of the rack.

    But unlike power stations, I don’t think the data centers have incentives or the ability to extract much useful work from their waste heat, so I’m sure they are dumping it as fast as they can plus the waste heat from all the secondary systems, cooling, water pumps, etc. are just compounding the local air temps.



  • We’ve spent nearly 100 years ignoring the problem and refusing to develop the alternative systems that would lower our reliance on oil. The modern society will never be able to move fully away from oil, there’s hardly a better solution for energy density.

    But we could have still built the public rail systems to move people, built housing that was very energy efficient, designed our communities to be walkable, put solar panels on every rooftop etc. knowing that oil pollutants were a problem for the environment and a massive crutch that once broken, would collapse modern life.