alt Hacker NewsA $13 billion dollar Meta datacentre was recently announced for a location near me: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/meta-data-centre-alb...
There's a kaleidoscope of issues with this that result in strong feelings of dismay and it took me a couple days of thinking about this recent announcement before I realized what's so completely disappointing about it.
So they're installing a $13 billion dollar data centre that's going to pull 1-1.8GW of power, dumping the resulting pollution onto the people in my province and the land they live on. It's probably going to mess up the groundwater int he area. And it's going to mess with the prices prices electricity and natural gas. And this is all at the whim of one person -- Mark Zuckerberg because with 61% of the voting power of Meta he is Meta. And the C02 emissions... Yadda yadda yadda, we all know the drill with these conversations.
But none of that is the worst part.
The worst part to me is that the heat energy from this 1-1.8gw operation is going to be completely wasted and dumped into the atmosphere. No attempt to use it for anything else.
In a different world the Alberta government wasn't so inept and self-serving and sheltered from the consequences of being so that they capitalized on an opportunity to bootstrap a heated greenhouse industry in central Alberta from the waste energy of a Meta funded datacentre.
In a different world Mark Zuckerberg wasn't so self-centered and sheltered from the consequences of being so that he would seize on an opportunity to feed hundreds of thousands to millions of people with his table scraps.
But that isn't the kind of world we live in.
And there's nothing that can be done about that.
It makes the kind of waste that Steinbeck so sorrowfully described in The Grapes of Wrath seem quaint.
Replies
youre in edmonton, you can complain pretty directly to the government
but also, like, alberta makes a killing selling oil for others to burn. its still our carbon footprint and its a lot worse than that data center and cant be converted to non-emitting
It's not obvious to me that building a greenhouse industry in Alberta based on waste heat from data centers is a good idea. If it was, why should it be the Alberta government's job to set this up, rather than private industry making a deal with data center operators? If no private enterprise has formed to do this, maybe it's a sign that there's not enough demand for the outputs of that greenhouse industry for it to be profitable.
But anyway why is this datacenter using a bunch of electricity a particularly less good use of electricity than anything else?