Why isn't the roof of that facility covered with solar panels?
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Why isn't the roof of that facility covered with solar panels? It might not provide all the juice they need, but it will offset some. Future facilities like this should be forced to install some sort of energy mitigation strategy before getting approval.
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Why isn't the roof of that facility covered with solar panels? It might not provide all the juice they need, but it will offset some. Future facilities like this should be forced to install some sort of energy mitigation strategy before getting approval.
Of course it should be covered in solar panels but so should most roofs everywhere but this single roof would be less than a drop in the bucket.
A square meter solar panel gives you about 100 watts while the sun is at it's highest point, and only when aimed directly at the sun. Typically over the entire day, the average will be a fraction of that
Meanwhile these servers use multiple CPUs that each take around 200 watts. A single server can take between 1-5 kilowatt in power. A single rack than carry dozens of those server's, so you see that you'd need way, waaaayyy more solar panels to make up for all of that
Again, not saying they shouldn't. All buildings should have solar panel roofs, but for this one building it won't do much to the point that the difference would be a blip
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Of course it should be covered in solar panels but so should most roofs everywhere but this single roof would be less than a drop in the bucket.
A square meter solar panel gives you about 100 watts while the sun is at it's highest point, and only when aimed directly at the sun. Typically over the entire day, the average will be a fraction of that
Meanwhile these servers use multiple CPUs that each take around 200 watts. A single server can take between 1-5 kilowatt in power. A single rack than carry dozens of those server's, so you see that you'd need way, waaaayyy more solar panels to make up for all of that
Again, not saying they shouldn't. All buildings should have solar panel roofs, but for this one building it won't do much to the point that the difference would be a blip
I get it, but you make them all do it anyway, just on principle, if nothing else.
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I get it, but you make them all do it anyway, just on principle, if nothing else.
Best we can do is diesel generators
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Of course it should be covered in solar panels but so should most roofs everywhere but this single roof would be less than a drop in the bucket.
A square meter solar panel gives you about 100 watts while the sun is at it's highest point, and only when aimed directly at the sun. Typically over the entire day, the average will be a fraction of that
Meanwhile these servers use multiple CPUs that each take around 200 watts. A single server can take between 1-5 kilowatt in power. A single rack than carry dozens of those server's, so you see that you'd need way, waaaayyy more solar panels to make up for all of that
Again, not saying they shouldn't. All buildings should have solar panel roofs, but for this one building it won't do much to the point that the difference would be a blip
You're right about the general idea, but I think you're even underestimating the scale here.
I don't think these servers will be doing much on CPU, they'll be on GPUs. HPE will sell you a 48 rack unit behemoth with 36 Blackwell GB200s for a total of 72 GPUs and 36 CPUs. The CPUs are actually negligible here, but each of the 36 units use a total of 2700 watts (single GPU itself is supposedly 1200 watts so that would make the CPU 300 watts?)
36 * 2.7 = 97.2 kilowatts. You put just a hundred of these in a data center and you're talking over 10 megawatts once cooling and everything is factored in. So this is what, 100k m^2 of solar panels for 100 racks?
You'd want them to be running most of the time too, idle hardware is just a depreciating asset. Say they run 75% of the time. 0.75 * 10 * 24 * 365 = 65700 MWh which I will not even convert to gigawatt hours to simplify this: The average American household uses about ~11 MWh of electrical energy per year. A single AI-focused data center without even all that many racks uses as much power as ~6000 households. They're building them all over the country, and in reality I think they're actually way bigger than what I mentioned. It's putting a significant dent in the power grid, to the point AI companies should be required to commission nuclear power plants before being allowed to build their data centers.
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