Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet...

That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.

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dangalf 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.

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mr_toad 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

There’s a minimum level of energy consumption (and thus heat) that has to be produced by computation, just because of physics. However, modern computers generate billions of times more heat than this minimum level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

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RhysU 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

It'd be super fun to take that as an axiom of physics then to see how far upwards one could build from that. Above my skills by far.

	▲	UltraSane 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The minimum amount of energy needed to compute decreased asymptotically to 0 as the temperature of space goes to 0. This is the reason a common sci-fi trope where advanced civilizations hibernate for extremely long times so that they can do more computation with available energy.

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geoffschmidt 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Heat is not by itself waste. It's what electricity turns into after it's done doing computer things. Efficiency is a separate question - how many computer things you got done per unit electricity turned into heat.

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userbinator 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if there's enough heat being produced for it to act as a district heating plant.

	▲	hephaes7us 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There absolutely is, but of course it's nonzero cost to capture.

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timeon an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Not sure what your point is. With POW inefficiency is by design.

	▲	edoceo an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You got the point. It's "by design" - you've both said it.
	▲	nh23423fefe an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		a home can leak heat to the environment because of bad insulation. a datacenter doesn't leak heat because leaking is normatively bad.

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vondur 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow. Is there still enough money to be made in crypto to justify this kind of investment?

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kanemcgrath 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I always wondered if anybody has calculated how much of our global heating could be attributed, if any at all, to every electronic device, server, and engine outputting heat as a byproduct.

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inatreecrown2 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

funny how somehow similar this image looks to that of a pc motherboard.

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andai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So I don't have any context for this. The article says it uses as much power as 300,000 homes. Is that a little? Is that a lot? How much does one steel foundry use?

Edit: One steel foundry uses about 3,000 more than that, according to my napkin math

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sowbug 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can multiply your own power bill by 300,000 if money is a more relatable unit.

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wat10000 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

3,000x would be 2.1 terawatts. That would require about 100 Three Gorges Dam, currently the largest generating station in the world, to power one foundry. Or about 2,100 nuclear power plants of typical size. I think your napkin math might be a bit off.

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msisk6 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site.

Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing complain about at the moment so here we are.

	▲	dajt 26 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Where is the upside here? An alu plant probably provided more jobs and produced something of actual utility. This is burning power for no benefit to society. It's burning less power than before, but it's not producing anything of value. The world cannot reasonbly run without alu, it got along better without crypto currencies.
	▲	troglo-byte an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		A cryptominer is a "datacenter" in the same way that a chop shop is an automotive parts supplier.
	▲	lolc an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I do get utility out of aluminium.
	▲	drivingmenuts 26 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How many people did the smelter employ vs how many people do the bitcoin miners employ? The smelter was providing jobs that fed money into the local economy. I'm sure much less money is coming out of the mining operation.

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nullc an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Home energy usage is knocked down people that don't that don't do anything at home and where almost their energy use is externalized (at places that make the goods they use, or other places where they spend most of their their waking hours).

So it's a useful figure if you want to make a shocking headline. "Uses as much power as infinity of something that uses no power!"

	▲	driggs an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Have you considered that it's used as a unit to represent capacity of our power grid? As in, we have now have the energy capacity for 300,000 fewer homes given this operating data center. So not only is it a relatable unit, but it's an incredibly meaningful unit for those who care about ensuring that energy availability actually support something of value (families) rather than something wasteful (crypto mining).