Can someone tell me what is these data centres

KildareP

Our climate is well suited to these sort of datacentres - relatively cool (significantly reduced aircon requirements), our air is a good humidity level (too dry air means static which means dead electronics), we rarely suffer extremes in weather (tornadoes, flash floods, intense thunderstorms, blizzards, earthquakes) and as mentioned we are well connected between Europe and the USA.

The problem is we've allowed these datacentres to come online very quickly while simultaneously shutting down our turf, oil and coal plants in the name of going green with nothing stable to replace them, all the while moving to electrify transport and heating.

Wind and solar can only do so much and you cannot rely on it to be there at the required levels when you need it at any given moment so you need a predictable "baseload" that can ramp up quickly and predictably when you need it.

When push comes to shove, datacentres are high volume, stable, steady, 24/7 consumers of electricity, unlike houses and offices which use the vast majority of their daily electricity over a very short space of time then practically nothing for the remainder of the 24 hours. Thus, when grid shortages arise, Eirgrid and the electricity supply companies have far more to lose by cutting off datacentres as opposed to residential areas. So guess who is going to get cut?

Clareman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957631#Comment_117957631

They do use wind turbines, in so far as they are taking the electrify from the national grid which is in turn fed from the turbines (Electricity | Energy Statistics In Ireland | SEAI), they can't just pop a load of turbines onto the top of their buildings to generate their own heat for a number of reasons, first off being as you point out turbines are often near the coast where they don't impact anyone, take a drive past a few wind farms at some stage and imagine those being located near data centres which are normally next to urban areas. The other issue with them generating their own power is the quality of the feed, wind turbines are like dynamos on a bike, the faster you go the brighter the light and vice versa, this isn't suitable for a data centre which needs a consistent, clean power source, even the standard power supply isn't clean enough for a lot of the data centre so it'll go through a UPS first.

Outside of the actual data, the largest output from a data centre is heat, anyone using any kind of technology knows that they give off heat, now imagine thousands and thousands of servers, data centres are very smart in re-using this heat, often it is brought back into the building to keep it at a standard temperature or turned back into electricity in some kind of heat recovery system, but a lot of time the heat is just "lost", there are plans to feed this heat back to local residential buildings which in turn will reduce the need for energy from those premises but that means that the data centres need to be close to residential areas and there is a bit of a housing issue at the moment so it's not always feasible to build the data centres close to where people live.

In my opinion we're going to be in a constant power battle and as we look to move more and more things to electricity the more and more electricity we will need, for the past decade or so there has been a massive shift to electricity, most houses are being build with electrical based heating solutions, we're being pushed to electric cars, etc. etc., that power has to come from somewhere, data centres are the "low hanging fruit" at the moment but there will be more and more drains on the system as well as more and more power is needed on a 24/7 basis, the future is the house with 2 electrical cars, an electrical heating solution as well as loads of smart devices to make your life easier (any ad break shows this) but I don't know what is going to power it, for example in my house having 2 cars charged over night, 2 electrical showers in the morning as well as all the other "stuff" will mean I'll be using more power than a small factory of 20 years ago all while the cost of power goes up.

DoctorEdgeWild

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957639#Comment_117957639

I can vouch for this, been involved in building data centres for the last year and a half and there's an unbelievable amount of trades involved on site, absolutely massive projects and we're only a small part (some of the steelwork) but they've absolutely been behind recent expansion/new staff in my company. Security is crazy though, understandably considering data is more valuable than anything these days.

dudley72

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957639#Comment_117957639

The problem is we now don't have enough builders. For instance on facebook they have a guy who was working on a local site as a foreman, he got a job on facebook for more money and he was standing along the road pushing a button on traffic lights for about 12 months, it was his job to let traffic past and then turn the light red when one of the facebook trucks had to cross the road

This is why you are seeing such a shortage of tradesmen across housing and even doing off jobs. They can pick up handy numbers on a DC for big money. Fair play to them and might as well make good money while they can but Ireland needs more construction workers to cover off these people.

In terms of why DC's in Ireland well the reasons are clear and already discussed. I do think when we get these DC's into Ireland we should be reviewing the requirements, Facebook talks about they are fully using renewable energy, what they dont tell you is that renewable is the energy we would have been using for houses etc.

For instance, on facebook they have a massive roof space, yet they are talking about building a huge solar plant a couple of miles away in fields, why not get facebook to fill the roof of the DC's with solar panels? I know Kingspan had a plan to do something similar

horse7

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957557#Comment_117957557

He drives a VW transporter.

Clareman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957808#Comment_117957808

Chances are the roof of the data centre is used to get rid of a lot of heat so the whole place would need to be re-done to accommodate solar, other factors would be shading, facing south(ish), etc. etc., then the fact that we have vast periods without sun light which means the solar energy will need to be "stored" for night time use which would take up a lot of space in an already full area so it makes sense that they'll need a new location.

Again, in my opinion, the requirements for data centres are simple, companies (Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) need data centres to run their operations, for example as companies move to Office 365 this means that there's no need for companies to have their own Exchange server so they "rent" part of 1 that's located in a Microsoft data centre, in a roundabout way this will have a positive impact as a large number of servers can be turned off but all that will be seen is the power used by the Microsoft data centre, as these companies are already in Ireland it's in our interest to give them what they want, after all if they are to setup their data centres in another country what's to stop them taking a load of jobs with them?

salmocab

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957808#Comment_117957808

Facebooks roof space is covered with hundreds of units for cooling the data halls below.

Lefty2Guns

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957758#Comment_117957758

I work in the industry and recently left a company that 75% of their work was designing DC's across Europe. I now work for a company that 50% of its work involves designing and building DC's across Europe. That's just from the design side of things.

I recently worked on an Amazon project and the security on it was unreal.

Clareman

Considering the value of some of the equipment in there for scrap value alone I'm not surprised that security is so high, not to mention the retail cost of a lot of the components, 1 cloud server rack could have millions of euros worth of kit in it and that's before all the cabling around the place is taken into consideration, they aren't a cheap place to setup but once setup, outside of swopping out of older IT kit, they are relatively cheap to maintain onsite.

iColdFusion

The hypocrisy of the government blaming data centers for power shortages when ESB and Eirgrid are both semi-state companies is crazy, Government are acting like data centres just pop up out of nowhere instead of going through 2+ years of planning and consultations plus paying massive capital contributions to the ESB to get their power connections, any power shortages are 100% down to ESB/Eirgrid for just pocketing the money and not upgrading their generation capacity and networks.

https://www.esb.ie/tns/press-centre/2021/2021/03/12/esb-group-announces-full-year-results-for-the-year-ended-31-december-2020

EA Games have a good few of it's Video game servers located here too. Wait until the new Battlefield game is released in November. Major blackout on it's way. 🤣

DoctorEdgeWild

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117958561#Comment_117958561

It really is. Before I started in this place, I'd never considered the scale of the places as they are deliberately built 'out of the way'. The design work alone is crazy, then filter down through every possible trade, service and security, you've got a lot of jobs riding on them. (including mine!! :D)

Lefty2Guns

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117958778#Comment_117958778

100%, the Government couldn't afford to stop them being built here. As another poster stated, its not as though they have just popped up out of the ground. You could be 2/3 years from planning to design before it gets to site. Unfortunately, IMO, we need DC's here in the country. The knock on effect if they stopped constructing them would be similar enough to what happened in 2008 when the country relied so much on the construction of houses. The ripple effect was felt throughout each industry.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117958670#Comment_117958670

Absolutely. There was a comment in one of the other DC-related threads about how Covid had prevented essential maintenance on some of the gas-powered generators. I'm really curious in what way Covid contributed to essential maintenance not being done.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957631#Comment_117957631

The wind doesn't blow all the time.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957648#Comment_117957648

Sure dont we have lots of clouds floating free around the west of Ireland with no one making any use of them🤔

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117959090#Comment_117959090

Is usually down to mid level managers abdicating their responsibility to actually manage in a crisis by saying "but covid".

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957631#Comment_117957631

I lost touch with the story - so I do not know what is happening now - but Microsoft started "Project Natick" in 2014 off the coast of Scotland which would go one better than wind turbines.

They submerged an entire data centre in a kind of tube structure. They availed of the "Free" energy of tidal forces along with the "Free" cooling this involved. In fact last time I remember hearing about it the cooling of the entire system was 3% of the total running energy. Whereas some land based solutions have a 1:1 situation where 50% of the power used in running the data centre is to cool it.

I know the plan was to run the submerged data centre for a few years to see how it worked. Obviously maintenance was an issue as you can not simply send people down there to pull out broken hard drives and replace them. But if it worked it would be very interesting.

Also because of many bureaucracy issues it was estimated that while it takes nearly 2 years to set up and deploy a completely new land data centre - they reckon a submerged ocean based one could be done within 90 days.

Fandymo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957639#Comment_117957639

Yeah, it’s not like we need houses or anything.

Ash.J.Williams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957542#Comment_117957542

electric cars are shite

Ash.J.Williams

there's datacentres we need, so we can function, but we have several datacentres yet to be built that the UK, Europe and the the rest of the world need and will drain 30% of our energy.

The J Stands for Jay

They have taken the lead out of petrol and I don't feel that petrol cars are adding a great deal to the pollution of the world.

Then I'm sure you wouldn't mind being locked in a room with an idling petrol car?

Ger Roe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117955843#Comment_117955843

It does indeed, and just the other day it was announced that we could be in serious trouble regarding electric energy supply, for every one of the next five years that they have forecast for.

It is not that people are against data centres, but more that we are not planning for the requirements that these (and other) developments will need. In fact,all we have are plans.... but we are not delivering the infrastructure and have fallen very short on most of the targets we either gave ourselves, or were committed to through various international agreements.

In the current circumstances the only short term fix option is to reduce demand and that will most likely be done by hiking the price charged to the easily targeted domestic consumer. It will be dressed up as a potential for saving through the smart meter roll out, (if you can use more energy at night, the increased charges will affect you less) but in the end it will simply cost us all more to use less energy.

It is only sensible to now ask the question why we are encouraging high energy use companies to locate here, when we do not have the infrastructure to support them.

BrianD3

Data centres and power consumption were covered in an unintentionally hilarious way on yesterday's Today Show. One woman had the innovative idea that we should, like, generate power naturally, like from waves and stuff.

Ian O' Doherty then came in talking about the cloud and how data isn't actually stored there but in data centres. No sh*t.

Then they were talking about how maybe we should send fewer email to save power, maybe use more pen and paper.

Markcheese

Are we all going to move to electric cars - ? Yes -but it's going to take a while - all NEW cars will have to be electric by 2030 - Most ( not all but most ) people will top up their batteries over night , when there is plenty of spare capacity -

Same with your shower - you'll probably just heat your hot water cylinder with cheap rate electricity over night ..

Heating ? Well if your home is very well insulated you shouldn't need much but yeah coal and oil are prob on the way out - gas will prob be a lot dearer but if you're using less then ok , and the big push is electric heat pumps ,-

Have eirgrid or the gov actually blamed data centres for our potential power shortages ? I've heard lots of "commentators" doing this , in fairness eirgrid have given the approval for data centres on the grid - if there's been political interference they should say !!

Ger Roe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117962447#Comment_117962447

In order to answer the future energy supply question fully, there would have to be a considerable degree of communication and cooperation between various agencies and several government departments. As a country, we have an abysmal record on that aspect - left hand mainly doesn't know, or care, what the right hand is doing. Each department looks after it's own aspect exclusively and disregards the fact that it is one of several component parts affecting a far broader issue.

riclad

Facebook has millions of users it has to store all their data videos, images, posts, on servers in a secure building and send that data all around the globe . Data centres use alot of power . It needs data centres in most country's. The cloud is just a name for servers located in a data centre that can be accessed from any device online

I've been in a about 20 data centers.

Any decent size company has their main infrastructure and servers in data centers.

Even the leading supermarkets in Ireland are in data centers.

The issue here is with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Google etc. The major players where one or two racks won't do them.

They need multiple buildings.

BraveDonut

The first 45 seconds of this video will tell you how interesting they are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdYtuMnlu1I

BraveDonut

I used to work for one of the large companies mentioned at the start of this thread. I was once told that they have paid for first dibs on ALL of the diesel stored in Dublin port should they need to run on generators in the event of a national grid failure