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Facebook's Newest Datacenter Relies On Arctic Cooling
Nerval's Lobster writes "One year and seven months after beginning construction, Facebook has brought its first datacenter on foreign soil online. That soil is in Lulea, town of 75,000 people on northern Sweden's east coast, just miles south of the boundary separating the Arctic Circle from the somewhat-less-frigid land below it. Lulea (also nicknamed The Node Pole for the number of datacenters in the area) is in the coldest area of Sweden and shares the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska, according to a local booster site. The constant, biting wind may have stunted the growth of Lulea's tourism industry, but it has proven a big factor in luring big IT facilities into the area. Datacenters in Lulea are just as difficult to power and cool as any other concentrated mass of IT equipment, but their owners can slash the cost of cooling all those servers and storage units simply by opening a window: the temperature in Lulea hasn't stayed at or above 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours since 1961, and the average temperature is a bracing 29.6 Fahrenheit. Air cooling might prove a partial substitute for powered environmental control, but Facebook's datacenter still needed 120megawatts of steady power to keep the social servers humming. Sweden has among the lowest electricity costs in Europe, and the Lulea area reportedly has among the lowest power costs in Sweden. Low electricity prices are at least partly due to the area's proximity to the powerful Lulea River and the line of hydroelectric dams that draw power from it."
With all those datacenters the town won't be that cold for long.
Heat needs somewhere to flow to, in order to make it valuable as a power source. Simply being very hot isn't sufficient. That said, the amount of light falling on the region IS directly usable as a power source, and with very little population or wildlife to disturb, this may prove quite an attractive place to gather solar power. Since transmission of power is one of its major cost factors, the data centers may well follow.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I know a lot of ./ is gonna come at this from a "those greedy scum bags" point of view, but this makes perfect sense from an overall humanity point of view, not just a greedy corporation point of view. Put power hungry stuff in a place where the power doesn't spew CO2 into the atmosphere thanks to hydroelectric. Someplace where they can use much less power by taking advantage of the outside cold. This is how it should be.
If there were just a way to extract energy from the ambient environment
There isn't. You can extract energy only by dumping the energy/heat of the ambient environment to a lower temperature or lower potential environment.
Having said that, most weather is due to a transfer of heat from the ambient environment (which in turn has been heated by considerable solar radiation) to space. And we can in turn harvest some of that energy transfer via wind or hydroelectric power.
Average Temp = -1.3 Celsius (29.6 Fahrenheit) Highest = 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) For those who believe the freezing and boiling points of water also make good reference points.
Thanks to wind and ocean currents all of Europe is warmer than many places in North America at the same latitude. Wisconsin gets colder than this place. I think it has more to do with abundant water and better year round temperature consistency.
In 2100 they'll probably still be a lot cooler than Kansas.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Lulea is a major center of the iron mining industry of northern Sweden, which produces massive amounts of waste heat. This is used to great advantage by the town already, and when Facebook asked the town if they should just went into the atmosphere or if they wanted to use the waste heat, the town said "no, thank you." Source: I'm a native of Lulea.
Thanks to global warming they won't be cool for much longer.
Actually, now the climate change denialists can say that shrinking of the polar icecaps isn't due to CO2, it is just facebook servers.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Get your spelling right. It's "Luleå", not "Lulea".
The first one is pronounced like "lu-leh-oh", the second would be "lu-leh-ah".
this? you mean lulea? you got any idea how dark it is during winter and even if the daylight is longer in the summer it goes through longer in the atmosphere losing some of the energy.
in africa you could get heat difference though quite easily. just dig a hole.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
In fact, the temperature has not been higher than 30C/86F for more than 24 hours in total since 1961
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
For those who believe the freezing and boiling points of water also make good reference points.
Well, I'm glad you put the temperature in F as well, since I find the body temperature of a cow very much more intuitive.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Luleå is the main port for Swedish steel, and there is quite a lot of it. So the powerusage of that data center is puny in comparision.