Those photos don’t seem great for the environment.
Nothing people do has zero impact. But pretty much everything else has a bigger one. Coal will utterly destroy the land, and the gases emitted after it burns will destroy far more.
Solar like this on a few percent of the land will supply all the electricity people need. So it looks huge, but is surprisingly low-impact compared with other options, or things like raising cattle
I guess the lesser of two evils is better than doing nothing.
Maybe one day fusion will finally deliver and we might have cheap and clean energy with no consequences to the environment other than a few big reactors in a country. But until that day arrives and we work that out we have to transfer and Wind, Solar and batteries are winning because they are cheaper than gas, coal and nuclear.
So... I considered trying to start an energy-sustainable data center...
The math doesn't check out. One square meter of earth gets about 1,000 watts from sunlight. Our current solar panels only run at 20% efficiency at best. Servers I looked at average 500 watts... and we usually put a bunch of servers stacked up in a single rack, which you can only fit one of in one square meter.
As AI grows, it's only gonna get worse. We need nuclear or geothermal or hell, fusion if we can make it not 50 years away.
But it explains why Amazon and such are looking into smaller scale nuclear. Let's see how that goes I guess...
Edit: I'm not saying solar is a bad idea. We just need more energy production of many sorts
Your numbers are old. If you are building today with anyone ad much as mentioning AI, you might as well consider 100kW/rack as ”normal”. An off-the-shelf CPU today runs at 500W, and you usually have two of them per server, along with memory, storage and networking. With old school 1U pizza boxes, that’s basically 100kW/rack. If you start adding GPUs, just double or quadruple power density right off the bat. Of course, assume everything is direct liquid cooled.
The thing is we can gather that solar energy from other locations too. We can harvest wind and hydro, which are just solar power in a different form. We can gather solar energy that's deposited off of our site in this way.
You're assuming that the world is covered in server racks. I don't expect anything like that, even with significant increases in datacenter construction.
Let's assume 1kw per person. 10 billion people at peak population some time hence. So about 150 billion m^2^ to provide 1kw per person 24/7. The earth's surface area is 510.1 trillion m², of which about 1/3 is land. So we're probably just fine on renewables.
Tbh it’s better than strip mining or coal power plants.
And in extremely hot areas, planting crops under solar arrays is a great idea, and can help more sensitive crops survive in areas where they’d otherwise get baked to death.
There's actually research that shows that farming under solar cover increases moisture retention and the crop yields of certain plants. You'll also note that a lot of these installations are on marginal land- steep hillsides, arid land, and even floating on reservoirs. The latter slows the rate of evaporation from the reservoir as well, so it has a net environmental benefit.
You're right though, not every installation is perfect. But we seldom ask these same questions when it's a new housing development or a Walmart with a moat of paved parking around it.
This message was sponsored by big oil.
The impact of our incessant growth continuously erodes the environment, wiping out ecosystems for development and depleting our finite materials. Our growth mindset excuses ourselves of the "lesser evil" of renewable energy.
Indeed this isn't great for the environment and I'm again disappointed about this community's shortsightedness in refusing to see it that way.
Not sure if that thumbnail pic is China or Mirrodin
At this scale, a geosynchronous solar power satellite beaming down power as microwaves actually seems chapter and more reasonable.
You know, other than the single point of failure in space part. I guess it's a bad decade for that idea.
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