The "leave tech and find some pastoral life" is a very tempting dream.
I know a lot of technologists who do something physical with their hobby time. Woodworking is top of the list... I know a blacksmith. There are quite a few who do painting (and the entire subset of spending that excess disposable income on plastic to paint).
Its to have something that has permanence when the lights are turned off.
Water and power use has implications for the amount of compute a given data center has and that may be regarded as a trade secret... or so the various data center owners and utilities claim.
> The case represented a major test of Oregon public records law. After The Oregonian/OregonLive requested Google’s records last year, The Dalles sued the news organization to prevent the information’s release. It argued Google’s water use was a “trade secret” exempt from Oregon disclosure requirements.
> Updates: Following the settlement reached between The Oregonian and the city of The Dalles, a Google spokesperson told the Associated Press that the tech company would no longer seek to protect its site-level water-use numbers as a trade secret at any of its data centers nationwide. And after the city turned over Google’s water-use data, The Oregonian reported that the tech company’s water use “nearly tripled in the past five years, and the company’s data centers now consume more than a quarter of all the water used in the city.”
> ...
> The Oregonian first requested records about Google’s water usage in The Dalles last September. But city officials denied the request submitted by business reporter Mike Rogoway, arguing that the records are “trade secrets” exempt from disclosure under the Oregon Public Records Law.
> The newspaper decided to challenge the city’s denial, asking the district attorney for Wasco County to weigh in. After reviewing the city’s rejection, the district attorney sided with The Oregonian, concluding that the city failed to meet its burden to show that Google’s water usage is a trade secret and ordering the city to disclose the requested records.
> The Google Data Center in Lincoln, named Agate LLC, claimed their electricity usage and water usage were trade secret information, citing Neb. Rev. State §§ 81-1527; 84-712.05 and NAC TITLE 115, CH. 2. In fact, Google did this for all three data centers, including their sites in Omaha and Papillion.
> In an oral ruling delivered during an August 17 hearing, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Ehlke found that the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) acted unlawfully when it denied a public records request seeking unredacted documents related to electrical load projections at Meta’s Beaver Dam data center. The PSC defended its refusal to release the information, claiming it was a trade secret. Judge Ehlke, however, was not convinced. He ruled that the information did not qualify as a trade secret because it lacked independent economic value, and he ordered its release.
1/4 of the cities water use is pretty impressive though the Dalles isn't that big. It is very dry though so I would be concerned about water use as a resident.
I think it's a no-win situation, because I also think of that talk. But if I credited the saying to Monterio, I'm sure someone would remind me that he sourced it from Goodfellas.
The link 'past' in the top bar allows you to see the front page in the past.
From 2010 ... https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-10-04 that still looks similar (though I find it amusing that Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754134 is on the front page "... My prediction (heh pun intended) is that you see enormous changes in the field when processing by GPU's becomes much more available. There are some algorithms that are simply difficult to research because labs don't have access to fast enough machines. ...")
There's certainly been some broification and the various reddit exoduses have been shifting the average user a bit.
I do believe you've got your top color set to ff007f rather than ff6600 if you're forgetting what the site looked like then.
And we've had difficulty as humans to childproof our sandboxes and infrastructure. Things that are otherwise innocuous spots to coordinate between like minded toddlers can become problematic.
For non-potable use, probably. Potable use might require some more treatment checks on it. It's one thing to use it for flushing the toilet... showering might be ok. Not sure about washing dishes. Washing clothes, maybe.
And for the "the amount of times I change out 2 gallons of water from the dehumidifier in the basement in the summer"... there's a lot of moisture out there.
This is constrained by season. In the winter, its much easier to get to 0% humidity than it is in the summer.
> We’ll imagine our storm measures 100 kilometers on each side and has a high TPW content of 6 centimeters. This means the water in our rainstorm would have a volume of: 100km x 100km x 6cm = 0.6km^3
> That water would weigh 600 million tons (which happens to be about the current weight of our species). Normally, a portion of this water would fall, scattered, as rain—at most, 6 centimeters of it.
Change that to 4cm for current conditions... but that's a lot of water.
That has a table of how much water at different humidity and temperature combinations. It's currently about 20 °C and that gives us 15.6 g/m^3.
... but there's an awful lot of air around.
This can also be complicated if you have trees or other vegetation around. The humidity at my parents place (fairly deep in the woods in farmland) is always much higher than it is if you go to the road (or in town).
> Some research conducted by USDA Agricultural Research Service suggests that corn can contribute between 3,500 and 5,000 gallons of water per acre to the atmosphere over the course of one to two days. A typical pool contains 18,000 - 20,000 gallons.
...
So, it's complicated. Maybe, a little bit, depends on where you are.
> Situated on 8 acres of industrial land, the Kapolei Energy Storage project comprises 158 Tesla Megapack 2 XL lithium iron phosphate batteries, which are about the size of a shipping container. All told, the KES project provides 185 MW of total rated power capacity, or the largest possible instantaneous discharge, and 565 MWh of energy capacity, or the maximum amount of stored energy.
> The system can meet 17% of Oahu’s electricity demand for three hours at peak load or six hours at half load, Brandon Keefe, the executive chair of Plus Power — the company that developed the project — told USA Today. Plus Power “develops, owns, and operates standalone battery energy storage systems that provide capacity, energy, and ancillary services, enabling the rapid integration of renewable generation resources,” according to the company’s Jan. 11 news release announcing the start of operations at its KES facility.
The amount of power rooftop solar in Hawaii is allowed to export to the grid is regulated.
> Customers enrolled in NEM Plus Limited Export are required to install a control device at the utility meter to limit the combined export capacity of the existing and additional generation to the capacity of the original NEM system. The battery must be programmed to 'load-following' mode so as not to export to the grid -- except when providing exports for grid services.
> Lately though, electricity, not recreation, has become the big-ticket wind client in the Columbia Gorge. Wind turbines have sprung up all over the blustery hilltops in eastern Washington and Oregon, an area soon to become home to the largest wind farm in the world, developed for customers of Southern California Edison. Indeed, half the massive new wind power generated in the Pacific Northwest goes down the grid to California.
> For the last three weeks, however, many of the wind farms have been ordered to shut down their generation for several hours a day — victims of an unusual surplus of hydroelectric power that has confounded regional electricity operators and infuriated renewable energy advocates who have worked so hard to develop the region’s wind bonanza.
> The problem is an unexpected collision between two of the Northwest’s most treasured environmental assets, wind power and endangered salmon. Spring flows on the Columbia are so high that power system operators say they cannot dial back hydroelectric generators without harming the small juvenile fish now making their way down the river in their spring migration to the sea. With the turbines generating so much electricity, there is much less room on the grid for wind power.
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In some areas, hydro is coupled with environmental regulations. You can either use the water for power (doesn't mix with the air when doing so), or have it go over the spillway (substantial mix with the air).
The hydro plants, during periods of time when fish are swimming upstream are regulated on how much they can have go over the spillway - and so are forced to generate power... and potentially more power than the demand calls for, and so you've got negative rates.
> BPA insists it can dump only a limited amount of water over the dams because excess spillage creates dangerous levels of nitrogen that are harmful to salmon and other fish. The curtailments may defy an order from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Ferc), which ruled in December that BPA, as operator of 31 federal dams and much of the regional grid, cannot discriminate against wind power by forcing unilateral shutdowns. Several factors have changed since last year, but wind generators still stand to lose millions of dollars.
Another aspect of this is timing. Solar and wind have peak power at different times (and different times in relationship to demand).
> But notice that the thermal generation (nuclear, gas and coal) does not vary much at all. It is the hydro component that has to constantly cycle up and down to adjust to the demand and to wind’s intermittent supply. This competition between two renewable sources means that the relatively carbon-free accruable hydro energy must be shed to take on the wind supply, with no net benefit in carbon emissions or energy cost.
> But constant cycling between 2,000 and 4,000 MW produces significant wear on the hydroelectric turbine gates.
> The following graph compares wind energy production and total demand (or load) for the first half of January 2014. Wind is weakly, but negatively, correlated with demand, meaning wind energy generally comes onto the grid when it’s not needed. Thus the constant need to ramp down hydro production to accommodate.
> Solar coupled with storage technologies could alleviate, and possibly eliminate, the risk of over-generation. Curtailment isn’t necessary when excess energy can be stored for use during peak electricity demand. SETO launched several projects in 2016 that pair researchers with utilities to examine how storage could make it easier for utilities to rely on solar energy to meet customer needs around the clock. This research will enable even more solar energy to be integrated into the grid, while tackling the obstacles utilities face when incorporating solar.
Though this will be something to look at for in the winter with "how does the house get heated?" https://www.maps.com/home-heating-fuels/ - This likely won't impact New England too much as that's primarily oil, but it's something to watch for. The "batteries with solar backup" would have more difficulty if there was increased demand for electric heating and reduced solar production.
Took a little bit of digging to find it - I remembered the graphic at the top and found a blog post that copied it and linked to the blog post, but the blog post isn't there anymore... so web archive.
The "leave tech and find some pastoral life" is a very tempting dream.
I know a lot of technologists who do something physical with their hobby time. Woodworking is top of the list... I know a blacksmith. There are quite a few who do painting (and the entire subset of spending that excess disposable income on plastic to paint).
Its to have something that has permanence when the lights are turned off.
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