Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Farmer Green,
compared with what? let's see the other options over the next 75 years
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
We'd be much better off with renewable, reasonably priced electricity for the whole country than any new-tech scheme (has anyone suggested hydrogen electrolysis yet?).
Someone suggested carbon fibre manufacture on Danyl's post. I'd like to hear more about the economics of that. But we either use this rare opportunity strategically, or we do not. Is spreading the extra energy around the existing users the best we can do?
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to George Darroch,
Why are we arguing climate change here?
because we are tolerating people wasting our time
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Gordon Campbell worries about the impact of the smelter fiasco on those 'mum and dad' investors.
At his press conference yesterday, even Prime Minister John Key confessed that he didn’t know how the possible closure of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter might affect the value of the state’s three other energy companies, besides Meridian. If Key doesn’t know, how are Mum and Dads – or institutional investors – supposed to make a rational decision about whether to invest their money?
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Smelter consultant Lance Wiggs reckons data centres are not a viable replacement for Tiwai's electricity take.
So how much does a data center use? Well the new IBM one in Auckland, which cost $80m, has backup generator capacity for “266 homes”. So to absorb Tiwai’s electricity use we’d need we’d need 2,354 of those flash Auckland IBM data centers, at a total cost of $188 billion.
That’s not going to happen.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Farmer Green,
Always far better to shoot the messanger.
Like most humans, I tend to judge whether something is worth engaging with by how it's presented and by whom. Life's too short to be 'debating' with flat-earthers.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Matthew Poole,
The Economist wrote the article from which the NBR piece is drawn
far more appealing than Gibson's foamy headlining, thanks.
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Mr Brislen writes on data centres being a possible silver lining in Rio Tinto's likely exit from Tiwai.
Facebook and Apple have just opened giant data centres in Prineville, Oregon (population 9253), a town nobody has ever heard of.
The reason? It's cold, which helps keep the cost of air conditioning down, it's remote, it has a guaranteed power supply, there's lots of water nearby (good for water cooling which data centres need in a big way) and other data centres are nearby, meaning there's a pool of already trained staff able to work in them.
Prineville isn't alone - Quincy in Washington state (population 7000) has five such data centres (Microsoft, Yahoo, Intuit, Dell and Sabey Corporation) with another one coming online shortly.
Maybe Bluff is not too small and isolated to host a cluster after all?
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Please post climate denialist material somewhere else. It's a waste of everyone's energy (pun regretted).
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Richard Aston,
It could even make sense they helped with capital costs.
Gee, an enlightened government might even do that.