Yandex data center in Finland loses power due to contract termination

[nicce]

Article is misleading. Yandex is not part of the sanctions yet. Electricity was cut simply because they failed to make a new contract.

Finnish source: https://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art-2000008786328.html

[Ndymium]

Yep, their electricity sales contract ~~expired~~ (EDIT: ended for unspecified reasons) and they don't have a new contract. Their electricity transfer contract is still valid because their Finnish company is not a part of sanctions. (Electricity sales and transfer is separate in Finland.) When they get a new electricity sales contract, then the transfer company will reconnect power.

I think the only matter here related to the war could be that electricity sales companies might be reluctant to sell a contract to them, due to PR reasons. But I bet one of them will, and they will get their power back.

[teh_klev]

The article title is misleading, but it does mention in the body of the story that:

"The reasons for the disconnection are not clear, as Yandex is not currently on sanctions lists, but its news and blogging services, as well as a senior executive, have been criticized for spreading Russian propaganda"

[_1tan]

Legally Yandex is well integrated into the EU. Their main co. is a dutch, public company. Not sure how sanctions should work in this case.

[ex3ndr]

Wonder why since it is completely controlled by pu

[Gravityloss]

@dang could you fix the wrong headline?

[RamRodification]

RBC calculates that running a 40MW data center on diesel would require 12,000 liters of diesel fuel per hour

Holy crap

[dredmorbius]

Checking that out:

  You have: 40 MWh
  You want: tonoil
          * 3.4393809
          / 0.29075
  You have: 1 tonoil
  You want: barreloil
          * 6.8419323
          / 0.14615754
  You have: 6.84 barrel
  You want: liter
          * 1087.4731
          / 0.00091956298

So, roughly 1,100 litres of oil per 40 MWh(thermal).

The generator is likely ~30% efficient at converting heat to eletricity, so bump that up to 3,700 litres/hour.

Even allowing for other inefficiencies, 12,000 litre/hr seems high to me. Though as a practical measure it may be correct. It's within a factor of 4 of the actual demand though.

(Calculations using GNU units.)

[pjc50]

If we take an estimate of 20GW from https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index (huge variance!), and multiply that up, we can estimate that bitcoin is consuming the equivalent of six million liters of diesel every hour.

(It's not going to be diesel, it's mostly a mix of coal and natgas depending on where it happens, but that gives you an idea of the size)

[bob1029]

I hope figures like this make developers think twice about about throwing yet another layer of abstraction on to the pile.

How many VMs does an average business actually require, assuming the software wasn't written like total ass?

[markonen]

One of the Finnish news stories stated that as of now, the municipality is receiving only one fifth of the normal amount of waste heat they use for district heating. That sounds like they have shut a lot of things down to cope with the loss of power.

[hengheng]

Estimating 10W per core at full load, 4M CPU cores can get a lot done too.

[Gravityloss]

It's like a medium sized container ship.

[gumby]

> In early April, Nivos Energia announced it is buying a bioheat center from local firm HansHeat, which uses wood pellets or grain as fuel. [Emphasis mine]

Grain seems like a rather inefficient way to generate power. Do they mean the waste straw left behind after harvest!

[ChuckNorris89]

I would like to know why Yandex though that opening data centers in western counties would be a good idea.

Surely they knew that, as a Russian company, if their government ever becomes aggressive, they'll also be targeted by sanctions.

[ThrustVectoring]

> If the situation so requires, we would have to replace waste heat mainly with Russian natural gas and light fuel oil.

Why wouldn't this just be using the electricity freed up by not powering the data center? Thermodynamically, the data center is just a resistive load, so assuming the electrical distribution system can handle the load, it should be a drop-in replacement.

[namibj]

There are no resistive heaters feeding the district heating system, only burners.

[ukd1]

That also assumes the other (non data center) parts of the system could take that load. I'd guess it's unlikely to have been over-engineered by 40MW. Then they'd also have to have the resistive heaters, which is doubtful as they aren't needed normally.

[obsrvatlarge]

Maybe it is a question of money or actually currency. Here in Finland electricity is paid for with euros. Good luck for Yandex trying to find a supplier in Finland willing to accept Russian roubles these days.

[jeroenhd]

It should be said that the European Yandex probably uses euros as well, though I'm not sure if their European income is significant. You can visit their tax evasion office over at Schiphol Boulevard 165, 1118 BG Schiphol, The Netherlands, right next to Schiphol Airport.

If their European counterpart isn't profitable or their tax evasion setup routes all funds through Russia then they may have trouble paying, but I think it's more likely that the political situation of the war itself is to blame.

[nuker]

> Tigran Khudaverdyane was forced to resign when he was hit with sanctions by the European Union.

So, did he got sanctions lifted? If yes, what was the point? It is not a musical chairs game, it is a bloody war.

[mensetmanusman]

Didn’t think I would live to see a search engine be a causality of war.

[changoplatanero]

How hot does waste heat from data centers get? Is it up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit? Seems like it would be difficult to efficiently transport that heat into nearby homes.

[cmutel]

The Nordic countries are famous for pioneering low temperature district heating. This can be as low as 50 C. Sorry, no citation, this is what I heard at a project meeting on district heating networks in Switzerland.

District heating with such (relatively) low temperatures is no problem, the energy to pump is much less than the energy to heat. My house is heated from nuclear waste heat pumped more around 10 kilometers.

[brtkdotse]

A lot of housing in Sweden is heated using left over heat from the industry (“spillvärme”). The industries actually rely on this for cooling.

From what I hear, it’s usually pretty expensive compared to ground/air-to-water heat pumps (1 SEK vs 0.4 SEK per kWh of heat)

[wasmitnetzen]

Stockholm has the "Open District Heating" project doing that: https://www.opendistrictheating.com/

(Disclaimer: I work for a company involved in this)

[changoplatanero]

Oh I see that they can use heat pumps to concentrate the heat and make its reuse more efficient

[fareesh]

Yandex is not sanctioned, and should not be - it has nothing to do with the war, and neither do its users. Yandex offers a decent email service for free, and you can use your own domain. I had set up one for a few non-profits who are trying to get up and running. They really have nothing to do with the war, so having an outcome where their day-to-day operations are inconvenienced is a really thoughtless turn of events. I have read articles about unwelcome Russian dogs and cats and Russian artists who are losing livelihoods for no reason.

Either Putin is a democratically elected leader, or he is a dictator. If he's a dictator why does it make sense to punish normal everyday Russians? Oligarchs and henchmen I can understand, but a cat? or a singer? Or Dostoevsky?

This kind of reaction in the west is really something else. The rest of the world just wants NATO and Russia to get along but instead there is a proxy war and the Ukranian people are suffering most of all. It was obvious to expect this sort of thing from Putin, which is why it's even more surprising that there has been such an obsession with poking the bear. What did western leaders think will happen? And was it really worth so many millions of Ukranians having their lives ruined? And for what? NATO membership? They just wanted to go about their lives. The absolute neocon brazenness of the USA where folks like John McCain was addressing crowds of protesters in Maidan saying that the USA supports their political cause, and then a civil war broke out that has now lasted 8-10 years and now most of those same people are likely homeless. The foreign policy of the west is just dumbfounding, truly. So many parts of the world and so many people have had their lives ruined because of it.

[kangda123]

Regardless of the alleged guilt of an average Russian (and the West's moral superiority to dispense punishment), doing business with Russian companies simply helps finance the war. Paying higher prices is literally the least we can do to save lives (on both sides of the conflict).

Just like we should not persecute every Russian, we should not take away Ukrainians' law to defend themselves. I come from a country that spend a better part of last 250 years under occupation and, frankly, lots of people would rather die fighting than go through that again. Especially, given that Russia is not a free country even for their own citizens - let alone conquered nation.

[marcinzm]

Russia invaded Crimea at a time when most Ukrainians did not support NATO membership so saying this is about NATO is just deflection. The only reasons NATO membership has become such a popular option is because Russia already invaded Ukraine once in the last decade and has supported a second war by proxy in Ukraine for almost a decade.

[trasz]

Anything that hurts Russia is fair at this point. This isn't one of those weird conflicts: this time there's clearly the bad side and the good side; Russia is guilty invading and perpetrating genocide for ideological reasons, and the West is helping the victim defend itself. (And also solve the root of the problem in the long run, by making sure Russia won't be able to invade anyone else in forseeable future.)

Of course the West isn't without fault here: it made the mistake of ignoring previous cases of Russian aggression, but it appears it's being finally fixed now.

[chelical]

It makes sense to punish Russia in the same vein we punished the citizens of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Putin was legitimately elected even if there were discrepancies, he's still extremely popular. The war has elevated his approval within Russia.

The rest of this post operates under the premise that Ukrainians wanting to be a part of the EU/NATO was manipulated by the West. Even if that were the case, the invasion and the ongoing war crimes are committed by Russia.

[throw_a_grenade]

Russia and "Putin" does not exist in vacuum -- they need resources to wage the war. Sanctioning taxpayers to Russia takes away resources needed for war effort.

[mantas]

Arabs could have easily sanctioned US and the rest of West back then. Or maybe people were happy to see Husein go... While in this case the world has a different opinion.

[can16358p]

> at a current price of €2.175 per 1 liter

What? €2175 per liter of diesel? Am I missing something?

/edit: nvm I misinterpreted decimal point as a thousands seperator.

[vardump]

A very reasonable misunderstanding, because that's exactly how 2.175 would be interpret in Finland. As 2175. In Finland, comma is the decimal separator.

[heavenlyblue]

Out of all places, Hacker News misunderstanding the meaning on `.` in a number? :) Every single programming language uses a dot as a floating-point separator.

[medo-bear]

in some places across EU decimal points are thousands separators and commas indicate decimals. i find this confusing too

[ginko]

I guess the . is supposed to be a decimal point.