Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

[theamk]

"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet...

That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.

[dangalf]

Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.

[kelnos]

I would definitely call that an inefficiency. Heat is wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work. The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose.

It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new electricity.

(And this is before getting into the fact that I believe mining cryptocurrency is a wasteful use of electricity in the first place.)

[userbinator]

I wonder if there's enough heat being produced for it to act as a district heating plant.

[Lerc]

Well It it's using solar power it's just moving heat from one place to another.

I guess, if it's using fossil fuel to generate power it's also just moving heat from one place to another, but really really slowly. The relevant factor there is that the long term storage was performing a important secondary function of holding a lot of co2.

It's in Texas, surely that's an area amenable to solar production. What are they actually using there.

[EGreg]

Seriously, the only way I would accept Bitcoin mining is as a winter heating source that pays for itself. Why can't people sell those?

[fainpul]

> By design, it's enormous electric heater.

You're right, it's not leaking, it's dumping excess heat on purpose.

However, I get triggered whenever someone uses the term "by design" wrongly. The generation of heat is not by design. It's an undesired side-effect of the computing being done. "By design" would mean that someone decided that there should be a certain amount of heat generation and made sure that it happens.

Most often I see this term misuse from developers who explain bugs as being "by design". It happens when two features interact in an undesired way that creates problems (a bug). Developers like to look at feature A in isolation, determine that it works as designed, then look at feature B, determine that it also works as designed, then they look at and understand the interaction between feature A and B and since they now understand what is happening, they claim it's "by design". However, nobody ever decided that feature A and B should interact this way. It was clearly an oversight and every normal person would agree that the interaction is undesired and a bug. But the developer says "won't fix, this is by design". Infuriating!

[akimbostrawman]

this obvious disingenuous framing is clearly on purpose to manipulate

[timeon]

Not sure what your point is. With POW inefficiency is by design.

[andai]

So I don't have any context for this. The article says it uses as much power as 300,000 homes. Is that a little? Is that a lot? How much does one steel foundry use?

Edit: One steel foundry uses about 3,000 more than that, according to my napkin math

[wat10000]

3,000x would be 2.1 terawatts. That would require about 100 Three Gorges Dam, currently the largest generating station in the world, to power one foundry. Or about 2,100 nuclear power plants of typical size. I think your napkin math might be a bit off.

[sowbug]

You can multiply your own power bill by 300,000 if money is a more relatable unit.

[dirkt]

Isn't "you can waste energy and heat up our planet and make live for everybody else harder just to make money for a few" enough?

[jesse__]

I think a large steel foundry uses approximately 1/10 of the power of this facility.

Arc furnace foundry : 500 kw/tonne

Production : 150 t/hr

500*150 = 75 MW/h

[nullc]

Home energy usage is knocked down people that don't that don't do anything at home and where almost their energy use is externalized (at places that make the goods they use, or other places where they spend most of their their waking hours).

So it's a useful figure if you want to make a shocking headline. "Uses as much power as infinity of something that uses no power!"

[epolanski]

To solve crypto sudokus I would say it's a lot.

[msisk6]

This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site.

Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing complain about at the moment so here we are.

[tempodox]

Climate pollution on this scale should be rated a crime against humanity.

[t0bia_s]

Then what?

[e-dant]

This life is needlessly absurd.

Why does this even exist?

And yes, I get what mining is and I get what the blockchain does. I’m saying that proof of work is absurd.

[rixed]

Those datacenters are the moai of our time; if you step back, it's interesting to watch.

[epolanski]

Worse of all, many different coins have proved you can have different proofing methods and those could be applied to Bitcoin but core developers will pull any shenanigan to avoid this.

[phil21]

The authoritarian state of KYC/AML might be even more absurd to some.

Welcome to our cashless society. It’s naive to think no one would fight back.

It may have devolved to useless speculation and gambling for now, but the genie cannot be put back into the bottle very easily at this point.

[0xbadcafebee]

We stare at screens full of text and pictures every day. We had screens full of text and pictures 20 years ago. Yet somehow we have justified re-creating every single component multiple times over, spending hundreds of trillions of dollars, to get the same thing we had 20 years ago.

We've been able to talk to machines, have them understand that speech, and do work based on it, for decades. But we're all still typing into keyboards.

We've had devices which can track our eyes to move a mouse pointer for 37 years, but we all still use our hands/thumbs to move a mouse.

We had mobile devices which had dedicated keys for input which allowed us to input without looking, and we replaced those with mobile devices with no dedicated keys (so we have to look to provide input) and bodies made of glass so they would shatter when dropped and required additional plastic coverings to protect them. Even automobiles, where safety is a high priority, also adopted input devices which require looking away from the road.

Our world includes a government which is indented to be led via decisions from all the people, and could easily be overthrown by all the people, but only a select few people actually get to make decisions, and they don't have to listen to the people, and basically do whatever they want (wrt the other few people who get to make decisions).

Yes, life is needlessly absurd. It's best not to think about it unless you wanna end up in a padded room.

[kanemcgrath]

I always wondered if anybody has calculated how much of our global heating could be attributed, if any at all, to every electronic device, server, and engine outputting heat as a byproduct.

[hetspookjee]

I have the feeling that particular energy output does not so much, really. For example this plant in the image is about 700x400m and when multiplied with the suns peak output you already get a potential energy of 280MW. And this site almost triples that. The sun shines practically everywhere, though.

Humans produce about 20TW globally at this time (ChatGPT), while the sun adds about 174000TW of energy to the earth.

I guess you could argue that our waste heat does something, but I think the greenhouse gases that trap this enormous energy more effectively have a far bigger effect.

[csomar]

Negligible, almost invisible. Now the emissions (CO2) coming from the gas/oil/coal energy generation so you can run your device in the first place, that's very high.

[quickthrowman]

It’s 0%. Solar radiation is about 1.4kW per square meter.

We use a fraction of the sun’s total energy output each year, orders of magnitude more energy are in sunlight radiating onto the Earth than in the heat rejected from buildings with air conditioning.

[TGower]

I did a quick alalysis and it actually matched the ~1.5 degree celcius rise pretty accurately. It required a bunch of incorrect simplifying assumptions, but it was still interesting how close it comes.

Estimated energy production from all combustion and nuclear from the industrial revolution onwards, assumed that heat was dumped into the atmosphere evenly at once, calculate temperature rise based on atmosphere makeup. Ignores the impact of some of that heat getting sinked into the ground and ocean, and the increased thermal radiation out to space over that period. In general, heat flows from the ground and ocean into the atmosphere instead of the other way around, and the rise in thermal radiation isn't that large.

On the other hand, this isn't something that the smart professionals ever talk about when discussing climate change, so I'm sure that the napkin math working out so close to explaining the whole effect has to be missing something.

[arprocter]

The article mentions Riot Platforms, but the image seems to show Bitdeer Technologies

They're pretty much adjacent, but the orientation of the buildings is different:

https://www.google.com/maps/place//@30.5678809,-97.0740152,2...

[vondur]

Wow. Is there still enough money to be made in crypto to justify this kind of investment?

[whatsupdog]

You are kidding right? I'm sorry for assuming. But you have to be kidding. Bitcoin has been around 100k USD all this year. And about 450 Bitcoin are mined everyday, and this doesn't even include the Bitcoin miners get from transaction fees. So, there's about 45 million USD worth of Bitcoin being mined per day. I can go into profit calculations, but at the end of the day it comes down to how much you are paying for electricity.

[sershe]

New business idea: can they mine crypto in my kitchen, it's an old house and the heating is uneven. Also there are whole countries that run on central heating where hot water is pumped from a central power plant like facility to houses and apartments. Probably inefficient, but something they could do.

[mnemotronic]

Can infrared energy be reflected like light? What would a good reflector be? (THEORETICALLY) Would a parabolic dish over this facility be able to focus the heat to a single point and, if so, what would the temp be? Is it additive? Like X joules of Y degrees over Z square meters focused down to 1 Sq cm?

[doctor_phil]

Yes. Metal. No.

You want to read about "conservation of etendue" for a technical explanation. For an easier explanation, look for xkcd's excellent "Fire from Moonlight".

[Waterluvian]

Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space.

Oh let’s look at what the humans are up to with their climate change problem. Oh wow they’ve got giant data centers at work on the problem. I guess maybe it’s worth the extra heat. Let’s see what they’re calculati— nope they’re just collecting and trading numbers.

[iJohnDoe]

You’re overall point and sentiment isn’t wrong. As a species, we do tend to focus on things that aren’t for the collective good. If some collective good actually happens, then it’s almost guaranteed another group will come along to undo it.

We’re not a species that will likely ever reach singularity (unified, fully cooperative humanity). We operate in packs and if we don’t have a pack we’re loyal to then it’s every man for themselves.

[ramblerman]

> Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space

I also think we are pretty dumb. But what reference point makes you think we are either smarter or dumber than other spacefaring species

[inatreecrown2]

funny how somehow similar this image looks to that of a pc motherboard.

[quickthrowman]

This article is useless. Virtually every building rejects heat outside using vapor-compression refrigeration.

[t0bia_s]

Technically any kind of datacenters, not just crypto, produces heat. Clouds, AI, banaking segment, etc.

[danny_codes]

Sure, but those applications may actually do something useful. Crypto mining is entirely useless, except as a way to facilitate black-market transactions.

[anArbitraryOne]

I learned about turning energy into useful work and having heat as a byproduct, but never thought about turning it into useless work

[hulitu]

> Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

That's how they call Area 51 now ?

[johnnienaked]

What a waste

[krautburglar]

Ok. Now point at one of the AI datacenters for making titty pics and get back to us. Absolute corporate shilling / distraction.

[rvba]

The government(s) could tax bitcoin mining servers with 1000% tax.

[toenail]

That would just make miners move somewhere with more favorable regulation and taxation, and nothing would change. Funny how taxes work