this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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Americans will do anything but use the metric system.
No, in this case humans are just really bad with large numbers. Most people can't even get the difference between a millionaire a billionaire or a trillionaire, despite orders of magnitude difference.
Sometimes you have to use the power of a bomb or a star, or the amount of time it's going to take for heat death of the universe just to get the point across.
At least in this case it gets across the truly stupid amount of energy being wasted. As a general rule I think that if you can boil one of the great lakes with your daily thermal output you probably shouldn't be doing it.
Is that a realistic Approximation of energy usage? This seems a lot to me, even over the span of one day
Definitely off by a few orders of magnitude.
17gw is about the same size as the Hiroshima bomb - 63 terajoules is 17 GWh and the 9GW data centre produces at least 16GWs of heat. Pretty scary when looked at like that.
17gw of heat is both under and over estimate.
Caterpillar 2.5mw generators have maximum efficiency of 45%, and so 19gw is peak thermal power. that is roughly 26 hiroshimas per day.
It's an over estimate because datacenter cpu/gpu capacity utilization is on average under 10%. It could still produce all that power for export to trap all that heat in a valley.
Not that it would matter for this conversation, but at hyperscalers levels, the energy required for mechanical loads is under 20% of the compute load. Wouldn't surprise me if ~10% can be achieved at multi GW scale. Thus about 11GW total energy.
Does "9GW data center" not mean "a data center that consumes 9GW of power"?
Or is it "9GW of computers + 5GW of cooling + something"?
9GW should be the compute load goal, to which you need to add the mechanical and administrative loads. At higher scales they gain significant efficiencies which translates to market advantages.
its 9gw of consumption. 19gw of total heat generation.
For comparison, a blast furnace making steel uses on the order of 3600 GWh/yr and the energy comes primarily from coal.
9Gwh is a high number for a datacenter, but industrial processes use much more and much dirtier energy.
That's also one datacenter and the largest. Whereas there are many, many blast furnaces running all over the world.
9gw if run 24/7 (capacity utilization is actually low on average in US) is 551.88 twh/year. 1500x. Natural gas is not that much cleaner than coal from co2/ghg warming perspective.
Listen guy, maybe you haven’t noticed, but we have some serious fuckery we are trying to deal with here. While I agree that metric is a more logical system. We’re trying to get a grip while everything around us is crumbling. Switching to metric is in like volume 17 of our todo list right now, sandwiched between end daylight savings time and making the my pillow guy eat a sock.
Who's this 'we' you're speaking for. Do you have a frog in your pocket?
Sounds like he's talking about Americans. I don't think "frog personhood" has been established there at this time, unless one owns a corporation.
I still don't quite understand. Can I get a conversion into how many hotdogs the heat could cook?
Let's assume Costco size hot dogs (1/4 lb, or 0.11 kg), with an internal temp increase from fridge temperatures (37 F, or 276 K) to 165 F (347 K). Let's also assume the heat capacity of the hot dog is about 3000 J/kg*K. To heat up a single hot dog takes this much energy:
q=mc*deltaT => q=(0.11 kg)*(3000 J/kg*K)*(347K-276K)=23,430 J of energy.
The heat capacity here is 9GW. That is 9 gigajoules of energy per second, or 9 billion joules every second. Divide this by the number of joules to cook each hot dog gets us the number of hot dogs that could be cooked every second:
9,000,000,000/23,430=384,123 hot dogs/second
With this hot dogs per second figure, we can find how long this energy source would take to feed the entire US population a Costco hot dog.
342,000,000 people/384,123 hot dogs per sec=890 seconds
Converting this to minutes:
890/60=14.8 minutes
So, this source of energy could feed the entire population of the US a Costco hot dog in less than 15 minutes if properly harnessed.
Finally someone speaking english.
The math you just did terrifies me and I have no way of verifying it, so I'll just say good job and leave it at that.
I think it's also important to have a hotdogs per day figure, and the math from here is super simple, so I can do it.
384,1236060*24 = 33,188,227,200 hot dogs per day.
So the specific heat of water at those temperatures is 4184 J/kg K, and those food court hot dogs are probably about the same as Kirkland dinner franks, which have about 73g of water, 31 g of fat (specific heat of about 2300 J/ kg K), 16g of protein (1500 J/kg K), and 3g of sugars/carbs (1200 J/kg K), and let's say negligible ash, so we're left with a weighted average of about 3280 J/kg K.
That's within 10% of your assumed value, so I think I just wasted my time trying to check your assumption, which was pretty close to my number that took a lot more work.
Well, there you go, free lunch for every schoolkid. Silver lining.
More than two
"How many hot dogs a day? Well, gosh, I don't know. Some days it's just two. Other days...it could be up to, and I'm just ball parking here you understand, it could be...up to seven?"
"So...seven hot dogs a day."
"Yeah, probably safe."
It seems I should watch this show
9GW is first. That's metric. The other number is to give an estimate that is more relatable.
Yeah, who doesn't know the heat of an atom bomb? (which famously can vary by 4 orders of magnitude)
Well, everyone knows it's at least a lot. That's the point. Most people don't know what 9GW means, in terms of heat. Even a small nuclear bomb it's enough to vaporized a large area. This tells even the least informed person that it's an amount of energy that should be concerning.
That's why "Hiroshima" is now a unit. We're lucky "Tsar Bomba" isn't.
but first is peak power, not waste energy, we're still missing the SI estimated number of Wh wasted per day
True, yeah. It should be Wh, not just Watts. I think most data centers are designed to run 24/7 though, so the Wh might be close to the same as peak.
If they can tell us how many "atom bombs" per day it takes to power it, at least we could figure it out!
I wonder how many football fields long this thing is?
Well... It's 9GW of waste heat. Same as the energy supply.
Probably like 8GW of waste heat, and 1GW of infrasound
No, 9GW of electricity, and they claim 16GW total. With a greater than 50% efficient gas plant.
!anythingbutmetric@discuss.tchncs.de