Facebook's Oregon Data Center Uses As Much Power As Entire County 208
1sockchuck writes "The first phase of the Facebook data center in Oregon uses 28 megawatts of utility power, local officials said this week. That's not extraordinary for a facility of that size in most data center hubs. But it stands out in Crook County, Oregon where all the homes and business other than Facebook use 30 megawatts of power. The economics of Facebook's presence in Oregon are outlined in a new study, which asserts that the Prineville facility has brought tens of millions of dollars into the local economy. The second phase of the Facebook project is now underway, and the local utility grid is being expanded to add capacity."
The study claiming economic benefits was commissioned by Facebook (reader beware).
Indeed (Score:5, Funny)
I have always noticed, the bigger you get, the more power hungry...
All this.. (Score:5, Funny)
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You've obviously never been to Prineville, OR. You could fill up 90% of that place with river and nobody would notice.
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They'll be kitty corner to any geothermal power coming out of Newberry Volcano, maybe FB can tap into that. Or make up claims to be doing so, since the juice is going to be sent to CA anyway, from what I've read.
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Hydro may not be particularly environment-friendly on a local level, but the point is that it's fairly localized in its effects - it doesn't spew crappy stuff into atmosphere or groundwater. And, unlike most other purported green power sources, it can be used on a very large scale here and now - indeed, most of the biggest power plants in the world are hydro.
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U.S. does not have [npr.org] a single unified power grid, though - at least not on the scale where there's meaningful load balancing between the parts.
I was going to post this to my Facebook feed.. (Score:5, Funny)
But then i'd be purpetuating the problem somewhat :)
Facebook... (Score:5, Insightful)
a source of pollution both on the Net and off.
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Isn't this datacenter powered from hydroelectric power? I think everyone is against burning fossil fuels for power (yay environment!), but whatever environmental damage damming the columbia river did happened 70 years ago. In terms of cleanest, cheapest power, there are few places better suited for a datacenter.
Re:Facebook... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this datacenter powered from hydroelectric power? I think everyone is against burning fossil fuels for power (yay environment!), but whatever environmental damage damming the columbia river did happened 70 years ago. In terms of cleanest, cheapest power, there are few places better suited for a datacenter.
Except that power is dumped onto a grid. If Facebook pulls 32megawatts from the grid, and the hydroelectric dam is providing it, then somebody else's coal plant (or nuclear) is making up the difference. Wasted electricity is wasted electricity.
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Although, In the NW, hydrolectric is something like 85% of the power grid.
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55.4% hydro in Oregon. This is down from 73.6% in 2000, according to the Energy Information Administration. [eia.gov] The slack has been taken up by everybody's favorite fossil fuel, gas, at 17.6% in 2010, now at 28.4%.
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55.4% hydro in Oregon. This is down from 73.6% in 2000, according to the Energy Information Administration. [eia.gov] The slack has been taken up by everybody's favorite fossil fuel, gas, at 17.6% in 2010, now at 28.4%.
Everyone's favorite fossil fuel is oil (and from it, gasoline). We don't burn oil or gasoline for electricity generation.
We do however use a lot of natural gas, which does not come from fossils.
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We do however use a lot of natural gas, which does not come from fossils.
Where do you think it comes from, Unicorn farts?
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Yeah... in California. Washington State is a net-exporter of energey. Washington state exports most of their power generated to SF and LA. Its't true.
So don't worry, the spotted owls in Washington won't be hurt by the power plants in 1800 miles away in Los Angeles - the 15 million people in the LA metro area are doing their best to filter their dirty air using their ULEV Priuses and with their lungs.
If the people in LA want cleaner air, they're going to have to lobby their state legislature
Re:Facebook...Celilo Falls (Score:2)
Lest We forget- The environmental damage caused 70 years ago [nwcouncil.org] changed the economy of 8 states- a trading network that had been in place for 10,000 years.
How much sooner (Score:2)
How much sooner do I have to give up internal combustion engines so that my girlfriend can play farmville? That indian from the 70's is gonna cry a helluva lot more than a single tear when he hears this news.
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Except he was a white guy who played an indian....
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Fuck ICEs. How much sooner will I be able to have an electric car because of all the development going into batteries because of the proliferation of portable devices?
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Fuck ICEs. How much sooner will I be able to have an electric car because of all the development going into batteries because of the proliferation of portable devices?
Keep on waiting. The engineering project got shelved in favor of coding "Farmville 3: the revenge of the pigs". Big money in Apps these days, don't cha know.
You know there's something wrong with computing... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You know there's something wrong with computing (Score:5, Funny)
You can do both at the same time on a Pentium 4.
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It's not Randall's fault, but, xkcd is a cancer on the Internet strangling creativity.
If you were right, it WOULD be his fault, because he's the one making it. But you're wrong, because if it weren't for xkcd, we'd just have more star wars quotes or something.
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It's not Randall's fault, but, xkcd is a cancer on the Internet strangling creativity. Nerds need to stop repeating their boring catchphrases constantly.
Laffo. Because one guy with a crudely drawn comic is somehow bringing down the entire internet. Get a grip.
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It's not Randall's fault, but, xkcd is a cancer on the Internet strangling creativity. Nerds need to stop repeating their boring catchphrases constantly.
Because before xkcd nerds never repeated catchphrases from, for example, Monty Python...
AAF: Ammo Against Facebook (Score:3, Interesting)
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yes let's all stop using the internet.
that power is nothing compared to the power it takes to slashdot a site or to the power it takes to run the machines used for reading facebook.
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Are you kidding? Without a place to store all of that inane drivel, some of those people might eventually end up here.
I've already heard more than enough about people's morning dumps in various first posts over the years.
Re:AAF: Ammo Against Facebook (Score:4, Insightful)
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What do you think all those people would do if they weren't using Facebook?
Personally, I was hoping they'd all hang themselves. But that's just me being unsocial again.
Re:AAF: Ammo Against Facebook (Score:4, Interesting)
And Slashdot is any better?
At least Facebook allows you to delete your account (keeping data around is another story). Slashdot doesn't even bother pretending.
How can I delete my account?
You can't. The system needs to keep track of the users, so accounts are permanent. Don't sweat leaving unused accounts hanging around. It doesn't hurt anything.
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Non-grown-ups?
You have not quite reached 2012 yet. You should go back a few years and feel superior in a different decade.
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It's also a great argument against Slashdot (non-grown-ups posting their rhetoric to engage in mutual onanism and accomplish zilch).
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I heard on the news this morning that Facebook has finally filed papers with the SEC to go public. If it happens like every other Software IPO EVER the mass craptitude of the project will go to infinity soon after, as shareholders take profit at the expense of R&D.
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And WHO pays? (Score:2)
Is Facebook paying for this upgrade? It damned well better be!!!
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Where do people like you live? I ask honestly, because I've never lived anywhere that people wouldn't kill for a high-tech datacenter to provide some real jobs close by. The only scenario I can imagine are where the road system is so bad that you already need 45 minutes to go a mile and bedroom communities in the suburbs where people would like to keep it all-residential. In the first case, you just insist upon road improvement. In the second, you'd need consent of the majority (in theory anyhow) before you
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I ask honestly, because I've never lived anywhere that people wouldn't kill for a high-tech datacenter to provide some real jobs close by
Really? How many jobs? There was a story a few months ago about an Apple datacenter getting a few million in tax breaks and employing a total of 40 people. Datacenters are full of computers, not full of people. They require very few people on-site to keep things working. Anyone else can (and, for security reasons, often does) work off site and sometimes hundreds of miles away. Even the infrastructure that one requires tends not to produce much by way of jobs.
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Where I grew up, 40 tech-ish jobs would be welcome. Almost everyone professional is either a real estate agent, lawyer, or doctor - everyone else works in the service industry or construction. Not only that, but most of the service work is highly seasonal so unemployment is horrid 6 months out of the year. I left the area because I didn't see a real opportunity for engineers.
Crook County (Score:5, Informative)
I looked it up so you don't have to: Crook County is inhabited by 20k people, its economy largely consists of agriculture and tourism so it's no wonder that they do not use massive amounts of electricity.
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Same here. Why would anyone be surprised that a data center that serves about one billion people uses more power than a county with less than 20,000?
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When I was a kid, my family would go to Prineville reservoir in the Summer. I think we doubled the population.
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This.
If you live in the Pacific Northwest, it's a bit of a fun drive to head out to Prineville and play "Spot the Datacenter." It's so out of place it's real easy to spot. It took me all of about 10 minutes of driving around to find it.
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This.
If you live in the Pacific Northwest, it's a bit of a fun drive to head out to Prineville and play "Spot the Datacenter." It's so out of place it's real easy to spot. It took me all of about 10 minutes of driving around to find it.
Wow. Things must be getting pretty dull down there if is it's a 'bit of fun' to go look for a datacenter. Don't you all have Starbucks or anything?
We can only hope (Score:2)
It'd be a pity if they got raided by the DEA. [slashdot.org] A real pity.
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With all the pictures of people doing illegal substances I'm sure are on Facebook, I would think having the DEA raid the place for evidence isn't that far of a stretch.
How much is 28 Megawatt? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You're right, 28MW is not a lot. I've seen a 20MW diesel generator, and the engine is just a little bigger than a construction dump truck.
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I've seen a 1.21 GW generator too and it's only the size of a DeLorean.
Re:How much is 28 Megawatt? (Score:5, Informative)
The most obvious comparison is its about 10 or so modern diesel electric locomotive engines, if you assume 2500 or so HP per engine, which is probably not a bad guess for your average generic engine... Spare me the anecdote that there exist like 4 Aclea Express engines in the USA that have 6000 HP, and I'm well aware coming from a three generation railroad family that there are some astounding coal haulers out there.
There are probably more than 10 diesels in my county right now... coal plant, despite the best efforts of the govt some industry still remains, multiple short range commuter rail and also some long range commuter rail, multiple intermodal transfer stations, a small but respectable great lakes "sea"port (which is admittedly frozen in right now)
Entire county (Score:4, Funny)
Did anyone else read that as Country? That would have been news-worthy.
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It could be one very small country :) Like, I dunno, Vatican City.
Re:Entire county (Score:5, Informative)
That's what I thought initially. The CIA World Factbook includes electricity consumption statistics [cia.gov] for many countries and regions. Note that they're listed in kWh per year; 28 MW translates to about 245,000,000 kWh per year. This puts the data center at around #174 on that list, ahead of Rwanda, Eritrea, Belize, Bhutan, Chad, and Tonga, to pick a few (though note that the data for many of those countries is a few years old, so they may have moved up). For comparison, the entire US is listed at 3,741,000,000,000 kWh per year. This data center is then around 0.007% of the US's power usage.
Since there are something like 3000 counties [wikipedia.org] in the US, assuming uniform distribution, an average sized county would have 1/3000 = ~0.033% of the country's electricity consumption. This county then has around 7/33 ~= 21% of the average population. That average would be ~300 million / 3000 = 100,000 people per county: and indeed, Crook County, Oregon has approximately 21,000 [wikipedia.org] = 100,000 * 21% people. So actually the electricity consumption of the county appears to be quite average, even though it sounds rural from the Wikipedia page.
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Vatican City, thanks to "The Green Pope", is carbon neutral and now runs mostly on solar. Plus, it's smaller than Crook County.
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Ever been to Eastern Oregon? It kinda is it's own little country.
Handier unit (Score:5, Funny)
That gives an average draw of around 30kW.
So this baby sucks a nice round 1 kiloGore (1kG).
So what's happening with all the waste heat then? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Article's a bit light on any details... but that facility has to deal with all that heat somehow... and using it to provide heating for local residents would be a very good use of it.
There's a reason, outside of extremely dense cities, you don't see heat distribution happen -- its horrendously inefficient and expensive.
Crook County is farm-country.
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Part of the reason Prineville is attractive is the local ambient temperature. Many of the datacenter projects (including Facebook) in eastern Oregon use ambient outside air to cool the datacenter most of the year.
misread that (Score:3)
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Be "green"! (Score:2)
Close your FaceBook account.
Challenge To Facebook (Score:2)
I wish someone who couldn't be ignored would make a public challenge to Facebook to make greener data centers. Combine all of the modern power conservation technology with all of the new clean renewable power generation tech they can reasonably afford.
Basically, when you read Facebook in the United States you are burning coal.
Not a lot. (Score:3)
It is funny how a grossly misleading story can make everyone on /. think this is a lot of power. I know a lot of the posters are trying to feel superior, but using more power than a rural county in Oregon is in no way significant.
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So? (Score:2)
Whenever you're given a comparison like this, you ought to look closely at the things being compared.
Crook County OR has roughly 21 thousand residents spread out over almost three thousand square miles. The urban suburb I grew up in (Somerville, MA) has over *75* thousand residents crammed into four square miles. For that matter the Queensbridge Housing Project in NYC has almost seven thousand residents in an area about 20-30 acres. You could say, "Facebook's data center uses two and a half times theenerg
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and build it in africa?
maybe they figure they're not in the electrical generation business, it's more practical if you can buy hydroelectric..
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Re:Go the Apple way (Score:5, Interesting)
Costs in Africa are enormous. For power, both grid and fuel supply are unreliable, so onsite generation and large storage are a must. Latency to users in the US, Asia and Europe is crippling, and corruption is massive, it will drag your deployment out for years.
Re:Go the Apple way (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, that makes a lot of sense.As long as they have a fat pipe to the internet, who cares where the datacenter is. Costs will be lower in Africa, and solar panels make a lot more sense there.
Go to Iceland instead. Lots of hydro power, cooling not a problem, halfway between two of the most important regions to serve...
Re:Go the Apple way (Score:5, Informative)
The FB datacenter already runs on hydro power (they're like, 30 miles from the columbia river, which generates something like 50% of the hydroelectric capacity in the US), with an average year round temp in the high 50s.
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the datapipes between usa and euro don't go through iceland do they?
but you know, since i'm not a total troll, before posting, I googled hydropower in oregon. it looks like a good spot - they got lots more than iceland does(more than iceland anyways).
Re:Go the Apple way (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, that makes a lot of sense.As long as they have a fat pipe to the internet, who cares where the datacenter is.
People on the other end of it. A "fat pipe" is only one half of the network speed equation - bandwidth. The other half is latency. Until/unless someone figures a way to overcome the speed of light, a datacenter in Oregon is always going to be faster for North American users than one in Africa.
That's why content distribution networks like Akamai serve you content from a DC nearest you - to reduce latency.
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They can't build Tony Stark's Arc reactor; but they can find some green pie in the sky equivalent. Install solar power on every house in the town. There they've just helped the grid for a few hours a day. Not a bad idea that.
Re:Go the Apple way (Score:4, Insightful)
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Lets run some basic numbers: lets assume 20% solar cells (pretty high) and lets assume 24 hour noon sun 7 days a week without clouds. At the equator that gives us about 160W per m2. So we need 188000m^2 of solar panels, or 18.75Ha, or a square 433 meters on each side completely covered in panels. Only
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Apple has 40,000 US employees and 20,000 international employees (not outsourced, they support their respective regions). They also provide all their US tech support from the US, not outsourced.
Paying a contractor to assemble 10,000 iDevices a day in the only place on the planet with that type of manufacturing capacity is not the definition of "outsourcing" you are looking for.
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Apple has 40,000 US employees
How many of those are manufacturing jobs?
Re:Clean and cheap energy in Sweden (Score:4, Interesting)
Or you could put your data center in Quebec, almost exclusively producing electricity from water and with little problem with cooling 10 months out of 12. There's a reason while so many aluminum plants are present in that Canadian province. Bonus : link the the Chicago network hub is easier from there than from northern Sweden.
With data center like these, they can expect less than 0.03 $CAD per kWh.
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Re:Energy per user (Score:5, Informative)
28,000,000 / 800,000,000 = 0.035 Watts/user
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28,000,000 / 800,000,000 = 0.035 Watts/user
If they only had one data centre.
They have a European data centre in Sweden, and has at least nine across the US [datacenterknowledge.com]
br.That's still only 0.35W per user, but an order of magnitude is huge no matter who you ask.
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It's conceivable that all the datacenters aren't 35MW.
Re:Energy per user (Score:5, Funny)
Does the ridiculous figure you come up with not make you question your working? 35 electric fires constantly on per user of facebook? In one datacentre? Are you high?
I pray you are not in any science or engineering disciplines ...
0.035 Watts/user you spoon
Re:Energy per user (Score:5, Funny)
Does the ridiculous figure you come up with not make you question your working? 35 electric fires constantly on per user of facebook? In one datacentre? Are you high?
My calculation was sponsored by the Green Party.
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You know those people who claim the Earth is 10,000 years old? You are twice as wrong as them.
Do you think about your answers for even a split second to see if they make any sense at all?
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Which is what future archeologists will be asking:
"This site must have consumed so much power . . . to store all this crap . . . we must be missing something! There is something important here hidden in secret code . . . "
" . . . or most of the people on the planet at that time were frivolous imbeciles . . . "
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Like drawing pictures of your hum drum day-to-day activities on the walls of your cave?
Or the diaries of Samuel Pepys?
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As an amateur historian - If I were a future historian (say 500 years from now), I'd just about commit genocide to get access to a couple of days worth of Facebook posts. That kind of access to the records of the daily concerns and activities of the masses is a pearl beyond price. Yes, there's a lot of dreck and minutiae to sort through - but there's also things like current political activities, current daily activities, etc... etc... for millions of people.
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But they will be saying "why did they need so many damn servers?"
Reminds me of that story about how Facebook gets something like half the performance out of the same server hardware as Google. Too lazy to find link to it.
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Good gravy, where do you people get your facts?
Twitter is for telling the world when you take a dump. Facebook is for "liking" when your Twitter friends take a dump. The more you know [tm].
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