If Meta were to build enough new, carbon neutral, and green energy facilities to supply triple the energy costs of their facility and sell the remainder to the grid, I don't think anyone would have much of a problem with the facility.
As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created over the past few years, purely for Facebook to... sell more ads. That's not palatable.
The suspension of Meta's data center had very little to do with the fact that it was for Facebook. The main reason is that NL has several of those data centers already and has become aware that they need huge amounts of energy and give very few jobs for it in return.
Especially the current time of energy shortage has made those data centers unpopular.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created over the past few years, purely for Facebook to... sell more ads. That's not palatable.
Why do people so strongly critique Facebook for selling ads but not businesses from buying them?
For instance [0]
> The story of Ramon van Meer. He runs a company that sells ramps that help wiener dogs get up and down off the couch. For years, his company reached its niche audience through targeted Facebook ads. Then Apple changed the privacy settings on the iPhone, and suddenly those Facebook ads stopped working.
Why don't small & medium business owners like Ramon get critiqued for feeding the beast?
I don’t blame children for buying micro transactions. I blame companies for making them and designing them to be as addictive as possible.
> suddenly those Facebook ads stopped working
Maybe Ramon should go onto wiener dog forums, groups, subreddits, and advertise his product. List on Amazon, or partner with smaller, online pet businesses like Chewy. I guarantee these will have high conversion rates than vacuuming up search queries for “wiener dog,” cross referencing them with device identifiers, browser fingerprints, Facebook pixels, computer vision tagged photos, and IP addresses to build a psychological profile you sell to Ramon. It may be easier for Ramon to click “sell to people who have wiener dogs,” but why shouldn’t a business be in charge of their own marketing?
>Maybe Ramon should go onto wiener dog forums, groups, subreddits, and advertise his product. List on Amazon, or partner with smaller, online pet businesses like Chewy
So advertise, but just not on FB?
>It may be easier for Ramon to click “sell to people who have wiener dogs,” but why shouldn’t a business be in charge of their own marketing?
You answered your own question. Marketing is hard work, and FB makes it very easy to target a huge customer base. Conversion might be good on reddit, but you can do that in addition. Why is FB off limits?
I didn’t say FB or advertising was off limits. I was responding to someone who was asking why we don’t blame businesses who advertise on FB and blame FB themselves, and then framing it (per my interpretation) as “when you take away FB’s ability to advertise ‘effectively,’ you hurt small businesses like Ramon the wiener dog ramp salesman.” My response is Ramon has plenty of other options besides FB if FB is regulated out of its ability to track, profile, and data mine the internet, and that these options support (a) other small businesses and (b) a more diverse internet ecosystem.
>My response is Ramon has plenty of other options besides FB if FB is regulated out of its ability to track, profile, and data mine the internet
That's a pretty bold claim though. There may be other options but that doesn't mean that they are enough to sustain his business. I think it's plausible that there's a vast swath of products that could not exist without Facebook. A lot of them are probably crap products that I wouldn't like but someone does.
But then again oh, I don't have any problem with targeted advertising for products. I have a bigger problem with targeted political advertising and radicalizing engagement content.
The world existed just fine before online advertising. If a company and its competitors for a product disappeared as a result of not advertising it probably wasn’t that great if a product, certainly not essential
I agree that the world would keep spinning without online advertising. That said, tons of products can't exist without it. This doesn't mean they arent great, but that they are obscure.
I don't think most people have trouble with online advertising as such. Not even targeted advertising as long as they are in control of what's happening.
I think what people have trouble with are the other things forced on them. They don't want to be spied on, and they don't want to have loud full page videos thrown in their face.
I think it's plainly obvious that spying makes targeted advertising better, but I don't think we have proof that it can't work at all without the private-sector equivalent of the Stasi surveillance state.
The wonderful days of conglomerates endlessly advertising how their candy will transform our lives.
I find the argument that advertising was somehow okay before the internet a hard pill to swallow. My recollection is that ads were misleading back then and reserved for larger businesses. It pains me to think about going back to that era.
On the other hand, it’s nice to find small businesses to buy from on YouTube / Instagram / Reddit. It’s also nice that I do not have to pay for these services with money.
So it’s not perfect on the internet. But it does seem a hell of a lot better.
My burgeoning collection of clicky keyboards with surprisingly small numbers of keys would, while not disagreeing with you, like to make itself available as a data point.
Not really.. I know many mom & pop forums that had symbiotic relations with a particular vendor. Sponsorship for the forum, special pricing for forum members.. Stuff like that.
That's a very different thing to just dumping ads on people because they looked at one video about a dog.
Of course such forums have become pretty extinct recently but for some interests they are still there.
Simple: Facebook is particularly slimy in their approach to engagement and making ad impressions, and so supporting their business is morally fraught. I won't elaborate because it's been beat to death as a topic.
"Maybe Ramon should go onto wiener dog forums, groups, subreddits, and advertise his product."
Wow. Have you tried this? Reddit mods will ban you in 5 seconds if it smells addy. Forums wtf? that is a niche niche thing these days. Even if you have good standing with a Twitter - that is close to a full time job building followers. FB makes a ton of money - cause this stuff is locked down.
It’s the “if they can’t have bread, why don’t they eat cake?” response to the small business owner needing ads. They’ve never tried to advertise a small business critical to their livelihood. If they had, they’d know. That’s why their response is tone deaf and unrealistic.
> I don’t blame children for buying micro transactions. I blame companies for making them and designing them to be as addictive as possible.
Your example falls flat immediately: the ad buyers are not children. They're adults and should be held to adult standards of awareness and responsibility.
It makes zero sense that you used children and micro transactions as the example for why blame should or should not be allocated to ad buyers.
> It makes zero sense that you used children and micro transactions
I somewhat expect adults to understand gambling and in-game transactions and the fact that they are somewhat manipulative [0]. I hold no such expectations for children who generally accept whatever is presented to them. Blaming a child for buying a box of digital gems or what have you will do no good.
Similarly, I don’t think blaming Ramon the wiener dog ramp salesman for advertising on FB is really going to challenge FB’s market dominance and iron grip of advertising. I don’t expect Ramon to understand issues of data privacy, internet surveillance, advertising monopolies, and walled gardens, or - if he does know about them from passing - I don’t think pressuring him to follow his conscience and resist the market size of FB will do any good.
“Blaming” businesses who advertise on FB without providing some alternative in the market will not succeed. Rather than blame Ramon, we should restrict FB’s ability to surveil people whether through private (e.g. Apple) or public (e.g. regulation) means. This way, as FB’s effectiveness dwindles, the market will produce some solutions as alternatives for these businesses to go.
Instead, pressuring and blaming FB for their handlings of these issues will prove far more effective. We’ve already seen some limited success with this strategy, landing FB in Congress multiple times and getting the Netherlands to reconsider their huge data center, not to mention issues of GDPR, the “right to be forgotten,” etc.
I chose children because just as I don’t expect them to resist loot boxes, I don’t expect business owners to resist FB advertising. I listed alternatives that Ramon should do as a good businessman if FB is not an option, and options I believe will yield more direct results and a more loyal customer base. The world is not divided into clueless children and perfectly knowledgeable and ethical adults. But rather than blame the advertisers (Ramon), we should go after the ad market (FB).
[0]: That said, I still think we should blame the companies who use dark patterns and casino strategies to trigger people’s tendencies to gamble or “roll the dice” after a couple hours playing a game. You could say “players” instead of children, but this isn’t really analogous to small businesses because I still expect some adult players to know when they’re being played. I don’t expect any small business to reject FB advertising if it is presented as a way to reach a huge customer base.
Oh god no. Why the hell would I want less explicitly defined ads and more native ads on forums. One I can tune out, the other pollutes the entire conversation space.
On the flip side, being part of the conversation space makes their advertising refutable.
On Facebook, I recall seeing an ad for a sticker you can put on your phone which supposedly blocks radiation to protect your brain. That is, in my not so humble opinion, a scam product which preys on and perpetuates a false fear. The first time I saw this ad, I recall commenting that it was a scam and people shouldn't waste their money, and reporting the ad. I saw it again recently on my monthly-or-so visit to FB, and the commenting was turned off, which is how most ads are delivered.
On car forums I used to visit, it wasn't uncommon for people to push scammy products, but there were also respected members identifying them as BS.
I’m sorry but this is such an obviously curated cry-me-a-river story aiming to frame Facebook as a benevolent giant enabling small business to reach their audience and not as the giant vampire squid mining and extracting humanity’s attention for profit while subverting democracy and dispersing deadly poisonous propaganda for even more profit. While also doing its best to gate, control and kill the open internet wherever possible.
I see a lot of medium size businesses. Im looking for furniture and I’m getting a lot of ads from smaller furniture brands on insta. Some are pretty nice. They are not as small as let’s say some local mattress store, but they are too small to be able to afford untargeted ads like tv commercials and billboards. Perhaps they could do furniture magazines, but many casual furniture buyers don’t buy magazines.
I listened to a podcast about Ramon's story and it certainly had the ring of truth - the guy was an internet marketing specialist who bought the weiner dog ramp business as he sensed it was a good product that was failing to find its potential market. Through the use of highly targeted ads he was able to find potential customers at a cost lower than his profit on the goods - so he turned it into a successful business.
Throwing money at internet marketing without a lot of thought is probably throwing it away for many businesses. Hiring a specialist to do your marketing is often not really any better because the industry is rife with shysters.
You don't need to lie to give a false impression. Somebody could find out about it, so it's better to just select whatever facts or examples support your argument. I don't think that Facebook would have trouble finding something useful in their little stash of everything about everyone.
If you choose 1024 people to give stock tips to, telling half that a random stock will go up and the other half it will go down, then ignore the group you were wrong at and repeat the process, you’ll end up with someone convinced you’re a genius because you gave them 10 accurate stock tips in a row.
Hide this inside a black box labelled “innovative machine learning” and you might even unwittingly fool yourself so it’s not even a lie.
The onus is on those who control the popular information streams of the moment to be good stewards concerned with long-term consequences, exercising appropriate amounts of restraint WRT greed and moderation when selling access to their audience.
The onus is not on the buyers of the access. If the steward is negligent and/or careless, there will never be any shortage of ad-space buyers who couldn't care less about the steward's reputation and/or the long-term consequences for the publication and/or audience. If FB is open to becoming a raging dumpster fire, it will happen overnight if that were profitable for someone who could afford it.
A useful metaphor might be a homeowner next door who lets all-night parties attended by random assholes who trash the street and have zero respect for the neighborhood. No sane person blames the partiers, the problem is clearly the enabling, negligent homeowner.
My problem is that their business model is treating their resources (ie. us, common internet users (both active FB users and people not using it because shadow profiles)) unfairly compared to their profit yield.
A Danish/British lawyer has filed for a collective legal action towards Meta [0][1] seeking USD 3.2 billions in damages to Facebook users. The optics is that Facebook, from a perspective of competition law, has acted unfairly.
> Why do people so strongly critique Facebook for selling ads but not
businesses from buying them?
I guess for the same reason people tend to criticise drug barons more
than street dealers, and dealers more than addicts.
Though everyone plays their part in an ugly business, there are power
relationships in operation. Facebook know what they are selling and
are gatekeepers to a near monopoly product. Businesses are desperately
in need and find few alternatives these days. Facebook are apex
predators and simply carry more responsibility and so deserve more
scrutiny for their role.
I find the critique most apt to the dealer and not the user. The user is just a weak link in the system where as the dealer is where all the misery basically starts.
But yea influencers and the lot I tend to advise to stop using but well they struggle with their habits.
This goes for (almost?) all dog breeds. Most of the working dogs of the past are now kept for different reasons, if you apply that kind of reasoning you will likely get rid of all dogs, especially purebreds because they all have their share of problems, some more than others.
Yes. And people buy blue sweaters and many other colours when it is clear that no dye is better. Simply put, the demand for dyed clothes should not exist.
Welcome to capitalism and the free world. Sometimes we just need to be tolerant of others and let them get on with it.
I'm not against viable dog breeds but Dachshunds suffer many disorders/congenital diseases that make their lives miserable just to please their owners and here we have someone further enabling this.
Blue dye on wool doesn't harm anyone. Even the Soviet Union a totally non-capitalist country allowed colors, so I don't know what your point there is.
Not being born is only a problem if you had the notion that your potential life was cut off. A potential zygote, not an exiting zygote, obviously has no cognition by definition and by determinism. So there is no suffering. Nothing is being aborted. In any event, if this "dog x" has to exist, why not a healthier crossbreed?
I'm not proposing to cull the existing dogs, just not to further a breed and other breeds of dogs that suffer health problems due to our artificial breeding. There are lots of other dog breeds that do not suffer more health problems than average.
Heh I forgot all about that video, but it’s a very good representation for why this whole deal stings.
It doesn’t help that it’s Facebook, which implies it’s unlikely to have much impact in terms of enabling an ecosystem of third party users (which is unlike, say, Microsoft or Google datacenters).
>> As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created
Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ?
A quick search suggests FB consume on average about 1 gigawatt globally. The original article calls it a 200 megawatt DC. That would be 20% of facebooks global energy consumption.
Given FB seem to have 18 existing Data center locations it would imply huge growth or consildation plans for that DC to consume 200 megawatts all the time.
In 2020 the global renewable energy supply capacity was approximately 2500 gigawatts so facebook used less than 0.5% of that capacity.
There are lots of valid reasons to oppose facebook, but it doesnt seem that monopolising the consumption of renewabel energy is a credible one.
Green energy production is highly location dependent. Global production is irrelevant - this is about the Netherlands. The Netherlands is a densely populated country that does not have a lot of space for renewable energy, neither does it have large mountains or water reservoirs that can easily be used for hydro power.
This data centre alone was going to use 10% of all wind power capacity in the NL [1].
It is not only about this data centre either, this was merely the largest and most egregious. There have been a number of new data centre construction plans in the Netherlands by other tech giants, all planning to use government subsidised wind parks. All so that these companies can pretend to be green and put up nice websites like the one you linked, while the actual wind parks and green energy generation is paid for by the taxpayers.
> Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ?
This was supposed to a colossal data center, the largest data centre in Europe [2]. They bought 166 hectares of ground (23M square feet) for its construction. It consuming as much as three of their other data centres would not be terribly surprising.
On a local scale monopolising the consumption of renewable energy is certainly an important consideration. Keep in mind that The Netherlands is a rather dense country. Every windmill is in someone's proverbial backyard, and has thus been fought over. Also, like in many places, the grid has trouble keeping up with the load.
Naturally this news has gotten a lot of coverage in the Netherlands. One of the reasons mentioned for the amount of pushback is the "bullying" attitude of Meta in the negotiations and the aggressiveness of its lobbying. (See e.g. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/03/30/de-laatste-boerin-vertr...)
This may point to a culture clash, a misreading of Dutch values. Dutch business is widely known for its matter-of-factness not to say bluntness, Dutch politics is known for "polderen", the grinding process of seeking compromises between all parties involved. It seems like Meta may have confused the two.
Disclaimer: I'm European and have worked in American tech mega-corps. And I grew up in a similar situation: my dad was an eng for a couple of American mega-corps so I'm familiar with how things work over two generations, first and second-hand. While I've never worked at Meta/Facebook I did interview twice but didn't get an offer. Incidentally, I've still never had a Facebook account in my life, ever. (I was too unpopular and friendless in uni for anyone to ask me to sign-up)
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> You would have thought Meta would have had employed plenty of Dutch resources with local knowledge.
Without doubt, the necessary US-based director-level people at Meta almost certainly did do that, as well as pulling-in expertise from the world of geopolitical consulting. And then immediately after reviewing all that input they didn't want to hear, the Meta folks very likely thought-up a quick plan that they knew for certain would outsmart those silly over-regulating and anti-business, Europeans... which clearly didn't, and hence we find ourselves in the situation we have today.
Do not underestimate the ego and (not mincing my words) arrogance of people who make it to the top: as soon as you start using "I'm C-level/D-level at Meta, I'm hot shit" in your thought-processes you're in for a nasty grounding incident, much to our amusement.
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Post-disclaimer: It's not about being American, it's about not letting your personal career success go to your head.
The reason we don't see non-American companies acting like this is because eventually all companies grow big enough to re-identify (if not relocate...) as an American company (...or they get acquired by an American company), because that's the single biggest market in the world, and you can't conquer the world without owning the North American market in whatever business you do, imo.
They did. One of their lobbyists Vince van Son is the son of Dutch emigrants, and another one, Edo Haveman, even worked for members of parliament before.
Maybe the problem is that Dutch "resources" are easily Americanized. The American and Dutch ways of doing business are not that different in style, just in scale. I suspect many Dutch entrepreneurs secretly think that if they just act a little more American, they can cut through the red tape and get things done. That may work on some levels, but not in Dutch politics.
Data centers are a hard sell in general because they don't really provide too much benefit to a community. They run on minimal labor, whether skilled or unskilled, so the job creation argument doesn't work. They have huge energy requirements, which is a burden on the regional grid. And residents of an area won't really care that the Facebook latency of all of Western Europe could improve by a few milliseconds because of their sacrifice.
If the local grid can't provide that then upgrades are needed. They may pay enough for that but then the energy needs to be sourced, which may mean extra fossil fuels and potentially breaking promises made on move-in towards a higher % renewable use. It can be about more than the financial price.
Even if it was about the cost of sourcing and provision, someone that big will bargain down close to the minimum. There will be little benefit to share around elsewhere, unless of course this is made specifically part of the bargain (they can build, in exchange _they_ improve local infrastructure to cope, as greenly as the locals desire, with stated benefits for the area with compensation clauses for if said benefits don't turn up).
I don't think it's necessarily that simple, if the community doesn't agree to it. The community might have a different idea about the appropriate use of electricity generation, other than selling all available capacity to the highest bidder, and then (probably) having to build out more capacity at greater expense. The community may have other expectations, such as phasing out of fossil fuels or other public goods.
If Facebook paid its electric bill to the neighbors, sure. But it doesn't.
We live in an age of energy scarcity. So even if people think about the electricity it uses, people probably see a data center as slurping up energy, causing prices for regular people to rise.
Selling electricity is never good business. Governments are at most going to recover costs of transmission and some ongoing operation, never the huge up-front investments they need to make in the sector.
No. They get lots of subsidies. Besides the energy, there simply is not a lot of space here in NL, and a huge datacenter won’t add anything to the country. Jobs, nature, view, spatial planning.
The only reason it was allowed before is that politician get a hard on from dealing with big tech. Aka corruption
So the problem is whoever is in charge to say yes to discounts?
Genuinely wondering because I keep not understanding this situation and I'm Dutch. Indeed, if people worry about that it'll use up all the green energy then let facebook pay for replacement renewable infrastructure that supplies MW equal to what they use, to be placed and functional anywhere in NL within X (1?) year(s) after the datacenter is turned on (we're not that big, we can swallow those transmission losses).
It’s not even about “saying yes” to discounts, it’s trying to actively persuade Facebook et al to build their DCs in NL, and using subsidies and discounts to entice them.
The way energy consumption is taxed is in a staffled manner. In the highest staffel the consumer wouldn’t pay any taxes on their top use. The plants thet hit these amounts are for example the reffineries.
It’s not as straight forward as just paying more unfortunately as the rules are so much in favour of big consumers one first needs to change those rules before you have the ground to ask them to pay more.
I suspect our laws say that they just have to be given access to the grid at the same terms as any other company.
And we're having to transition to green energy, and having great difficulty doing so, as you know. So a new thing that adds 10% extra national electricity usage isn't exactly welcome right now, imo.
I read elsewhere that we're talking about 160MW, that's 1.4 GWh -- if it would run at peak power all year long.
The netherlands uses about a thousand TWh of energy in a year. (Electricity or other energy doesn't really matter because it's all going to have to come from renewables in the end anyhow.)
That's not 10%, not 1%, not 0.1%, not 0.01%, not 0.001% but 0.0001%.
Don't want to defend facebook but let's keep at least keep the order of magnitude correct
Many FB datacenters use evaporative cooling systems rather than traditional A/C, basically spraying water into the incoming air supply to cool it below outdoor ambient temperatures. The hotter it is outside, the more water is needed to cool the air, trading temperature for humidity. But this water can't easily be recaptured without using significantly more energy than normal A/C, so the evaporated water is exhausted as part of the hot air from the DC aisles.
Don’t forget the added coalents to the water that are dumped back! I’m still curiou to hear what the composition of these chemicals is but appearantly not s single data center is able to tell oddly enough.
Some percentage of it is lost to evaporation (fairly obvious if you see a big steam cloud coming out of a tower). How much that is...I have no idea. I don't think any place on earth forces big tech companies to report on the environmental impact and resource usage of their data centers. In fact, I think a lot of companies view these details as a competitive advantage and intentionally keep these facts secret even from non-datacenter folk in the same company.
I agree (aside from that AWS might think twice about where to strategically expand further given how politics treated Facehook) but I don't get how this is related to what you quoted or any other part of GP's comment.
According to today’s NRC coverstory it was the opposite: the project failed because of the aggressive lobbying demanding an exception. And Meta refusing to discuss their datacentre design. IOW it failed because of the way that Facebook treated politics. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/03/30/agressieve-lobby-voor-d...
> (...) but I don't get how this is related to what you quoted or any other part of GP's comment.
If you read about the topic you'll soon discover that Meta/Facebook has been systematically imposing demands for preferential treatment, including demanding circumventing laws to allow agricultural land, some of which they don't even own, to instead be used to build high-density industrial buildings.
This, in a country where Amazon and Microsoft already operate their own data centers. In fact, Facebook rejected the location already used by Amazon and Microsoft, and instead decided to force their way somewhere else.
It's also worth mentioning some of the apparent corruption aspects of Facebook's deal, abusing preferential rights of the municipality to exclude competing bids.
Probably the same way sports teams convince communities to build subsidized stadiums: with unrealistic projections about jobs and trickle down benefits.
As a Dutch person, one of my biggest concerns with this datacenter is its green energy usage; from what I understand, it’s going to use up a huge portion of all the green energy we managed to build the last years. The datacenter is huge: 166 hectares.
To me, if that concern is addressed, I would be ok with it (a more suitable location would be nice though), and planting a few extra trees is not going to cut it.
Where are these trees being planted though? Are they saying they are paying to have 1 million trees planted in the Amazon where nobody can actually verify, then that's pointless. The trees should be planted in an area around where the company is located. A million trees around datacenters or fullfillment warehouses would be impressive.
This is one common strategy to fool people. Fool people by saying they will plant more trees etc., and when push comes to shove they will simply turn their head and probably claim for bankruptcy. These sort of Shenanigans happens so often I really don't trust big companies.
Additionally, Facebook doesn't seem to provide that much value to humanity anyway. In fact, I would say they contribution is negative in today's society.
“for a combined generating capacity of 429 megawatts” according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder. I read that sentence as “under optimal circumstances” the Windpark can deliver 430MW. Whereas the datacenter will have sustained need of Power 365x24. IMHO that it a completely different thing. Please someone explain how Facebook could manage it's datacenter on local Netherlands sustainable Energy sources?
I'd say that a datacenter actually has the ability to be responsive to energy market conditions more than most other kinds of loads, and no datacenter operates at its max rated power 24x7. Anyway the point is a datacenter of this size would amount to a tiny fraction of the energy load in that country. It's fine if they don't want it; it's their country, after all. But they should own the fact that they're just superficially against Facebook, and drop the stupid greenwashing argument.
The fraction that you mention is not a fraction. It’s equivalent to the city of Amsterdam. In addition that 160mw number is hard to source and just a Google gives me various numbers already. The national news channels always mention the number equivalent to the inhabitants of Amsterdam, so if you’re saying that the addition of a power consumer equal to the capital is a tiny fraction than I find that rather curious.
Your theory is good as a theory but in practice not. The entire power grid is currently not setup to hold a location so perfect for Facebook. If they cared about the environment and the power grid they’d put it somewhere else. As it’s currently it’s the pupation that would be paying for this addition for the grid and there are plentiful other interesting economic things to do with that kind of power use.
Honestly the fact that it’s Facebook does matter but way less than you think.
There's no way that it's accurate that this datacenter is equivalent to the energy needs of almost a million people. Not even close. A household needs ~2kW of grid capacity on average, and there are at least 400k households in Amsterdam. That's 800MW just for the domestic consumption, which excludes transport.
Consider that the EIA says NL consumed 3.818 quad BTU in 2019 ... this is about 1.1e12 kW-h, or 800x what a 160MW data center would consume. This size of data center, though fairly large, would still be much less than 1% of the energy story of that country.
Generally, data centers use far less energy that people suppose, compared to transport and industry.
How do you get to 2kW per household? Even the (ridiculously high) comparisons provided by German utilities don’t claim more than 4500kWh/year for electricity. That’s about 10 kWh/day so about 0.5kW per household (yeah I’m lazy sue me). So the 200 MW kind of fit (factor of 4 off from your calculation).
In practice I’d be surprised if it’s even that much. The 4500kWh number is for a 4 person household, and there aren’t 400k 4 person households in Amsterdam. And city apartments tend to be newer (aka more efficient) than the rural parts that also contribute to that average, which is also quite historic.
So I would be surprised if that DC doesn’t require more energy than Amsterdam (at least the population, not sure how much heavy industry is there, but probably not too much)
That's certainly interesting, but it just doesn't fit with the yearly consumption data available. Even if you take a look at [1], which distributes all electric energy consumption onto citizen you barely get 6000kWh/year. Which brings us (barely) to 2kW per household (btw. I find it kind of surprising, that there is a factor of 3-4 between total and private consumption).
So either they are taking all electric energy consumption and not the consumption of the household as their basis or (and more likely) they are talking about installed peak capacity necessary to provide the required electric energy over the year. But we would have to look where their marketing got their data from.
Are you perhaps confusing hectares with the wattage as I read the following on Reuters:
The facility, which will use 1.38GWh of electricity and cover 166 hectares (410 acres) of farmland, is expected to run on green energy and provide the local economy a boost but has been criticised by some politicians and environmental campaigners.
1.38gwh is almost trice the optimal output of Flevoland and is indeed more in line with the total power consumption of Amsterdam. And will instead reflect several percentages of the national use.
I seem to recall doing the math on this one and finding that Netherlands’ own vehicle fleet burns the equivalent fuel that this DC would use in a year, every day. It’s a 160MW (peak) data center and Netherlands burns 180000 barrels of oil per day.
This large American company is simply giving the Dutch something on which to focus their own abundant hypocrisy.
But I’d that really a meaningful comparison? For that fuel consumption you get all of normal life. For that added data center noticing will change. In other words: the benefits for the humans aren’t even on the same measurement scale (although I’m a bit skeptical regarding the numbers. Amsterdam is a significant fraction of the Netherlands and I would be surprised if burning fuel would be 3 orders of magnitude more than electricity consumption for a Western European. But I’m also too lazy to do the calculations so …)
That... is actually a crazy perspective. How much time and energy has the media, the politics, the people, especially the locals already spent on this... something about time spent vs. size of the issue.
(FTR I'm Dutch so I see this constantly in news, I'm part of this wasted-time group...)
The point is to use it for existing energy consumption, and only then start increasing energy consumption. If you add X GW of green energy to your Y GW of non-green energy, and then increase your usage by X, then the impact on the planet is the same as the status quo, i.e. not good.
Historically, economic and technological development has relied on increasing energy consumption. Green energy now offers us the possibility to increase the marketed energy supply far beyond anything imaginable with fossil fuels — 2Y, 10Y, 100Y, 1000Y — enabling currently unimaginable technological benefits. (More centralization of computation and speech under Facebook's control would not be beneficial, of course.)
However, it will only become abundant and cheap if those sales are permitted and investors expect that such opportunities will continue in the future, providing them a positive ROI on building 10Y or 100Y of generation capacity. If they expect their energy sales to be capped at X+Y due to hostility from the ignorant public, they will not build.
Let's opt for a solarpunk future where we pass Kardashev Type I and rapidly accelerate toward Kardashev Type II, not a post-apocalyptic dystopia.
> The point is to use it for existing energy consumption, and only then start increasing energy consumption.
Sounds like a good idea, but why start here specifically? There does not seem to be a general ban on expanding other things, e.g. installing a new AC when you don't even have solar panels yet is not discouraged let alone prohibited. Now facebook wants to build something and we trip over each other to complain about it. I mean, yeah, it's facebook, nobody cares if they have to find a suboptimal location and we're a good country to find dwarsliggers in general, but are we doing it for the climate or are we doing it because we don't like facebook?
> The Dutch government also in February enacted a nine-month moratorium on permits for data centers larger than 10 hectares. Last June, the Dutch province of Flevoland, where Zeewolde is located, announced it would halt data center developments for an unknown period of time.
FB was proposing a huge DC, and got attention for it. There is now a blanket moratorium and the country is investigating the effects.
Sure, the fact that it's FB probably increased scrutiny. But there's now some blanket ideas here. And honestly, FB could have tried more if they wanted to ("We will finance building out of green energy capacity to triple of our consumption" could have been a real smart move). Yeah, we don't ask other people to do it, but other people don't have billions of dollars at their disposal to make large scale changes! And it's 200MW! A big number, and a huge project. Yeah, you'll get more scrutiny.
(And yeah, making some law that new housing has to have solar panels in general would not be a bad idea!)
EDIT: https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2020/12/04/200-mw-sola... this 200MW australian solar farm looks to cost $300M. Now it's not apples-to-apples cuz of loads of reasons (in particular large swaths of land would be needed). But let's imagine being able to build 400MW out for 1 billion euros. That is a decision that somebody at FB could make.
> "This is a purely political decision," Dutch Data Center Association managing director Stijn Grove said in a reaction sent to Reuters, adding that it had been made "largely because it is Facebook."
Conflicts with
> After the local council approved the project, party Leefbaar (Liveable) Zeewolde ran on a platform of opposition to the data center, citing environmental concerns and a lack of local input.
But then Facebook's response seems pretty reasonable to me:
> “We strongly believe in being good neighbors, so from day one of this journey we stressed a good fit between our project and the community is foremost among the criteria we consider when initiating and continuing our development processes,” Meta said in a statement.
To me all parties involved seemed pretty reasonable, the previous administration was favourable to the project, but got subsequently voted out of office. Now they just want time to make sure that they didn't get voted out because of that project. Facebook seems to understand.
That data center association is just a huge lobby front. Just the website in itself is a hilarious joke and a complete cherrypicked representation of some numbers. Good luck finding any numbers there that may possible harm their case.
This data center is ridiculous beyond belief in Dutch aspects and that is even got this far in voting is solely due to the prime ministers choice to push these responsibilities toward local municipalities, a village of 30k inhabitants deciding if a power consumer equivalent of 700k inhabitants would fit in their region. The way they Facebook made their case was a joke too as they, just like Google and Microsoft argued there’d be many job opportunities and rest warmth.In addition they argued they needed to have an exception to be added to the power net which is already massively overburdened and lagging, just for the sake that the reigning party can appease their consumer. Even Eric Wiebes, the then minister of economics, meddled in this business in favour of “getting it done”. In the end our prime minister Mark Rutte who was from the same party also started to chime in to move things forward.
That this was shot down was only because, indeed, the entirety of the Netherlands was against this data center and the local municipality elections came by and destroyed all the parties that voted in favour. All of a sudden the powerless Huge de Groot found a way to block this thing.
It is more than a political decision but that this got blocked in the end does move me slightly away from the extreme cynism that is most apt as view on the whole of the Netherlands policital theater.
> that is even got this far in voting is solely due to the prime ministers choice to push these responsibilities toward local municipalities, a village of 30k inhabitants deciding if a power consumer equivalent of 700k inhabitants would fit in their region.
I don't see why that's a problem?
> added to the power net which is already massively overburdened and lagging
Is that being worked on? Is there a reason the electrical payments from the datacenter couldn't be used to make the power network net better? Charge them a higher rate for the first x years if necessary.
The problem with the diet part is that a local municipality has the ability to make a decision that will affect the entire country. To me that is problematic and weird.
The idea that you mention on charging them more and higher would indeeed be interesting be it not that the highest politicians aided in lobbying for a preference treatment that would save them quite a bit. The way it’s setup is that the population would eventually be paying for this addition for the net as big power consumers are extremely heavy subsidised up to the point that the heaviest users don’t pay any power taxes after a certain point.
> The problem with the diet part is that a local municipality has the ability to make a decision that will affect the entire country. To me that is problematic and weird.
If the prime minister is deliberately pushing it to the local level, I still don't see what the issue is.
Also is the local municipality in charge of getting them electricity? If they're only in charge of allowing the construction then that's fine.
> The idea that you mention on charging them more and higher would indeeed be interesting be it not that the highest politicians aided in lobbying for a preference treatment that would save them quite a bit. The way it’s setup is that the population would eventually be paying for this addition for the net as big power consumers are extremely heavy subsidised up to the point that the heaviest users don’t pay any power taxes after a certain point.
So the actual problem is the high level government?
Well it’s one man shoving this huge decision onto a local group that lacks the credentials and oversight to judge such a big effect. They’re in charge of deciding if this thing is allowe to be build there yes or no. It makes sense that the locals are able to voice that, but currently they’re almost the sole authority on the matter with the government being unable to step in. So that’s where to me the big problem is. Alsointeresting detail, the government said it was unable to act before the recent elections that showed the locals were actually widely against this idea and it was just the incumbent municipality that thought it’d be a good idea. Most of them are now without a job. After these results the government suddenly did find a way. I’m happy that it’s shot down but so find the whole going about super weird.
Yes indeed in this situation the actual problem is the high level government causing this oddity. From now on, and also how it used to be before most responsibilities were delegated to the locals, the government itself will be in charge of these decisions.
I think a large part of the problem is that they're building renewable power as fast as they can, but are still heavily reliant on Russian gas for electricity. So building this data center would increase their reliance on Russia.
Those piles of money would not be coming from Facebook, they hardly have to pay for any infrastructure and are heavily subsidized.
The energy network has some issues. It needs a lot of work to be upgraded. Salary of technical engineers in semi-government is maxed and there is a shortage or workers at the infrastructure companies. Then there is a first come first serve rule for new connections which causes sun farms to go where the land is cheap, which is often the opposite area from where energy is used.
Yes. If all the sorely needed renewable energy were to be used for something useful,there wouldn’t be this much opposition. Using it for doom scrolling, ads, and waste of time - sure sane people are against it. I’m happy that people see through the bullshit for once.
IMO, They should be allowed in only if they produce 100% of the renewable energy they could consume. Let Facebook pay the millions in windmills and solar panels, and sure, they can be part of the society.
> To me all parties involved seemed pretty reasonable, the previous administration was favourable to the project, but got subsequently voted out of office. Now they just want time to make sure that they didn't get voted out because of that project. Facebook seems to understand.
I'm assuming your comment is in good faith, and you're not from Facebook's PR team.
I don't think you're aware of the history of the case. Local opposition to the project is nothing new - starting with how Facebook hiding its identity with the locals.
Data centers are a necessity that I can accept if the services they host offer any utility. Facebook does not. It’s a net negative for its users and society at large.
Even if you believe that Facebook, whatsapp, insta, quest, etc are a new negative they there can still be a subset of people who they offer utility to.
A big point was that the grid does not have the capacity for such a datacenter, and this would prevent other companies to enter the region. Local government only saw dollar bills so went through with it anyway.
Good thing. We don't need those (ugly power eating useless purpose) big buildings in our garden.
If it were datacenters to cure cancer or something else meaningful then ok. But it's Facebook.
I get the sentiment, but it's not like the Netherlands don't use Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp. There needs to be a data center to address those requests and it will be built somewhere. The NIMBY attitude is not really productive.
Compare the DC to a landfill. Do you want one in "your garden"? Probably not, but it's not like you are going to convert to zero waste and render the project irrelevant.
Fair enough. I’d be OK if Facebook‘s data centres get scrutinised over their energy use, waste of land, etc. elsewhere as well. So yes, if other communities opt against new Facebook data centres then it’ll mean that their services perform worse. So what? Society would be better off if Facebook ceased to exist.
The majority of Google or Facebook infrastructure runs stuff that’s at best useless to their users, and it can be argued that it’s actually harmful. I suspect there wouldn’t be a problem with data centers if they were used for stuff that’s useful.
The Netherlands are one of the most densely settled areas in Europe and particularly prone to floods. Better to build a datacenter somewhere in Germany or France's rural regions - the real estate is cheaper.
> Better to build a data-center somewhere in Germany or France
Hey hey, don't give them ideas. We don't want them here.
Plus, given current European energy struggles, when Germany considers rationing power delivery, deploying Facebook space heaters sucking 200MW is not only irresponsible, but should be criminal.
The datacenter in question was going to deliver residual heat to the community. Not really sure how well that works with a datacenter given the relatively low temperature exhaust air but yeah, you jest, but that was apparently the plan.
That only works if the datacenter is built somewhere near residential units, and real estate that is near residential units is usually too expensive to build a large datacenter.
I'm no energy engineer so I'm just going off what I randomly know: in Iceland they transport ~80°C water from a power plant off in the mountains (okay that makes it sound further than it really is) to Reykjavík and it loses only a few degrees along the way. Used for residential heating, hot water (it's potable but smells bad so they use heat exchangers), and even street heating against sleet. The distance is something like thirty minutes of driving on the highway if I remember correctly, so like 30km?
While I see your point in general, also because servers are not typically put in oil or anything so this would be hot air (much less dense than water), I wonder if it's as simple as that. It's not like the Netherlands has spots where you are further than a handful of kilometers from the nearest buildings and, often, towns.
Yes the Netherlands is dense, but a vast majority of it is still open space. You can see by just looking at a satellite view of Zeewolde. It's almost entirely farmland.
How big do you think these data centers are? There are ~80 square miles of farmland in Zeewolde. The largest data center in the world would take up less than .1% of that space.
On top of that, the farmland isn't necessarily even growing food. They may be growing, say, tulips.
Netherlands is only behind US in agricultural export because of those open spaces. Of course there's money to be made and latency improvement would be great for EU but if the usage of the land takes more from the locals and the peoples of importer countries than it gives then it's not worth it. Company being FB seems to be just making this argument stronger.
Strictly speaking, Dutch can be taken to refer only to the people and language, with Netherlands referring to the country. Hence 'Royal Netherlands Air Force' (Koninklijke Luchtmacht) and 'Netherlands embassy in London' (Nederlandse ambassade in Londen).
In popular speech, however, Dutch is also frequently used to refer to the country, i.e. 'Dutch embassy in London'.
In the Dutch language, the two words are the same: Nederlands (referring to the people, language and country).
As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created over the past few years, purely for Facebook to... sell more ads. That's not palatable.