[tommiegannert]

Cool idea!

This begs the question if we could do the same with data centers: put them into hibernation during the night and move load to the sunny sites. Sure, latency would be higher, but it won't affect that many night-active people. Perhaps it's worth it to remove one use-case of energy storage?

(Yeah, the whole de-globalization and no-data-outside-my-backyard government movements speaks against this. Maybe there's some way around that.)

[gundmc]

This is kinda what Google announced they're trying to do - move around workloads to run in data centers where Green energy is available depending on weather conditions and time of day so that all workloads 24/7 are run by green energy (instead of just buying offsets).

Edit: Better link: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/247-carbon-fr...

[Kalium]

That's a fascinating idea! So let's dig in a bit.

A lot of places experience the procession of the equinoxes. You wind up with the sun coming up after typical daytime working hours start and often setting after they end for part of the year. In places like Finland, this can mean a six-hour day in December. Some people may be different, but many expect things like Netflix and other entertainment options to work well in the evening. The details of solar power mean that less than 100% of daylight hours are useful for generation.

Further, the decreased usage of local data centers would have to be balanced against increased long-distance bandwidth usage and the corresponding increase in data center usage elsewhere. You would need to over-provision quite a few places relative to local demand to keep up their part in this follow-the-sun.

Let there be no doubt that your idea is interesting. It might not result in any desirable outcomes, though. Naively, it seems like it could get pretty expensive to turn one data center into four or five (with attendant solar farms) with a bunch of intercontinental high-bandwidth links to avoid having to store energy. It might work for some workloads, but seems sub-optimal for general-purpose use.

A more detailed financial analysis is of course possible and perhaps worth exploring! Adding wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear power would make the whole thing far more workable. Or just use local energy prices.

[chrisshroba]

Hi! Please excuse me for being the "a stranger was wrong on the internet >:(" guy, but the precession of the equinoxes is an incredibly cool concept that I've been learning a lot about lately, and it's not quite what you're describing, but rather the slow rotation of the earth's axis over a period of about 26,000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession

Just thought I'd share because astronomy is cool!

[youngtaff]

As far as I can recall Yahoo started shifting whole loads between data centers for energy and resilience needs 10ish years ago

Think this talk from Mike Christian covers it https://youtu.be/iO2z3ttlpi4

[zitterbewegung]

I agree that trying every possible thing to make datacenters use less power but when you go into smaller and smaller process nodes it also makes it more efficient ? That and figuring out efficient coping strategies ?