Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by SoftTalker 2 days ago
Also depends on what you were used to before. I live in a rural area and it can be annoying when a neighbor half a mile away is running a lawn mower.

In a downtown urban center there is so much noise from traffic, emergency vehicles, construction, and equipment of various types that a new data center would probably just blend in unnoticed.

2 comments

The problem is the salvaged aviation turbines. Airplanes are prevented from operating at high power levels above cities. These engines-from-old-airplanes are likely being operated in their high efficiency range, around 80 percent, so they are loud. Living next to a runway loud.
Airplanes can't carry much in the way of sound supression or "mufflers" on engines. Running them on the ground, it should be straightforward to make them reasonably quiet.
The sheer volume of air moved by high pressure gas turbines makes that large and costly. Not impossible, but very large. These units are 2 per container size, intake and exhaust silencers would probably increase their footprint 5-8x. Not that it shouldn’t be done, just that there’s a lot of incentive not to do it.
And, surprisingly, dense urban buildings are pretty good at blocking sound. It's rare to hear a mower even one street over.