Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn't thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.
Don't use a "server" server, unless you really need that. Use a desktop from a few years ago, from some oem who advertises power efficiency. Stuff it full of hdds and ram.
I've made very good experiences with Fujitsu. The power consumption figures they publish in their energy consumption white papers has been matching my measurements very well, so you can check ebay for used machines that match your performance/price expectations and then google eg "p920 energy white paper" and check the pdf. (Note, some models are available with different PSUs, ie 90+ and 85+.)
My "home server" mostly idles at 14W with one hdd running, one in standby and one ssd.
Take a look at the Tiny Mini Micro[1] project from Serve the Home for some very enthusiastic reviews of small 1 liter-sized desktop computers from Lenovo, Dell, and HP. I use a tiny Lenovo that's been rock solid, and uses almost no power.
This is the way. You don't need high density at home (usually) so don't pay the price for it. Get a mobo with ECC ram that fits an ATX case if you want server grade stuff. If you don't use stupid tech like VMware it won't eat your resources either (not that VMware is bad in a datacenter, but it is quite resource hungry in comparison to virt-manager or Proxmox).
I mean unless databases or Java are your favorite things in the world.
Configure power saving as well, that way your CPU really doesn't consume a lot.
Same conclusion here. Initially I used an old notebook with USB cases for full-size HDDs, nowadays it'n an older desktop PC in a midi tower, with some extra memory and HDDs. Idle power is <20W, which is most of the time. I really wanted a proper server for the cool factor, but it's just so expensive to maintain.
Were there significant downsides to the laptop solution?
I have a similar setup with a NUC mounting storage from a small ARM-powered NAS, but I was thinking of changing this to an old ThinkPad X230 with just internal storage and offsite backup.
It was a really old beater, and the problems, I think, stemmed from there - think of electrical problems, because of old USB ports and such. Otherwise it was chugging along like a champ. What I like in my current setup more, is that I could upgrade it as my needs increased - in the desktop, I could fit 5 HDDs and 20G RAM, impossible with my old laptop.
In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is 1€/year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more something like 3€/year. The increase is so important I am still not sure if my calculations are right!
1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh
My current price: 0.33€/kWh (100% renewable)
8.76kWh x 0.33€/kWh = 2.89€
You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas.
With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever.
New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
The rush out of nuclear fission power still shocks me.
It's a miracle fuel. It really is wonderful. It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima not been reported so irresponsibly.
No one knows where to put the trash. That was the major reason for the phase-out, that no one knew how to handle that.
I'm just the messenger, don't shoot me.
And please do not come up with future inventions that will magically remove that issue, that does not help.
Btw, it wasn't really a rush, it was started more than 30 years ago by not building new nuclear power plants. Many of the power plants are actually at the end of their lifetime anyway.
They do, though. That is where the “trash” is. They have become so adept at it, they made a museum out of one facility[0].
Two misconceptions that benefit from being clarified:
1. There is very little waste for the amount of energy produced. If we only used nuclear, it would amount for 40 grams per person per year[1].
2. The waste is not trash, it is extremely valuable. It was valuable in the ground, and it is still valuable out of the ground; just not for the particular reactor that it came from.
You're talking about fuel, and we're talking about trash.
From refinement to the reactor and spent fuel processing, the nuclear power industry generates a huge amount of trash that is low-grade radioactive and thus cannot be just dumped in a landfill.
The nuclear industry has had over seventy years to get their act together regarding fuel recycling. They'd rather just dump it into pools on-site because it's cheapest and makes it Someone Else's Problem. It's the same attitude of the chemical industry from the 1950's: dump it in a hole and let someone else deal with it after you've long since left.
Here's an idea: let's spend the money on wind turbine blade, battery, and solar panel repurposing and recycling instead.
What is the kill count for this low-grade radioactive “trash” per TJ? What is the volume per TJ?
The coal industry has convinced the ecologists to require titanic standards from literally every green energy source, especially the one with the most stable output.
> Here's an idea: let's spend the money on wind turbine blade, battery, and solar panel repurposing and recycling instead.
I am into doing that, AND the nuclear stuff. No need to tie an anchor to our ankle while we try to metaphorically swim back to the surface.
> Here's an idea: let's spend the money on wind turbine blade, battery, and solar panel repurposing and recycling instead.
The two is not exclusive. You do need stable base energy production and none of the renewables solve it well. Hydro could do it, but the locations where it is appropriate are few and it has quite a big ecological impact in and of itself.
I think the two are not exclusive and IMHO a big part could be these small-nuclear-reactors coming up.
I think renewables are very important, but just this week was a comment about Netherlands (I think) where the comparison was 200sqm against 4400 wind turbines and somewhat 20sqkm if you compare nuclear vs. wind/solar.
If you take a look at Switzerland, I have no clue where to put 4k wind turbines. Hell, even 1000 won't have enough space (or you will waste so much forests or agrar or you'll put them into alps and waste the scenery, which will break tourism).
That's not true. Nuclear waste is so minimal in volume nuclear power plants can just sweep it under the carpet. Or more specifically, just store it on-site. Modern nuclear reactors can even use the waste of old reactors as fuel and reduce it by another 80% or so. Dealing with nuclear waste is really no big deal. At least for medium term storage.
Storing waste so you don't have to look after it for thousands of years is admittedly more difficult. Then again, future generations are always impacted by the choices we make today and I'm pretty sure the kids 300 years from now would rather deal with the cleanup of our nuclear waste than with the consequence of global warming.
Burning coal on the other hand has a waste disposal mechanism built in! The carbon atoms are converted into CO2, a harmless gas that we can release into the atmosphere without any consequences.
> No one knows where to put the trash. That was the major reason for the phase-out, that no one knew how to handle that.
We know so well how to handle it that we are wondering how to keep people out of the storage places in the event of a civilization collapse. That is, where current languages are forgotten and we forget what nuclear is. That's how advanced in storage we are.
I'm almost anxious to ask, I know very little about the topic, but I've been wondering if it wasn't a viable option to just shoot the waste into space? I know it's prohibitively expensive to do that as of now, but seeing what they're doing with Spinlaunch..
In addition to the raw costs of moving anything into space, there is the contingency cost of what happens if the launch goes wrong. A new satellite blowing up on the launchpad is bad, but a cargo of nuclear waste exploding a few seconds after liftoff is catastrophic.
I’m sure someone here can do the math, but it takes a lot of energy to get things not just in space, but out of the Earth’s gravity. You don’t want that nuclear waste raining back down. It’s far easier, cheaper, and more fool proof to just bury it deep.
Yeah, I'm French and I'm a bit sad that people seems to deal with nuclear energy as if it was some kind a religious thing. Both sides, anti nuclear who seem to ignore the great benefits it can bring and the pro nuclear who can't seem to see how it sucks (not because it's dangerous or not green, but because it's expensive and doesn't work half of the time because of maintenance or heat - oh and also because we cannot build new reactor in reasonable time and budget anymore )
If you ignore the radioactive waste, it really is wonderful, but we still don't have a single final depot in Germany for it and it takes some 100k years to get rid of it the natural way.
It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima
Every energy source is the perfect energy source, if you choose to ignore its problems. Just like every operating system is the perfect operating system if you overlook its flaws.
Messing with atoms is better than burning fossil fuels, but let's not pretend that it's perfect.
not been reported so irresponsibly.
"Blame the messenger" is an ancient, and irresponsible game.
Blame the messenger is perfectly valid if the message is not delivered accurately. I think the qualms people had with the reporting of nuclear plant problems is that they were overblown and scared people away from nuclear.
> The reactor core itself was refuelled and is now using 60% mixed uranium-plutonium oxide fuel, supplied by TVEL and manufactured at its Zheleznogorsk site. The plutonium for this was produced from uranium during the operation of other nuclear power plants and recovered from the used fuel assemblies through reprocessing.
It's not 100% renewable in the Mix. Thats not what he said. It just means, that he picked a supplier, which exclusively buys renewable energy on the energy market.
Obviously it's still the same energy mix, which arrives on your house. But your money won't support Coal Power Plants.
No you can't (unless you do it yourself but the price is extremely high if you want uninterrupted power). What happens is: your provider purchase "green energy certificates" which means that some green electricity was generated on a sunny and/or windy day.
When it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else.
No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy on day-to-day scale, let alone seasonally.
Please don't let the brainwashing gets to you and inform yourself.
There are several power companies in Germany that are offering 100% green power after X years, in the sense that they're committing to constructing or buying new green power plants with a generating capacity at least as high as the amount sold X years ago.
The actual power from your outlet is going to be the same no matter which company you buy from, but it's still buying "green power" in a more meaningful way than a zero-sum relabeling.
When it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else.
Since this thread is about Germany, and not everyone on HN reads threads in scope, it's worth pointing out that this is not universal.
In most of Texas, for example, the wind blows most fiercely — and regularly — at night. Solar power contributes to the grid during the day, and wind power picks up that generation loss when the sun goes down. I once saw a graph of it from a utility regulator published in a newspaper.
Not every geography is so lucky in this manner. But because this is the global internet, it's important to point out that solar and wind aren't exclusively daytime sources on most of the planet.
What Germany needs is a source of wind that works at night. I've read that Spain imports energy from North Africa. Perhaps a more robust link in that direction is the solution.
> No you can't (unless you do it yourself but the price is extremely high if you want uninterrupted power). What happens is: your provider purchase "green energy certificates" which means that some green electricity was generated on a sunny and/or windy day. When it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else.
that is bullshit.
also besides that germany is small compared to other countries and dense, there is no time of the day where its nowhere windy nor sunny. so at the moment there is just no need to purchase green energy certificates for the bigger providers, they can either buy power from other providers or they can produce their green power.
and also it does not matter, since if you need 3kW and they can't deliver green power at the moment they will deliver more green power later, thats how it usually works.
> No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy on day-to-day scale, let alone seasonally.
also bullshit.
it has nothing to do with cost, more with there is no storage for everybody.
most providers that offer 100% green power actually do generate the amount of power in green that you use (that is their premise) of course they can't create different power lines, thus it's a mix.
(in germany it's forbidden to mark your product as "100% green power" if you buy certificates, of course you can write it some where but if your contract states it, it would be illegal, but there is a difference between contract and marketing, of course... Energiewirtschaftsgesetz - EnWG §42)
There's a massive business opportunity for someone willing to produce low density batteries for home use.
In a lot of countries customers are billed significantly less during the night than during the day for electricity, so the incentives already exist to make it financially worthwhile if a home battery pack that can provide a days typical use can be installed at a reasonable cost.
This would substantially smooth out base load requirements and mean that renewables could make up substantially more of the energy mix.
> There's a massive business opportunity for someone willing to produce low density batteries for home use.
Can you explain why, please? I'm genuinely interested.
I don't understand how this would be anything other than rich prepper niche market.
Installing batteries in all homes is going to be more expensive than grid storage, since you will need to pay more in total installation costs rather than installing ginormous grid batteries (or reversible dams, where feasible) in bulk.
My thinking on this is that if you don't need to pack the energy storage into a small volume (like in a vehicle), and if weight is less critically important (as it'll occupy space in e.g. a garage), it opens up a lot more options for storage medium (as an example, iron-flow packs).
At scale the costs could come down quite substantially given that the basic chemistry is iron, salt, water and little else - at which point it's a substantial financial boon to the customer given that they could see an up to 50% reduction in their energy costs (going by tariffs in my own region) to compensate.
It could and it might even be more efficient. That doesn't mean home installation is not a huge market though. It also has access to different capital.
This is what I think the real benefit is, and also why I think we'll see both. I don't see the political will or financial commitment materialising for large scale energy storage in the short term because it's an upfront cost to a taxpayer whichever way you slice it.
Individuals are free to self-fund their own battery pack installations though, and can then decide if the upfront cost is worth the reduction in rates to shift energy usage to non-peak times. Once that sufficiently takes off it becomes easier to sell the public at large on the idea, and will also drive down costs, at which point I could see wide-scale grid storage becoming thing. At that point, renewables are scalable to almost 100% of energy usage (assuming vehicles and industry transition away from combustion machinery).
It depends on what other market forces there are. If the utility has a government mandate to install more renewable energy than there are renewable energy customers, then it is like you say - just a book-keeping exercise.
On the other hand, if there is no government mandate, or if customer demand for renewable energy exceeds that mandate, then it provides a profit incentive for the utility to install/purchase more renewable energy.
One of the British '100% renewable' companies used to buy renewable power and then destroy their surplus resellable renewable obligation certificates instead of selling them (each supplier was obliged to hold certificates covering x% of their supply, where x << 100). That had the consequence that the renewable power generated was genuinely additional, as the other generators would have to get their renewable obligation certificates from new generation rather than the secondary market, at the margin.
They stopped, publicly reasoning that the proceeds from selling certs could be used to build their own additional renewable generation. I suspect it was just leaving too much money on the table, though.
Well, it makes a difference what kind of energy supplier turns a profit from your energy consumption. If you're buying renewable energy from a company that still invests into fossil fuels, it's fairly useless. If you buy it from a company that mainly builds up renewable energy production capacity, that helps the transition.
Of course, even a 100% renewable supplier needs to buy from the market to smooth out peaks in energy consumption for their customer base.
(disclaimer: i work for such a renewable energy supplier)
Some providers promise to build new renewable capacity that matches the consumption of their customers (not sure about the timeframe).
I'm not aware of any provider that builds the required storage too, though
There isn't enough renewable energy yet to cover all consumption. Which means that you paying extra is only an administrative move. You're just swapping places with the party that would otherwise have consumed the renewable energy.
I use $1 USD per watt per year, with electric prices around $0.10/kWh. Good enough to inform decisions like whether to leave a light on all the time ($5/year) or whether to purchase a NAS vs. used server ($40 vs. $300 per year).
I guess my prices are actually a little over $0.10 and a watt over a year is a little under 10,000Wh as shown in your calculations, so those offset to make the estimate even more accurate (than necessary).
California's power market is heavily distorted by the private utilities needing to make a profit, extreme cost of living, and a need to import power from other states.
Yes, you just purchase your electricity with a market price contract (usually with added margin) and every day the next day prices are published around 3pm Finnish time (perhaps 12 UTC). Then just use the free APIs to load data and use the data to adjust when you spend electricity on what. E.g. to charge EV on cheapest hours, or load batteries, or when you fire up your electric Sauna...
These days the price is different for every hour, in near future they move to 1/4 hour pricing.
About 10% of finnish household contracts are market price contracts. Most of the contracts are kinda continuous (price changes every 12 months) or fixed (e.g. a two year fixed price contract).
This is also common in Denmark. You get the new estimated hour-by-hour rates around noon the day before.
I actually made a little calendar subscription service[1] to help our household plan when to run the dishwasher, drier etc. and we've saved about 50% this quarter despite the rising electricity costs. You can usually tell when it's cheap/almost free too just by sticking your head out the window, since it's mostly always the cheapest on especially windy days.
Spot price (+margin) contracts became common in Finland at least some years ago. Most energy companies provide them now. The margin is something like 0.30–0.40 cent/kWh.
We buy energy from any Finnish seller with contract separate from transfer of electricity (a natural monopoly).
The poster said it's an extra 0.4 cents/kWh, not 0.4 USD/kWh.
Our contract in Sweden is NordPool market price + 0,006 USD/kWh. Typical electricity prices in Sweden is anything from 0,001 USD/kWh to 0.5 USD/kWh, it varies widely day by day. This is what enables people to be able to save by using electricity when it's almost free.
It's like with refrigerators - when some years ago it was both cost-efficient and even 'green' to scrap working refrigerators and replace them with new ones, because the difference in improved energy efficiency meant that the electricity cost savings outweighed the cost of the new refrigerator already within a year or two and the reduced pollution from less electricity (at the time, fossil fuels) outweighed the environmental cost/waste of making that new refrigerator.
You obtain a reduction of (1726-400) * 0.15 ~= 200$ a year.
I believe the average refrigerator price in the USA is over 400$ so I can't understand where the 2 years figure would come from without even talking about trying to supposedly be "green" ...
And after 1988 you are down to 800kwh so you would gain something like 60$ a year.
Yes and it even has a lower energy usage : ~300kw/h :).
But since you probably upgraded from a similar one then you are probably more inline with the 60$ I mention at the end and not 200$.
From what I understand high end fridge are often less efficient because of features like ice fountain or freezer in the lower part with drawers instead of doors.
Anyway I'm thinking it's probably not just post-facto justification because it looks too much like a seller pitch and wondering where it comes from.
I'm French and I had never heard it.
1. Electricity in other countries is more expensive. e.g. in Ireland it is €0.35/kwh (~$0.40).
2. Other countries have smaller houses, therefore smaller kitchens therefore smaller refrigerators. Between that and higher energy efficiency standards in general, new refrigerators in my local store vary from 230kwh (A energy rating) to 260kwh (F energy rating) in power usage.
For your second point it probably applied 10/20 years ago too, then it means you have an even smaller budget to make some economy.
So even when doubling electricity price I fail to see how it could be possible to reach the two years originally mentioned.
And I believe each time I have seen this 2 years figure mentioned it was probably USA centric conversation. I'm French and I had never heard of it before.
I plugged my parents 1960 fridge into a kilowatt and it used so little power I had to leave it plugged in for several days to make sure I got a reasonable reading. Something like 2 kwhr per day. So it would take about five years for a replacement to pay for itself if the replacement ran on nothing but happy thoughts.
$0.15 is laughably cheap for some parts of the country... Here in California it's not uncommon to pay 3x that, so $600/yr in electricity saved by a $400 appliance is a huge deal.
Even here in expensive Seattle our top rate (when you go above 500kWh a month, which is $0.1056/kWh) is $0.1307 per kWh. If you go just north the top rate falls to $0.10/kWh, and many PUDs in the state charge around half that price.
Folks make these same sort of claims on high-efficiency HVAC systems and I never get them to pencil out. The higher efficiency doesn’t pay for itself even over the entire lifespan of the system.
Inevitably the people making these claims sell HVAC systems.
There's a reason used servers are so cheap on ebay: if you run them 24/7 their electricity cost makes them unattractive compared to new hardware (often within a year).
Said in another comment, my server averages around 100-200W. It's equivalent to running a gaming PC.
The reason there's a lot of cheap servers on eBay is that their support contracts expired and are absolutely ridiculously expensive to maintain for a big company. It's easier to get a new server (which will likely have performance and efficiency upgrades as well) than to continue maintaining a server that no longer has a support contract.
The reason there's not many servers in people's hands is size and noise. Servers aren't meant to go in a house; most people don't have server racks in their home. And by default, the fans are jet engines, even behind closed doors.
I live in the USA - California, and 150W 24/x would cost about $550/yr. In fact it would cost me a lot more, as my family shifted to time-of-use billing to save money (yeah, it means we don't do certain things between 4-8pm, but with some adjustment it's made a difference in our bills).
one of the upsides to living in texas, lots of cheap wind power lol. even with more expensive electricity i can still run old hardware for cheap. means less e waste also.
Yearly averages are probably the most sensible to look at. Wind is at 20% which is still nothing to sneeze at:
> According to ERCOT, nearly half of Texas’ electricity was generated by natural gas-fired power plants in 2019. Coal-fired plants and wind power each generated about 20 percent, while the state’s two nuclear power plants — the South Texas Project near Bay City and Comanche Peak near Glen Rose — supplied a total of 11 percent. Solar, hydroelectric and biomass resources provided most of the remainder
A fan replacement and activating quiet mode on the server (usually a bios option or sometimes a hardware tweak) helps with the noise a ton at the cost of slightly less thermal ceiling.
They are still a great deal for burstable workloads or to use as a workstation - only run it when needed so no need to run 24/7.
If you need really cheap (and local!) compute for short periods of time, picking up one of those servers can still work out cheaper than renting from a cloud provider.
My R730 averages at around 100-200W with two 12-core CPUs, 128GB RAM and 8 12-14TB drives.
Servers are more efficient than people give them credit for. It's close to a gaming PC in electricity usage. Certainly not 60W (or what people can get with NUCs and RPi clusters) but for the power I get, it's very much worth it.
If we average that out to 150W, that'd be 1250-1300Kwh/yr. Current Bay Area electric prices means that'd cost in excess of $500/yr to run. I'd say that servers are not more efficient than people are giving them credit for...
Servers are more efficient when fully utilized. A commercial grade server in a homelab is more likely to idle all the time, making it very energy wasteful. Servers need to be right-sized, instead of "more is better".
And at Seattle prices, that's $150, so I don't exactly see what the purpose of your anecdote is other than to mention how pricy your electricity is.
Edit: But even at $500, that's pretty much the price of a low-spec VPS or VM per year. So for a fairly low initial price to buy the server, you're getting far more performance for the same price you'd pay someone else to use theirs.
Since it's a home server, when it's not receiving backups from computers in the house, or streaming media via Plex it's sitting there at < 15w, which is low enough not to worry about.
Well the electricity prices (according to the article) rose 55% in Germany and 83% in Finland, while the server prices are just going up by 10%, so electricity is just a part of it.
Electricity is a significant opex for many products including Agriculture. For example, I've seen Farmers cost as high as 50% for power, generally to move or pump water
I've been wondering over the past few months if we can build a "public" cloud. I have some old machines gathering dust, I'm sure others do too. Is it feasible to build an ad-hoc network of such computers where the compute power is rented out. For ex: I can connect my old lenovo i5 laptop to this network for 6hrs a day and charge 1.2x my electricy cost. Sort of like on demand EC2 instances, but backed by torrent like tech. It'd make computers pay for themselves over time
In order to keep my eletricity bill for a running system in my apartment to then minimum I researched the specs & prices from the "The Power Consumption Database"[1] and found an intel nuc running on 5watts idle. Thats the same class of power consumption of a raspi 4 8GB, but easier to maintain. Now I'm waiting for my a Coral TPU USB-Accelarator to keep the peak consumption down for some recognition tasks in homeassistant.
