Datacenter diplomacy: Australia commits to help Vanuatu build bit barns Australia will help to fund the development of two datacenters in the Pacific island nation Vanuatu, an example of tech infrastructure becoming an important diplomatic consideration. Vanuatu is around 2,000 kilometers from Australia’s east coast. The country is home to around 320,000 people, and its GDP is just over $1 billion …
Do data centers on a bunch of volcanic rocks 2500km from Australia make any economic sense? Bear in mind that the islands,being volcanic,have little or no fossil fuel resources. Electricity for those Islanders that have access mostly comes from imported diesel. What percentage of the population has power?According to the internet, about 33%.
Nothing against Vanuatu. Might be a tropical paradise for all I know. But it seems an odd place to locate data centers.
They could add a third offshore immigration detention centre for brown people, and Matrix-like generate electricity.
I guess they are also ignoring the seas-level rises threatening Vanuatu too - or are they using the volcanic rock as a foundation pile and going all Waterworld from the start.
Diesel generators are nasty, noisy, smelly things and require some sort of regular tanker service to keep them fuelled up. Solar panels would seem appropriate bevause photos on Wikipedia seem to show enough non-agricultural land to to power a few data centres, though wind power may not be a good idea since the islands seem to be in a wind belt.
The worry about putting data centres on Vanuatu would be the cost of laying data cables to it, so it would be nice to know its situation w.r.t. to the potential users of the proposed data centres.
Some 950 miles away from Vanuatu is Tuvalu. Tuvalu's foreign minister gave that speech while standing in the sea to highlight how the rising sea is threatening his country. I don't think the sea level in Vanuatu's sea level is going to be that different, seems the PM wants to accelerate the process.
Downvoted because sea level rise in the 20th century is estimated to have been around 20cm (8 inches) and there is no reason to believe it has accelerated much if at all in the 21st. (You can check that by going to https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8518750 See a frightening trend there? There isn't one. By all means, check other us tidal gauges (hint, The Presidio tidal gauge in San Francisco has the second longest US record. But be aware that you want long term records because there are definitely short term (e.g. decadal) variations in sea level at any given location. And remember that older tidal gauges were primarily intended to tell cargo ships how much water was under their keel. It's likely that some of the records include effects of repairs or even moving the recording site around the harbor possibly to locations with different local tectonics
That doesn't mean that rising sea levels won't be a problem for some over a very long time span -- centuries. But ironically probably not for Pacific Islanders. Why not? Because tropical reef corals make limestone from CO2 and Calcium molecules in the tropical oceans. And they do it at impressive rates. Tropical atolls seem to have managed to keep up with 120 meters (400 feet) of sea level rise during the continental ice sheet melt 20000 years ago to 10000 years ago. That's six times the 20th Century rate. Where will the problems be? Probably places built on fill that is compacting(many of the world's port facilities), places where fluids (petroleum, fresh water) are being pumped from under the harbor, places where the Earth is sinking due to natural tectonic forces.
I'd recommend the IPCCs Assessment Reports sea level sections. They seem to be quite good for the most part. But they are information dense and are unlikely to give you the sort of quick, easy answers the media, politicians, and the public in general favor. Here's a link to AR6 (the latest) https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-9/ If you want to tackle it.
The IPCC also tackled the subject of the small islands and how they would be affected, including in the Pacific - see https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/chapter/chapter-15/. The report is hardly arguing that sea level rise isn't a problem.
