back to article China details relocation plan for up to five million datacenter racks

China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has outlined plans for a massive migration of computing resources to more efficient facilities. The Middle Kingdom has previously discussed plans to build clusters of datacenters in the nation's west – a region where the weather is cooler, renewable energy is more …

  1. martinusher Silver badge

    Also aids employment

    One of the goals of the Chinese government is to promote employment in these areas.

    1. Dinanziame Silver badge

      Re: Also aids employment

      Building data centers generates employment; managing them, not so much. A bit.

      I'm wondering why it is necessary to make a plan out of it though. In the US, it seems simple optimization has already ensured data centers end up in relatively empty areas with cheap energy.

      1. Chris G

        Re: Also aids employment

        With over four times the population of the US, it makes sense to have plan to deal with the level of data.

        Presumably it also provides for redundancy, future proofing and security.

      2. vtcodger Silver badge

        Re: Also aids employment

        "I'm wondering why it is necessary to make a plan out of it though. In the US, it seems simple optimization has already ensured data centers end up in relatively empty areas with cheap energy."

        Probably because in the US, a "remote" data center is a few hours away. Maybe the Mohawk River Valley between Albany and Utica for a New York City based enterprise. What seems to be under discussion here would be putting that data center 3000km away in Beaver Bog, Montana. Which, except for the NSA's huge building in the wilds of Utah, doesn't seem to happen.

        Also, the Chinese believe -- with some reason -- in planning. It's worked for them. (Although they reject the Soviet version of economic planning). In the US, there is a powerful constituency that believes that governments can never do anything properly other than bullying foreigners. A government plan to put data centers in remote Western areas of North America would not have much support.

        Also, I wouldn't be shocked to find that the Chinese intend to power those data centers largely with coal, and they would like to help clean up the air in their Eastern population centers by burning the coal where there are fewer people and fewer other air pollution sources.

        1. Dunstan Vavasour

          Re: Also aids employment

          I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal. They've got the manufacturing costs of both PV panels and batteries down to the point where any high energy business is now built with renewables nearby to avoid the cost of mining and transporting any sort of fossil fuels.

          The only reason China is building coal generation now is because they can't build out renewables fast enough. For this sort of planned migration the renewable generation will be a pre-req.

          1. Excused Boots Bronze badge

            Re: Also aids employment

            Oh no, absolutely these datacentres will be coal powered or possibly nuclear or gas, but more that likely coal. After all what's this 'global climate change' nonsense? We have business, and profit and influence to think about....

          2. W.S.Gosset

            Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

            Be amazed.

            You're forgetting that the West's power markets are wildly skewed by regulation and mostly-off-the-books subsidies. Current example in Australia: Origin Energy is shuttering our largest coal plant and replacing it with a single battery, because via subsidies and market-warping, they earn less from producing&supplying avg 60 MWh/day max 70 MWh/day than by supplying ZERO power and just borrowing and returning 0.7 per day.

            Coal remains very much the cheapest large scale energy source on genuine all-in whole-of-life basis.

            Put it this way: China has by far the bulk of the world's solar etc construction capacity and by CCP direction can install at cost price. Cost FOB, too, not our CIF. And can simply direct build-out of any needed additional production capacity, as they routinely do elsewhere in the economy.

            No one on the planet can do solar etc anywhere near as cheaply as China. And their focus is purely the numbers. But their centralised decision-makers have ALL the numbers --whole economy-- not just a PR-cherrypicked subset.

            So if they're choosing to go ~full coal for their massive new power plant buildouts, what does that tell you about the real-world costs?

            1. W.S.Gosset

              Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

              ERROR. Sorry, it's early and the coffee's still seeping in.

              > "0.7 MWh"

              Schoolboy error: that's its instantaneous capacity, not its daily capacity.

              If we assume it can achieve the charge/discharge speed of South Australia's big Tesla battery (one and a quarter hours per 100MWh* one-way), then Origin's battery could borrow from & return to the grid 0.96 MWh/day. Assuming my coffee is working correctly.

              Or to put it another way: on a per-unit basis, in Australia via market-mangling you earn >60 times as much by borrowing&returning renewable energy, as you do by actually contributing to the power supply via coal.

              China does not have this market-mangling.

              .

              * if per 100%, then daily max capacity is 6.72 MWh, and the profit premium per-unit is only 9 times as much on a max-vs-avg basis, or 10 times as much on a max-vs-max basis.

              1. Kapsalon

                Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

                Please explain better what you are trying to say here! 100Mwh in 1 hour and 15 minutes means 80Mwh per hour means 1.9 Gwh per day (but the battery is not big enough for that of course),

                The Hornsdale Power Reserve (phase 1 only) can (is contracted to) deliver 100Mw, for 10 minutes, then throttle on with 30Mw for 3 hours minus the 10 minutes,, a bit more than 0.96 Mwh/day:

                16.6 + 84.9 = 101,5 Mwh/day

                With the extra 50% of phase 2 that becomes about 50% more probably.

                1. W.S.Gosset

                  Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

                  We've both made a silly mistake.

                  My error: Unit cockup: Well, there's the v.early morning syndrome for ya. Replace all my "MWh"s with "GWh"s. (Except for the "100MWh" of the SA battery capacity.) D'oh. More coffee before commenting!

                  Your error: Re calcs: you've forgotten to include (re)Charging Time. Cf. my "one-way" note. I've read that max (sustainable) charge & discharge rates for this-scale battery complexes are usually about the same, so that's 2.5hrs for a full charge+discharge cycle for the SA battery. The rest of the numbers drop out of that (G!Wh...:)

                  (The SA battery's 75+mins to discharge its 2.5mins-worth-of-peak-power was widely disseminated at the time. Less well known is the accompanying $415m spent on diesel generators as real-world backup. Green! Weatherill and the media covered that up very well. Theoretically convertible to gas in future, for IIRC another ~$100-150m or so. But I haven't seen that line item hit the budget yet.)

                  (I note the SA battery boys are currently in court for completely failing to provide the mandated emergency power/balancing for a 2019 power station disruption. Let's hope SA never actually needs it.)

            2. John Robson Silver badge

              Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

              "Coal remains very much the cheapest large scale energy source on genuine all-in whole-of-life basis."

              Assuming you ignore all the costs you don't like

              1. W.S.Gosset

                Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

                Nope. Sorry. That's what "all-in" means.

                Likewise, means you don't airbrush out the myriad subsidies for "renewables". Eg, NSW has so far spent $11bn on pre-production subsidies for solar to replace approx.$7bn of 2 retiring coal plants. None of that will appear on the solar firms' books. Neither will the next layer of construction subsidies. And the final ongoing operating subsidies are nontrivial to trace (but in Australia are per-unit a bit more than the price un-penalised coal can deliver to the market at) (solar used to be topped-up to ~4x the coal market price, so it's getting cheaper.)

                Actual real-world all-in costs.

                1. John Robson Silver badge

                  Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

                  "Actual real-world all-in costs."

                  So you've included illnesses and deaths from pollution, the costs of climate change...

                  What value did you put on death or on long term lung disease?

                  1. W.S.Gosset

                    Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

                    You're muddling up coal plants, with pre-WWII every house and business in one particular extremely dense and large city burning coal or wood (both typically damp) for heating and cooking on a near-continuous basis. Coal plants have only one material pollution effect (which can now be, and is now, filtered) ; amusingly, I haven't come across a single "green" person who's aware of it. Because it doesn't affect humans or cute fluffy things.

                    However, lung disease IS a very serious and near-automatic consequence of a "green" policy: low/zero-airflow houses. Great for insulation. Hence attempts to make them mandatory. Problem is that the v.low-income people who've been involuntarily forced to live in such new-builds, are developing serious lung problems and various other related health problems. Turns out that warm humid low-airflow environments are wonderful environments for the growth of aerosolising moulds, yeasts, etc.

                    Oh, and for a true environmental horror, look into Solar. ~10yr lifespan on most panels. Go find out what happens after they expire.

                    Re climate change: if you're worried about that, just do a deep dive on any part of it. Right down to the nuts & bolts, and/or right down the reference tree until you start to get to the core primary works. When you get your first "That's odd..." or "Hang on..." moment, you're getting warm. Dig into it, and you'll have that dawning shock moment everyone does. Go sideways from there, at that level, and welcome to the world of fiction and fraud. Bluntly, if that sort of carry-on had happened in a business context, there'd be a dozen people looking at serious gaol time, and a coupla dozen looking at life-changing fines.

                    1. John Robson Silver badge

                      Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

                      I'll take that as an "I didn't bother counting external costs because they're inconvenient".

                      There is no doubt that a large scale burn can be better controlled than lots of small burns - and EVs take advantage of that brilliantly. But they also allow for significantly cleaner methods of energy harvesting.

                      The fact that you think that solar panels have a 10 year lifespan and then have to go to landfill is the killer though - solar panels are easily recycled, and the volume of them coming to the end of their life is starting to grow, which will make this an easier process still.

                      1. W.S.Gosset

                        Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

                        > I'll take that as

                        "Interesting"... Your attempted point rests on a fantasy world, and when this is pointed out --indeed, the source of that fantasy actually detailed for you-- your reaction is to retreat harder into the fantasy world and insist that, rather than your point being heard and demonstrated fictional, that somehow instead I'd ignored you/your point.

                        You dig yourself deeper into fantasy land, or at least the land of someone who enjoys being lied to, with your assertion re solar panels. Solar panels are not recyclable. The supporting frameworks are recyclable (aluminium struts, frames, armour, "the box they're held in", etc). Pretending that recycling these = recycling the solar panels, was a propaganda attempt by activists -- you're the first person I've come across who's repeated it.

                        And EVs are an ecological farce and an electronics marketplace nightmare. Re the former farce: did you know EVs need to last 3 times longer than a petrol car just to have the same environmental impact to build? So your Nissan Leaf/Tesla/blah needs to last 60yrs and 750,000km for environmental equivalence. You would know this -- if your info wasn't being subsetted, if you looked at what the industry is saying rather than trustafarian activists. Re the latter nightmare: if even a couple of sizeable populations go all-in on EVs, hang on to your phone and your laptop: might be the last ones you can afford. Plus power bills will soar even further as simple grid cable soars in price. And the industry reckons the domestic grid will need to triple to cope with 100% EVs, so boy will those bills soar. Smash the poor! Green! Etc.

                        You appear to confine your information-sources to spin-priests like the Guardian or the ABC. Be aware that you are being fed fantasies and savagely edited subsets of facts/situations (the euphemistically named "cherrypicking" of data).

                        1. John Robson Silver badge

                          Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

                          "Solar panels are not recyclable"

                          No, because 85% reuse of the silicon isn't recycling at all...

                          And EVs do not require lasting several times as long an ICE vehicle to be ecologically beneficial. They do "cost" more to build, but only on the order of 40ish%.

                          And that is offset, even with fairly generous (to ICE) assumptions about electricity production within a few years.

            3. vtcodger Silver badge

              Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

              "Coal remains very much the cheapest large scale energy source on genuine all-in whole-of-life basis."

              Depends on where you are. In North America, huge volumes of natural gas are produced as a byproduct of oil production from organic rich shales. In North America, natural gas is cheaper than coal. In China similar shales exist, but they are technically more difficult to exploit, so -- for now -- coal it is. FWIW, China expects domestic coal production to peak around 2035. Which is to say they expect to run out. China is said to have 46 new nuclear plants in planning or under construction (The US has two.)

              1. W.S.Gosset

                Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

                > Depends on where you are.

                Yup. Commodities (physical) are incredibly situation-specific -- even particular coal consignments from the same mine can see varying prices per the price formula, based on the per-load Assay tests. Eg, hydro is wonderful, the best of all; but if you ain't got the mountains, and the right shape mountains, it's a non-starter.

                But at a macro level, in the general case without seeking to start racking out Specifications for Energy Mix Per Region, the core point holds.

                > they expect to run out

                The rest of the world's known coal reserves were predicted a few years back (before the renewables started getting jammed into the system: killing baseload but forcing peaking powerplants to pick up the slack, ie gas) to last ~4-500 years at expected growth rates.

                We've been using coal in-large for about 70yrs, and look how far alternate energy sources have come in that time. We had >5 times that R&D time comfortably up our sleeves before we'd be looking at having to regress as badly as we are now, in terms of service quality and price. We're jumping straight to the worst-case scenario for 4-500yrs from now...

                1. Alan Brown Silver badge

                  Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

                  Coal might last 4-500 years, but the atmosphere won't.

                  If we exceed ~800-850ppm CO2 then it's game over for most complex life on the planet and almost certain extinction for all terrestrial animals exceeding 20kg adult mass

                  Ironically, most of the planet's oil deposits date from (and are a product of) the last time that event occurred - the Permian Extinction

                  To give an idea how bad things were back then - just before the extinction, global oxygen and climactic conditions were similar to what they are now. Just after it, oxygen levels went to 12% and stayed there for ~10k years, It took ~10 MILLION years for coal to start forming again

                  Humans (most mammals and most birds) can't survive at less than 16-17% oxygen long-term. We drown in our own lungs after a while. It's called altitude sickness and it's a nasty way to go

        2. Alan Brown Silver badge

          Re: Also aids employment

          They ARE powering them with coal. Moving them won't move the power sources but it makes more power available in the distribution system to run heat pumps and get rid of coal burning heating systems in apartment buildings in cities

          Longer term the aim is to get rid of the coal and replace it with nuclear heat. That's what the work at Wuwei is all about - Molten Salt nuclear is hot enough to replace coal burners, unlike "conventional" water-moderated plants (it's also MUCH safer than water moderated systems and essentially immune by design to just about every kind of nuclear incident seen in the last 70 years)

          When you look at it this way, the coal plant rollout makes more sense. The layout of the sites clearly allows for something to be dropped in later and a MSR plant is 1/4 the size of the equivalent coal source

          Renewables are nice but essentially only an expensive stepping stone to carbon-free power generation. They can't provide everything needed and they're more expensive than MSRs

          Ans yes, MSRs are the thorium future Lester was pushing on this site 10-15 years ago. China ran with it. Others will too. 2MW pilot plant has been running since November 2021 (replicating Oak Ridge test site byt starting with the thorium proposal Nixon killed in 1972), A 100MWe plant is being built alongside it to validate the Oak Ridge power proposals and next step is GW scale full size power plants

      3. IGotOut Silver badge

        Re: Also aids employment

        "I'm wondering why it is necessary to make a plan out of it though. "

        Well, the Special Economic Zone plan went rather well, so why not?

  2. AlanSh

    Sounds great

    As an ex data centre migration architect, that sounds like a great project. But riddled with issues, of course.

    I hope they have good people on it. I can think of lots of ways it can fail.

  3. John Riddoch

    Surely a typo?

    65% availability would mean it was unavailable 1 day out of 3, or over 2 days a week. If that's what is delivered, it's going to be a tough sell to get anyone to use the new data centres.

    1. Lazlo Woodbine

      Re: Surely a typo?

      These will mostly be Government data centres, so there won't be a huge need to find customers.

      Also, as the article states, low-latency data will still be local, these centres will mostly be cold storage.

  4. W.S.Gosset

    Rubbery figures?

    > five million racks of kit

    1 rack per ~300 people?

    Seems... excessive.

    Could it be some of these figures are subject to the usual CCP spin/exaggeration?

    1. Petalium
      Big Brother

      Re: Rubbery figures?

      With the amount of data they collect on their citizens and probably on foreigners, expect the number of racks to double in five years:)

    2. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Rubbery figures?

      Tape libraries hold around 500 tapes per rack

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like