Microsoft’s Geothermal Building – Cool – And Another Reason For Cloud
Episode 172 •
2nd September 2021 • This Week Health: Newsroom • This Week Health
00:00:0000:06:39
Transcripts
This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.
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Check out our website, our YouTube channel, and our LinkedIn page, and see if subscribing or following makes sense for you and your career. All right, here's today's story, and this comes from Fast Company Fast company.com. So Microsoft is building one of the largest geothermal plants in North America. Let me give you a couple of excerpts.
A major new building is rising on the expansion of Microsoft's corporate campus outside of Seattle. Unlike other recent architectural escapades from tech companies, it's not a circular spaceship or a swirling glass mountain, or even a starchitect designed indoor outdoor park. Microsoft's new building is an energy plant.
The thermal energy center is the unlikely centerpiece of a 3 million square foot. Addition to the Tech Giants campus in Redmond, Washington, as its straightforward name suggests, the building will be the hub of the expansion's new energy system, which will power the campus almost entirely through electricity provided by geothermal energy exchanges designed by the Seattle based architect NBBJ.
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For a company as big and as energy intensive as Microsoft think rooms full of warring computers, a fleet of electric vehicles and 10,000 meals being cooked daily in its cafeterias, there are a lot of fossil fuels to replace all of our heating and our cooling, the HVAC systems, these need to be all electric.
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Other renewable energy sources like wind and solar can provide more power than geothermal, but can also take up more space and often rely on existing transmission networks. Geothermal. When done at this scale provides the amount of electricity and savings that Microsoft needs while also avoiding the intermittency issues with wind and solar when the air is still or cloudy.
All right. That's all from the story I. It's a really fascinating story. What's, what's the, so what? What could possibly be the, so what am I gonna tell you? That your health system should build a geothermal plant? No, I'm not gonna tell you that. I'm gonna tell you that your health system is not going to build a geothermal plant.
And because of that, I think it's one of the reasons we are going to move to the cloud. The cloud makes sense. And one of the rationales, if you go back to how electricity sort of came to being, and you look back at that, there was Tesla's model, which was AC and there was . Edison's model, which was dc and DC was safer.
You could actually touch a DC line with power going through it, and it would not hurt you in the least. AC though we know can electrocute people at high voltages and can send a pretty good shock through you if you do the wrong things in your house. So AC was not as safe. DC was a lot safer, but AC one.
Why did AC win AC one? Because it was much more efficient. It was easier to build and scale. You could build a massive power plant, say at Niagara Falls or at the edge of a major metropolitan area, and you could essentially provide power for that entire city or even a region. And with DC they had to put power plants essentially on every street corner.
And that's the direction they were going. When Edison was trying to build out electric in New York City, they were literally putting power plants on every street corner. And that was not gonna scale. Tesla's model of, uh, alternating current ended up winning out. I think the same thing's true here when you look at scale, how are we going to reduce carbon emissions?
We're gonna reduce it through scale. Organizations and companies that can build data centers that are submerged under water, that can use geothermal energy, that can use alternative energy, means like outside air and produce their own chips, and do all sorts of those kinds of creative things, which quite frankly in healthcare, we don't have time to do.
We just don't have time to mess with. I would never tell you to go out and build your own computers. I don't think you should be building your own data centers. . And I think you should be moving more and more of your compute, your storage, and your processing out into the cloud. And part of it is we're just not gonna be able to reduce our energy footprint and our greenhouse gas emissions and those kinds of things.
If we continue to try to house it within all of our hospitals across the country, that's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, you get the picture.
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