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3 months ago
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Isn't it a beauty!?
Say hello to the Beauharnois Generating Station, a run-of-the-river hydro plant on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal, Canada.
Our newest data center region sits just 800 metres from this powerhouse, making it a perfect addition to our carbon-aware cloud, which always selects the lowest CO₂ regions.
With 36 turbines and over 1,900 MW of capacity, Beauharnois can power nearly 400,000 homes, or run ~24,736,362 jobs in parallel, reducing emissions by up to 90% compared to traditional compute. Each 300-tonne rotor weighs as much as 50 African elephants.
If we maxed out the entire output for an hour, we could run ~24,736,362 jobs in parallel, reducing emissions by up to 90% compared to traditional compute.
Thanks to Hydro Québec for keeping the electrons flowing clean and the great facts on Elephants.
Guestimating Dam Workloads
A rough calculation to figure out how many jobs we could run in parallel using the energy from a single dam. We work backwards from how much energy one job uses to see how far that power could stretch.
1 2const energyPerJobkWh = 0.0037978278; 3const durationSeconds = 178; 4 5// 1. Find energy per kWh 6const energyPerSecond = energyPerJobkWh / durationSeconds; 7const energyPerHour = energyPerSecond * 3600; 8 9console.log("Energy used per job per hour:", energyPerHour.toFixed(6), "kWh"); 10 11const totalKWhAvailable = 1900000; // 1,900 MW for 1 hour 12const numberOfJobs = totalKWhAvailable / energyPerHour; 13 14console.log("Jobs that can run in parallel:", Math.floor(numberOfJobs).toLocaleString()) 15
