The power of 21000 homes for advertising.
What’s most impressive is that it is even legal.
Or profitable
Is it? Last I‘ve heard it was bleeding money.
Probably because they’re not doing much with it. It’s $100/person to see the basic “Planet Earth” showing and almost $200 to see The Grateful Dead show. Previously they showed a Phish show. That’s it for options, and none of it sounds really appealing to me.
I love this kind of shit. Building things for the sake of it is worth it. Not only as just expression, which may be hubris but it’s still expression. Also entertainment, inspiration, pushing the art of engineering, and just giving people something to do, and all the good that comes with that like personal and trade growth.
A purely utilitarian life is a life only spent on survival. Not a life I want to live.
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If this is something you feel strongly about, then please stop eating factory farmed meat and animal products if you havent already. It is something you personally can actually do. It helps, and it will genuinely make you feel better. You may not have much power, but using the power you do have to help the team you claim to be on instead of the other team is a massive step forward.
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I don’t agree. The comment points out the single most effektive move an individal without political nor financial power can make to cut personal co2-emissions with just a change of habit. It’s not about veganism, animal rights or your health, it’s just about sanity. Us still eating meat even though we know better is an incredibly dumb waste of energy for the sake of pleasure, exactly like this shitty powereating globe.
As long as >95% of the global population still consumes meat I understand the urge to bring this topic everywhere.
Advertising? This thing is essentially a theater. Yeah, it can run advertisement but anything with a screen can do that. It’s like saying a movie theatre is for advertising.
It’s a 400 foot tall screen that’s constantly on and in view, even at night, which plays ads like 90% of the time. Calling it “essentially a theatre” is a huge understatement.
But the energy usage is quoted as peak for the entire venue - which is literally a theater / concert hall. It opened with a live U2 performance. The energy usage isn’t just for the displays, it includes all the power for the entire building, the concert speakers, heating/cooling, indoor lighting, any kitchen equipment, etc.
Currently, an agreement is under review to ensure that 70% of the Sphere’s power needs will come from solar sources, with the other 30% from non-renewable energy that will be offset by renewable energy credits.
Ahh yes, energy credits. AKA bullshit.
We shouldnt call them energy credits, but rather indulgences.
Somewhere in an ancient crypt, the bones of Luther begin to twitch to life…
We should call them FRAUD
Hey!
They’re not always BS. Just most of the time!
Or are they? Some of the companies who are the best at it and seem to be genuinely trying have been shown not to be able to guarantee one way or the other.
“Wait, someone cut down that forest we planted?!” (no joke)
Edit: see REC clarification below (thanks!)
Just to be clear, renewable energy credits are different than carbon offsets, and easier to guarantee because they’re often tied directly to a metered renewable energy source.
That said, there are still junk RECs on the market, like those tied to energy that was produced up to 2 decades ago that nobody got around to claiming / retiring. Or RECs tied to energy sources that may have happened regardless of the REC sale.
Ohhh good point! Wanted to edit that into my comment there even, thank you.
The junk RE credits are really interesting. As is the “ha we were building that solar farm no matter what!” problem - reminds me of when that happens in… tax deductions I think.
At least I understand forests that are replanted over and over to be used for lumber, effectively reducing the use of old lumber for myriad products.
Energy credits — what a bunch of vacuous rhetoric.
The reality is that it’s energy being taken away from the overall grid, requiring a larger grid and thus prolonging our dependence on non renewable energy while we build up renewable sources.
If we weren’t so wasteful with our energy we wouldn’t need as much of it and it’d be easier to go fully renewable.
Well this is not good math at all. If you create a project and offset all its power requirements, you haven’t added anything to the grid. The alternative is to not do stuff, which is not going to happen anytime soon*, so it’s a net good thing and needs to be incentivized, not disparaged.
*Well it will happen after the water wars and plagues wipe us out, and the sphere will stop drawing any energy at that point.
Currently, an agreement is under review to ensure that 70% of the Sphere’s power needs will come from solar sources, with the other 30% from non-renewable energy that will be offset by renewable energy credits.
Nevada has pledged to achieve net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, and the solar project under construction to help offset its energy debt is estimated to complete in 2027.
How stupid is it that somebody can claim “Net Zero” greenhouse gas emissions when 30% of their power is greenhouse gas.
Just gonna throw this out there. Fuck credits, charge a carbon tax.
We’ll also ignore the fact that that solar could have been used to offset actual needs instead of this BS.
Vegas exists because of the BS.
Well you don’t understand what “net” means.
It doesn’t mean literally zero. It means colunm A and column B average out to zero.
To acheive a real net zero, they have to save energy somewhere else that takes that column past 100% (Such as if their solar panels produce more energy than they use during certain times.)
They probably just make some shit up to say their are saving extra somewhere they aren’t (so to that point, yes…credits are bullshit.)
Fuck credits, charge a carbon tax.
IMO it seems RECs are a better solution than carbon taxes at least in situations like this. With RECs you’re buying renewable energy to offset non-renewables, with a carbon tax the company is just giving the government money for use of non-renewables. Only funds spent on RECs in this case actually go to supporting the renewable energy sector. I’m no expert in this stuff so I could be off, just how I understand it.
Maybe, I mean just maybe, they can run this thing only as long as the solar generated power lasts, and then turn it off 30% of the time.
Run it at 70% percent brightness.
Oooh, this is a good idea
They never claimed net zero. They plan to achieve net zero by 2050
Yeah, that’s in the quote. I’m more complaining about the concept of “net zero”.
Exactly. Carbon credits for the win! I love me some Pigouvian taxes. :)
Las Vegas in general is a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat. Does it even exist without the Hoover Dam?
I don’t know about power, but Vegas is actually incredibly water efficient. Due to the way the water rights work with the Colorado river, they’re not allowed very much, but it doesn’t “count” if you put it back in. So nearly every drop they use is treated and put back (probably cleaner, tbh). Boggles the brain, but somehow it’s actually a fairly sustainable city. More than any other other major metro, in any event.
Considering they are in a literal desert, they would have to be fairly sustainable to exist in the first place. Not saying it’s not super impressive, my dad lived out there when they were building up a lot of the expanded infrastructure and he has some cool stories about how he saw the desert on the outskirts disappear as they added in all the water and transportation stuff
It was also, literally, built by the mob
It’s funny, I think Vegas is perfectly fine as the city of sin so things like this really don’t phase me. It was built on the idea of crime and excess.
What does seem weird to me is how in a desert, why isn’t everything solar? The sun is their only natural resource besides sand. Every rooftop and parking lot and flat surface possible seems like it should be a panel.
Vegas is surrounded by empty desert, they don’t need to use rooftops and parking lots
even deserts host life. it’s kind of a ecological misnomer that we could just cover the deserts of the world in solar panels. that would have serious repercussions.
What repercussions could covering a few acres more in the mojave with solar panels have?
Honestly if we could get space elevators figured out, the best place to put solar panels would be in the upper atmosphere. Tethered to the ground by massive columns that feed the energy they collect to massive capacitors on the ground?
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They say there are 16 screens inside, each with a 16k resolution. Such a screen would have 16x as many pixels as a 4k screen. The GPUs power those as well.
For the number of GPUs it appears to make sense. 150 GPUs for the equivalent of about 256 4k screens means each GPU handles ±2 4k screens. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it could make sense.
The power draw of 28 MW still seems ridiculous to me though. They claim about 45 kW for the GPUs, which leaves 27955 kW for everything else. Even if we assume the screens are stupid and use 1 kw per 4k segment, that only accounts for 256 kW, leaving 27699 kW. Where the fuck does all that energy go?! Am I missing something?
This is a complete shot in the dark but could the huge power draw come from needing some intense industrial cooling/airflow stuff in/on the sphere?
Edit: forgot a word
The big power draw is because of the sheer amount of light it dumps out. You try lighting up 54,000 square meters of LED panel to a few hundred nits like a pc monitor, and see how much power it takes.
More likely it’s the thing that generates all that heat in the first place.
complete shot in the dark
Man, I wanna delay the stupid edgy joke I’m making but I can’t help myself
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In the future there will be myths that we once had standards such as html but after we tried to build this sphere, god cursed us to use only incompatible proprietary protocols
Yeah, 4k phone and 4k plasma tv don’t consume same ammount of energy.
Says 16K, where’s the disconnect? (I don’t know display tech)
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Anything most likely driving factor here?
Extreme resolution requirements, massive number of LED elements, real-time rendering and synchronization needs, complex content processing, load distribution and redundancy, future-proofing capabilities, fraudulent kickback scheme
And a waste of electricity?
Its one of the smaller atrocities in Vegas, particularly when compared to the Bellagio Fountain or the food waste generated by all those casino dining halls.
The fountains aren’t quite as wasteful as they seem. They use a lot of water compared to a house, but way less than some car washes.
Plus it is recycled. They would only replace what is lost due to evaporation or after a drain and cleaning.
I looked it up (because the air is very dry in Nevada) and about 32,000 gallons of water per day are evaporated at the Bellagio fountains.
Source: The Las Vegas Sun
An average car wash uses 40 gallons per car and washes a hundred cars per day: Source
A car wash uses 80 gallons per car. The car wash by my office probably washes a thousand cars a day.
Car washes recycle water, too.
Yeah we should have never invented televisions or records either! And don’t even get me started on cell phones. Just waste waste waste.
Why, if it were up to me we would all still be hunting and gathering!
Apples to oranges dude, this is for pure spectacle that wears off after five minutes. Plus any data gained from it was at the lab they prototyped it I believe in Burbank. This aint really a sign of progress, and itll be funny to see what happens to it when it inevitably breaks.
Add a solar array and battery bank, a you might even have electricity left over. It’s in the desert after all.
Have you ever seen a solar array that gives 28 MW?
Is it bigger or smaller than a football field?
Rough calculation says it needs about 28 ha, this could be about 30 football fields (depending on whatever they mean in your area when they say football :))
Thank you for doing the math.
So?
Or how about six wind turbines? It’s rather windy in Las Vegas.
I mean, have you seen it with your own eyes?
I’ve flown over a couple big ones. Not sure of the exactly area or output.
Is the ‘dystopia-sphere’ trying to compete with the torment nexus or something?
Thunderdome was already taken
A bomb that could destroy Earth’s core would be an admittedly impressive technical feat!
I mean it is cool. But really a testament to why we deserve extinction at this point…
Ok, so it’s “capable of drawing” enough power for 20,000 homes in the area. How much does it actually use day to day? Does it dim at night and brighten in the daytime to keep those ads rolling in the sunshine?
Might as well just give up on the earth right now I guess
That article gets stuck so much and makes my (relatively high end) laptop’s fan scream so hard you’d think the website was designed for that kind of hardware.
Wouldn’t just one GPU be enough to run the Sphere, or a I getting something wrong?
I remember hearing about that it’s not exactly high resolution, each “pixel” being a bunch of pretty large lamps.
Wikipedia says it’s 16,000x16,000 (which is way less than I thought). The way the math works, that’s 16x as big as a 4k monitor, so 16 GPUs would make sense. And there’s a screen inside and one outside, so double that. But I also can’t figure out why it needs five times that. Redundancy? Poor optimization? I dunno.
But wouldn’t that be only necessary if it needed to render real-time graphics at such a scale? If I’m correct, all its doing is playing back videos.
I think it’s doing some non-trivial amount of rendering, since it’s often syncing graphics with music played live.
Even if it’s just playing back videos, it still should compensate for the distortion of the spherical display. That’s a “simple” 3d transformation, but with the amount of pixels, coordinating between the GPUs and some redundancy, it doesn’t seem like an excessive amount of computing power. The whole thing is still an impressive excess though…
I’m guessing it’s the department of redundancy department, is my guess.
Someone elsewhere in the thread suggested it might be a marketing thing on Nvidia’s part, and that makes a lot of sense.
The way I think it, it’s possible a really small number of GPUs would be enough to render the framebuffer, you’d just need an army of low-power graphics units to receive the data and render it on screens.
Having a high-power GPU for every screen is definitely a loss unless the render job is distributed really well and there’s also people around to admire the results at the distance where the pixel differences no longer matter. Which is to say, not here.
