America’s Cup charts a course to net zero for shipping industry

 

The AC75 race boat Ineos Britannia “flying” on foils in practice for the America’s Cup. 

C.Gregory/INEOS Britannia

From WSJ by Perry Cleveland-Peck

From solid sails to flying boats, technology developed for the world’s most famous sailing competition is making its way into the commercial fleet, as the industry races to reduce carbon emissions
 

Merchant shipowners with an eye on a sustainable future will have the Port of Barcelona in their sights this month and next.
But it isn’t the Spanish commercial sea hub they will be focusing on rather than the America’s Cup yacht regatta that is being hosted by the Mediterranean city.

The sailing event, which takes place every three or four years in different locations around the world and is often described as Formula One racing on the sea, brings together world-class sailors and money-no-object design teams in a bid to create state-of-the-art race boats in the hope of winning the world’s oldest international sports competition.

But while the offshore action will no doubt be exhilarating to watch, it is the work taking place in the boat sheds and sail lofts on shore that could prove more interesting for the shipping industry as it seeks to meet its net-zero goals.

“A surprising amount of the tech that is developed for the America’s Cup finds its way into the commercial fleet” as the industry “strives to reduce carbon emissions,” said Peter Sand of ocean analytics firm Xeneta.

 

Ben Ainslie is the skipper of Ineos Britannia, the U.K.’s 2024 America’s Cup team.
Photo: INEOS Britannia

Founded by Ben Ainslie, the captain of the British America’s Cup team for the past three campaigns and a sailing medal winner in five consecutive Olympic Games, BAR Technologies was born directly out of the 2017 America’s Cup regatta with one simple idea: Why let all the effort and money that went into designing and perfecting these incredible race boats go to waste once the event is over?

The boutique marine consulting firm, based in Portsmouth, England, has since taken some of the most winning formulas from the America’s Cup campaigns and applied them to the commercial sector.
It is perhaps best known for its WindWings technology, solid sails developed using techniques borrowed from the America’s Cup and adapted for commercial shipping, allowing a vessel to maintain speed while powering its engine down, thereby consuming less fuel and operating more efficiently and sustainably.

“We’re always pushing the boundaries in the America’s Cup,” Ainslie said.
“When we set up the British team, we also established a technologies business on the back of that.
The wing-sail technology was the most transferable for commercial shipping.
And now they’re on these huge commercial tankers.”

 

The Berge Olympus is fitted with four WindWings, which lower fuel consumption and reduce emissions.

Photo: BAR Technologies

 

Last year, Singapore-based shipping company Berge Bulk, which owns a minority stake in BAR Technologies, launched a 300-meter bulk carrier fitted with four WindWings, which it says help to lower fuel consumption by up to 20% and reduce emissions by an average of 19.5 metric tons a day.
Meanwhile, U.S.
agribusiness giant Cargill, which put two WindWings on one of its 230-meter carriers for six months, said that in optimum conditions the sails are able to save 11 metric tons of fuel, or 41 metric tons of CO2e, a day—a 37% emissions saving.

BAR Technologies is also working with U.K. shipping company Union Maritime to put WindWings on a number of vessels it has under construction.
The company, which says it has the world’s largest wind assisted propulsion system, or WAPS, fleet on order, announced in June that it too had bought a minority stake in BAR Technologies.

Uptake of sail technology within the commercial sector is growing.
In a report out last month, U.K. professional services firm Lloyd’s Register found that deployment of WAPS is expected to pass the 100-installation mark in the next two-three years.

Gavin Allwright, the secretary-general of the International Windship Association, who is quoted in the Lloyd’s Register report, said the challenge for modern shipbuilders is taking state-of-the-art technology seen in races like the America’s Cup and turning it into a robust product that can last 30 years.
“In the racing community, every second, every fraction of a knot, can be the difference between winning and not winning.
Many of our members are taking these incredibly fine, highly developed models and adapting them for a commercial level, where those systems, those materials can be replicated at scale and be cost-effective,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

BAR Technologies isn’t the only marine engineer with roots in yacht racing that is making sails for today’s merchant fleet.
French naval architect VPLP, which built the catamaran that won the 2010 America’s Cup among many other race boats, designed the rigid wings for the first sail-assisted containership, Canopée, constructed to transport Ariane rocket components between mainland France and French Guiana.

In Germany, Hapag-Lloyd is working with the blue water yachtsman Boris Hermann on a possible wind propulsion project for some of its vessels.

“There’s probably about 40 different companies developing wind-propulsions technologies worldwide.
Thirteen of those are in the market or just coming in, offering four or five different types of wind propulsion,” Allwright said.

 

An artist’s impression of a vessel built with AeroBridge and WindWings. 

Photo: BAR Technologies

In addition to making sails, BAR Technologies has used its design know-how to rethink the superstructure of the modern bulk carrier with sustainability in mind.
Taking a fresh look at the shape of most commercial ships today, the company’s engineers identified that one of the biggest causes of aerodynamic drag on the vessels was their accommodation blocks, which traditionally run across the ship, perpendicular to their direction of travel, presenting a wall of metal to the oncoming wind.

The company has solved the problem with its “AeroBridge” concept, which replaces the crew block with two linked accommodation quarters running down the sides of the ship, connected below decks and by a bridge above.
Union Maritime is in discussion with BAR Technologies over the possible installation of AeroBridge on some of its future vessels.

Bar Technologies CEO John Cooper said that to attract the best designers and engineers to his company, he needs to offer exciting projects around sustainability.
“The shipping industry is one of the dirtiest.
It is burning fuel that is the waste product of refineries.
So if you’re really into decarbonization, the maritime business is a really exciting area,” he said.

 

BAR Technologies’ BARTech 30 commercial work boat uses foil technology to reduce fuel consumption and smooth out the ride.
Photo: BAR Technologies

Another innovation seen at the America’s Cup and developed by BAR Technologies for the commercial sector relates to foils, the underwater “wings” that are attached to the race boats which allow them to lift out of the water and “fly” at eye-popping speeds in relatively low winds thanks to the reduction in drag acting on the boats’ hulls.

The company has adapted foil technology for its crew-transfer vessels designed for the offshore wind industry in an effort to “help make a green-energy sector even greener.” It uses foils to lift the boats slightly, correcting for pitch and roll while at sea, while reducing displacement and drag, and thus fuel use.
It also makes for a much more comfortable ride.
Some of BAR Technolgies transfer vessels are currently at work in the North Sea serving the U.K.’s wind farms.

Ainslie said that taken together these steps are like the theory of marginal gains in sport.
“The AeroBridge can generate maybe 3% efficiency. We’ve got foils on our commercial boats.
We’re redesigning some hull sections, particularly in the bow. We’ve got the WindWings. You add it up, all of a sudden it becomes a really meaningful efficiency gain.”

Another company developing America’s Cup foil engineering for the commercial sector is Artemis Technologies, a Belfast-based maritime design and engineering company spun out of Artemis Racing, the Swedish challenger in the 2017 America’s Cup regatta and one of the teams in this year’s new women’s event.
The company’s CEO and founder is Iain Percy, himself a double Olympic sailing champion for Great Britain and a former America’s Cup tactician.
His company has developed a fleet of fully electric foiling workboats, including pilot boats and a passenger ferry.
One of its electric boats is being employed as a “chase” boat by the Artemis team in Barcelona. 

Artemis uses foil technology developed in the America’s Cup on its all-electric foiling workboats.

Photo: ARTEMIS Technologies

The same foil technology is also being harnessed to boost efficiencies on new hydrogen-powered chase boats that each America’s Cup team must operate this year.
The hope is that these emissions-free vessels will also inspire more sustainable power boats in the future.

Mark Evans, the CEO of McConaghy Boats, which built the chase boat for Emirates Team New Zealand, the defender of the America’s Cup, said he is looking at building a 300-seater version of the vessel that would serve as a passenger ferry.

Bluegame, an Italian company that has made the U.S.team’s hydrogen-powered chase boat, said its experience constructing the vessel will “give birth to a new range” of multihulls, “containing many advanced technological elements of the America’s Cup boat.”

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : The space chase : the Americas'cup hydrogen chase boats are leading the way in the future of nautical tech.

The US needs open ocean data to avoid an innovation wipeout

Challenge accepted.

We’re going to show you just how much accurate and open data @NOAA collects and stores for #DATAPALOOZA today - here are 5 cool databases (like ocean floor bathymetry seen in this video!) worth checking out: https://t.co/sVzQKfjDeR pic.twitter.com/y7db6fMtMj

— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) August 17, 2018

From The Hill by Tim Gallaudet & Tim Janssen

The last decade has seen a surge of activity and interest involving the world’s oceans.
Exciting examples include the recent discovery of explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship the HMS Endurance at a depth of 10,000 feet in the Weddell Sea, record-setting submersible diver Victor Vescovo’s mind-blowing descents into the world’s deepest ocean trenches, as well as an upsurge in ocean-based, post-pandemic tourism and recreation.
Ocean related challenges have been in the headlines with images of congested seaports being the most visible symbol of the ongoing supply chain disruption, where shipping is but one component of the increasingly relevant ocean-based blue economy.
Our oceans are also a place for the most prominent conflict and competition of the day, as the South China Sea and Strait of Taiwan are center stage for the U.S.-China rivalry, while the Black Sea plays a key strategic role in Russia’s brutal aggression toward Ukraine.

The ocean’s natural resources are also seeing a growing groundswell of support, with governments, philanthropies, industry and the public sector working together to tackle marine plastic pollution, combat coral disease, counter illegal fishing, restore coral reefs, as well as add new and expand existing marine protected areas (MPAs).
An overarching international effort to coordinate efforts like these is the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science, for which the U.S. has a dedicated committee within the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics to coordinate our national contributions.

The common denominator in all of this ocean activity is data.
Whether exploration, transportation, conservation or competition — all depend upon knowledge of the physical characteristics of the maritime domain.
For that reason, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) led the development of the national strategy and plan to acquire ocean data through mapping, exploration, science, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems.

These developments have happened so swiftly that we are approaching a point of potential ocean data inundation.
Powered by emerging remote and in-situ sensor technologies, satellite communication networks, edge computing and cloud-based data storage and delivery systems, we are collecting and disseminating unprecedented data densities.
At the same time, advances in data-driven modeling such as machine learning have the potential to accelerate ocean understanding and predictive capabilities beyond anything seen to date.
Realizing this potential requires a fundamental shift toward collaborative approaches to open up data pathways across government, academia, philanthropy and industry.
 

The #MyOcean viewer enables high-resolution data visualisation such as currents. Create ocean maps based on scientifically-validated data by the Copernicus Marine service and download them for #free https://t.co/Zj2zPOom0i pic.twitter.com/PVsv4IHHO4

— Copernicus Marine (@CMEMS_EU) July 9, 2021

Three essential actions that can help accomplish this are:

1. Expand autonomous, multi-platform collaboration and interoperability

The first step in dealing with the ocean data deluge is to further its occurrence.
In other words, we should embrace the current proliferation of ocean data collection platforms.
Given the scale and remoteness of much of the ocean environment and the data density and coverage required for meaningful impact, we must turn to more distributed, multi-platform networks consisting of advanced, autonomous sensing nodes that carry heterogeneous payloads.
Interoperable, multi-domain and multi-vehicle, uncrewed ocean systems are emerging today, and they will only increase through advances in ocean internet-of-things (IoT) capabilities such as undersea and space-based communications.

2. Advance standardization of system components and connectivity

A critical obstacle to expand our use of ocean data is a lack of standardization.
The distributed, multi-platform and multi-modal ocean network we call for is characterized by varied and challenging environments and requirements, diverse stakeholders and use cases, disparate subsystems, as well as numerous factors that introduce extreme sensitivity to hardware margin costs.
In other fields, connectivity standards have been in use for decades.
Consider the profound impact of the USB with the desktop PC, Bluetooth for mobile devices and CubeSat in space.
No broadly adopted standard has emerged for ocean connectivity.

Instead, there are a wide range of connectors, protocols and electrical specifications for bespoke projects and platforms.
Advances in standardization are still early stage but have the potential to be extremely disruptive.
The Defense Advanced Research Program Agency’s (DARPA) Bristlemouth project, for example, aims to provide an open access, full-stack connectivity standard to support high-level plug-and-play modularity for marine applications, and it represents the role that public-private partnerships can play in removing barriers to scale.

3. Enhance data discoverability by increasing public-private partnerships.

Increasing public-private partnerships will help to build seamless pathways to access more data from multi-platform networks with distributed ownership.
While gold standard, government repositories such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Center for Environmental Information have partnered with private companies to augment ocean datasets, much more can be done.
In the last decade, we have seen the rise of frictionless data as a service (DAAS) models, commercial cloud-based data hubs, and application programming interface (API) technology that are making private sector ocean data increasingly accessible to a wider section of society.

Other developments in industry include geospatial dashboards which enable rapid integration of information flows into applications and data systems, as well as on-the-fly visualization.

Autonomy, artificial intelligence, edge computing and communication technologies have combined with a growing global awareness of the importance of the oceans to generate a surging tsunami of ocean data.
To overcome this challenge, NOAA and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership are hosting the National Ocean Exploration Forum later this month.
While we applaud this demonstration of leadership by America’s top ocean agency and nonprofit, the Biden administration should elevate this effort by making similar commitments to those stemming from the 2019 White House Summit on ocean science and technology partnerships.
The potential benefits of this to the environment, economy and national security are tremendous.
With public-private partnerships, we can create connected oceans for a more sustainable future, ride the big wave of ocean data — and avoid an innovation wipeout.

Links :

• Sciences Advanceds : NOAA Open Data Dissemination: Petabyte-scale Earth system data in the cloud
• GeoGarage blog : Open to change: how Open Data will save our oceans / The global push to share ocean data

La Solitaire

🤯Quelle bagarre hier en Manche !

La flotte de La Solitaire du Figaro Paprec à dû faire le dos rond hier pendant les deux traversée de Manche à haute vitesse. Avec des rafales à 40 noeuds et des creux de 3 mètres, les figaristes ont atteint jusqu'à 17 noeuds de vitesse dans… pic.twitter.com/ZhZQT1M0Vp

— Team Région Bretagne - CMB (@TeamBretagneCMB) September 11, 2024

The fleet of La Solitaire du Figaro had to keep a tight rein on yesterday's two high-speed Channel crossings.

With gusts to 40 knots and 3-meter high waves, the Figaro sailors reached speeds of up to 17 knots in the surf.

Old Imray blueback nautical chart or map of the Irish or St. George's Channel (Irish Sea) and English Channel

The waters between England and Ireland.

click on the picture for HR viewing or go to Geographicus

 

James Imray (May 16, 1803 - November 15, 1870) was a Scottish hydrographer and stationer active in London during the middle to latter part of the 19th century.
Imray is best known as a the largest and most prominent producer of blue-back charts, a kind of nautical chart popular from about 1750 to 1920 and named for its distinctive blue paper backing (although not all charts that may be called "blue-backs" actually have a blue backing).
Unlike government charts issued by the British Admiralty, U.S. Coast Survey, and other similar organizations, Imray's charts were a private profit based venture and not generally the result of unique survey work.
Rather, Imray's charts were judicious and beautiful composites based upon pre-existing charts (some dating to the 17th century) and new information gleaned from governmental as well as commercial pilots and navigators.
Imray was born in Spitalfields, England, the eldest son of a Jacobite dyer also named James.
Imray did not follow his father profession, instead apprenticing to William Lukyn, a stationer.
He established himself as a bookseller and bookbinder at 116 Minories Street, where he shared offices with the nautical chart publisher Robert Blachford.
In 1836 Imray signed on as a full partner in Blachford's enterprise, christening themselves Blachford & Imray.
At this time the Blachford firm lagged far behind competing chart publishers Norie and Laruie, nevertheless, with the injection of Imray's marketing savvy the firm began a long rise.
James Imray bought out Blachford's share in 1846, becoming the sole proprietor of the chart house, publishing under the imprint of James Imray.
Relocating in 1850 to larger offices at 102 Minories, Imray was well on track to become the most prominent chart publisher in London.
In 1854, when Imray's 25 year old son, James Frederick Imray, joined as a full partner, the firm again changed its imprint, this time to James Imray and Son.
The elder Imray was a master of marketing and was quick to respond to trade shifts and historic events.
Many of his most successful charts were targeted to specific trade routes, for example, he issued charts entitled "Cotton Ports of Georgia" and "Rice Ports of India".
Other charts emerged quickly following such events as the 1849 California Gold Rush.
Imray's rise also coincided with the development of governmental mapping organizations such as the Admiralty and the U.S. Coast Survey, whose work he appropriated and rebranded in practical format familiar to navigators.
Imray's death in 1870 marked a major transition in the firm's output and began its decline.
Though Imray's son, James Frederick, excelled at authoring pilot books he had little experience with charts and issued few new publications.
Most James Frederick Imray publications issued from 1870 to 1899 were either revisions of earlier maps prepared by his father or copies of British Admiralty charts.
Charts from this period are recognizable as being less decorative than the elder Imray's charts following the stylistic conventions established by the Admiralty.
The Admiralty itself at the same time began to rise in prominence, issuing its own official charts that were both cheaper and more up to date than those offered by private enterprises.

 

Cuurent Imray map of Saint George's Channel with the GeoGarage platform

 

Norie Blueback nautical chart : chart of the English Channel (1842)

click on the picture for HR viewing or go to Geographicus

The company's history is recorded more accurately in the book 'The Makers of the Blueback Charts' (Imray, 2002) which is based on the family records of both Imrays and Wilsons and researched by an expert maritime historian.
The Wilson family took ownership of Norie’s firm in 1852. 

It traded as Norie and Wilson Ltd until 1904, focusing on yachting from the 1890s. 
The Imrays began working with the Wilsons in 1899, with members of both the families owning shares in James Imray and Son Ltd. 

This company, plus Norie and Wilson Ltd, ran until 1904.
 In 1904, James Imray and Son Ltd and Norie and Wilson Ltd amalgamated and also bought the R.H. Laurie business.  The Wilson family owned half the shares and the Imrays and Lauries a quarter each.   Norie and Wilson was relatively financially stable and the Wilson family led this amalgamation

 

Today it continues to publish maritime charts as "Imray, Laurie, Norie and Wilson".

 

1887 Norie and Wilson Blueback Nautical Chart of Map of the English Channel

click on the picture for HR viewing or go to Geographicus

 

Cuurent Imray map of English Channel with the GeoGarage platform
 

Links :

• Raremaps : Antique maps by James Imray & Son
• GeoGraage blog : Curiosities at the chart makers Imray
  

An underwater data center in San Francisco Bay? Regulators say not so fast

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images

From Wired by Paresh Dave & Reece Rogers

The YC-backed startup NetworkOcean plans to sink GPUs into San Francisco Bay.
Multiple California regulators WIRED spoke with hadn’t heard about the test—and raised concerns about its potential environmental impact.

Data centers powering the generative AI boom are gulping water and exhausting electricity at what some researchers view as an unsustainable pace.
Two entrepreneurs who met in high school a few years ago want to overcome that crunch with a fresh experiment: sinking the cloud into the sea.

Sam Mendel and Eric Kim launched their company, NetworkOcean, out of startup accelerator Y Combinator on August 15 by announcing plans to dunk a small capsule filled with GPU servers into San Francisco Bay within a month.
“There's this vital opportunity to build more efficient computer infrastructure that we're gonna rely on for decades to come,” Mendel says.

 

The founders contend that moving data centers off land would slow ocean temperature rise by drawing less power and letting seawater cool the capsule’s shell, supplementing its internal cooling system.
NetworkOcean’s founders have said a location in the bay would deliver fast processing speeds for the region’s buzzing AI economy.

But scientists who study the hundreds of square miles of brackish water say even the slightest heat or disturbance from NetworkOcean’s submersible could trigger toxic algae blooms and harm wildlife.
And WIRED inquiries to several California and US agencies who oversee the bay found that NetworkOcean has been pursuing its initial test of an underwater data center without having sought, much less received, any permits from key regulators.

The outreach by WIRED prompted at least two agencies—the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the San Francisco Regional Water Quality Control Board—to email to NetworkOcean that testing without permits could run afoul of laws, according to public records and spokespeople for the agencies.
Fines from the BCDC can run up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The nascent technology has already been in hot water in California.
In 2016, the state’s coastal commission issued a previously unreported notice to Microsoft saying that the tech giant had violated the law the year before by plunging an unpermitted server vessel into San Luis Obispo Bay, about 250 miles south of San Francisco.
The months-long test, part of what was known as Project Natick, had ended without apparent environmental harm by the time the agency learned of it, so officials decided not to fine Microsoft, according to the notice seen by WIRED.

The renewed scrutiny of underwater data centers has surfaced an increasingly common tension between innovative efforts to combat global climate change and long-standing environmental laws.
Permitting takes months, if not years, and can cost millions of dollars, potentially impeding progress.
Advocates of the laws argue that the process allows for time and input to better weigh trade-offs.

“Things are overregulated because people often don’t do the right thing,” says Thomas Mumley, recently retired assistant executive officer of the bay water board.
“You give an inch, they take a mile.
We have to be cautious.”

Over the last two weeks, including during an interview at the WIRED office, NetworkOcean’s founders have provided driblets of details about their evolving plans.
Their current intention is to test their underwater vessel for about an hour, just below the surface of what Mendel would only describe as a privately owned and operated portion of the bay that he says is not subject to regulatory oversight.
He insists that a permit is not required based on the location, design, and minimal impact.
“We have been told by our potential testing site that our setup is environmentally benign,” Mendel says.

Mumley, the retired regulator, calls the assertion about not needing a permit “absurd.” Both Bella Castrodale, the BCDC’s lead enforcement attorney, and Keith Lichten, a water board division manager, say private sites and a quick dip in the bay aren’t exempt from permitting.
Several other experts in bay rules tell WIRED that even if some quirk does preclude oversight, they believe NetworkOcean is sending a poor message to the public by not coordinating with regulators.

“Just because these centers would be out of sight does not mean they are not a major disturbance,” says Jon Rosenfield, science director at San Francisco Baykeeper, a nonprofit that investigates industrial polluters.

 

0.5 MW capsule in progress, to be tested underwater in the SF Bay

 

School Project

Mendel and Kim say they tried to develop an underwater renewable energy device together during high school in Southern California before moving onto non-nautical pursuits.
Mendel, 23, dropped out of college in 2022 and founded a platform for social media influencers.

About a year ago, he built a small web server using the DIY system Raspberry Pi to host another personal project, and temporarily floated the equipment in San Francisco Bay by attaching it to a buoy from a private boat in the Sausalito area.
(Mendel declined to answer questions about permits.) After talking with Kim, also 23, about this experiment, the two decided to move in together and start NetworkOcean.

Their pitch is that underwater data centers are more affordable to develop and maintain, especially as electricity shortages limit sites on land.
Surrounding a tank of hot servers with water naturally helps cools them, avoiding the massive resource drain of air-conditioning and also improving on the similar benefits of floating data centers.
Developers of offshore wind farms are eager to electrify NetworkOcean vessels, Mendel says.

NetworkOcean’s launch announcement pictured what it described as a 0.5-megawatt capsule “to be tested underwater in the SF Bay in 1 month.” The company promoted the availability of 2,048 H100s, the highly sought-after Nvidia GPUs that allow AI tools to churn out text, images, and videos.

Though generative AI has increased the potential need for underwater data centers, companies including Microsoft have pursued small projects for years.
Microsoft’s tests off the coasts of California and Scotland between 2015 and 2020 led it to conclude that the idea was “logistically, environmentally, and economically practical.” But the company hasn’t moved beyond experimentation and doesn’t have data centers in the water today.
It declined to comment on the California permitting violation.
(The Scottish portion was permitted.)

The long-term reliability of underwater setups is questionable, says Tony Harvey, a senior director who analyzes data centers for the consultancy Gartner.
While they may suffer less from the heat stress that contributes to faulty GPUs and optical components on land, underwater centers may not prevent breakdowns altogether, and he suggests that repairs will be more difficult in the sea.

Mendel disputes the concerns.
He says NetworkOcean’s vessels will be compatible with common maritime equipment and be serviceable in under an hour, without turning the hardware off.

NetworkOcean isn’t alone in its ambitions.
Founded in 2021, US-based Subsea Cloud operates about 13,500 computer servers in unspecified underwater locations in Southeast Asia to serve clients in AI and gaming, says the startup’s founder and CEO, Maxie Reynolds.
“It’s a nascent market,” she says.
“But it’s currently the only one that can handle the current and projected loads in a sustainable way.”

Subsea secured a permit for each site and uses remotely operated robots for maintenance, according to Reynolds.
It plans to fire up its first underwater GPUs next year and also is considering private sites, which Reynolds says would ease permitting complexity.
Subsea claims it isn’t significantly increasing water temperature, though it hasn’t published independent reviews.

NetworkOcean also believes it will cause negligible heating.
“Our modeling shows a 2-degree Fahrenheit change over an 8-square-fot area, or a 0.004-degree Fahrenheit change over the surface of the body” of water, Mendel says.
He draws confidence from Microsoft’s finding that water a few meters downstream from its testing warmed only slightly.
 

Protected Bay

Bay Area projects can increase water temperatures by no more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit at any time or place, according to Mumley, the ex-water board official.
But two biologists who spoke to WIRED say any increase is concerning to them because it can incubate harmful algae and attract invasive species.

Shaolei Ren, a University of California, Riverside, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who’s studying the environmental impact of AI, compares plans for an underwater data center of NetworkOcean’s announced capacity, when running fully utilized, to operating about 300 bedroom space heaters.
(Mendel disputes the concern, citing Project Natick’s apparently minimal impact.)

A few years ago, a project that proposed using San Francisco Bay water to cool a data center on land failed to win approval after public concerns were voiced, including about temperatures.

The San Francisco Bay is on average around a dozen feet deep, with salty Pacific Ocean water flowing in from under the Golden Gate Bridge mixing with fresh runoff from a huge swath of Northern California.
Experts say it isn’t clear whether any location in the expanse would be suitable for more than a tiny demonstration between its muddy, shallow, salty, and turbulent parts.

Further, securing permits could require proving to at least nine regulatory bodies and several critical nonprofits that a data center would be worthwhile, according to spokespeople for the agencies and five experts in the bay’s politics.
For instance, under the law administered by the Conservation and Development Commission, a project’s public benefit must “clearly exceed” the detriment, and developers must show there’s no suitable location on land.

Other agencies consider waste emissions and harm to the region’s handful of endangered fish and birds (including the infamous delta smelt).
Even a temporary project requires signoff from the US Army Corps of Engineers, which reviews obstruction to ship and boat traffic, and the water board.
“For example, temporarily placing a large structure in an eelgrass bed could have lingering effects on the eelgrass, which is a critical habitat for certain fish,” the water board’s Lichten says.

NetworkOcean’s Kim tells WIRED that the company is cognizant of the concerns and is avoiding sensitive habitats.
His cofounder Mendel says that they did contact one of the region’s regulators.
In March, NetworkOcean spoke to an unspecified US Coast Guard representative about testing at the bottom of the bay and pumping in seawater as a coolant.
The company later shifted to the current near-surface plans that don’t involve pumping.
(A Coast Guard spokesperson declined to comment without more clarity on whom NetworkOcean allegedly contacted.)

For permanent installations, Kim and Mendel say they are eyeing other US and overseas locations, which they declined to name, and that they are engaging with the relevant regulators.

Mendel insists the “SF Bay” test announced last month will move forward—and soon.
“We're still building the vessel,” he says.
A community of marine scientists will be keeping their thermometers close.

 

Links :

• DataCenterDynamics : NetworkOcean plans underwater data center test in San Francisco Bay
• Gizmodo : The New Plan to Power Data-Hungry AI: Sink Server Farms Into the San Francisco Bay
• TechTimes : China Becomes the First Nation to Sink Underwater Data Center 
• GeoGarage blog : Goodbye Natick! Microsoft has given up on one of its ... / Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable ...