Institutes that operate energy-hungry supercomputers, accelerators, and laser beamlines are struggling with Europe’s surging energy prices—and they may be coal mine canaries for the rest of science.
Soon after Jessica Dempsey became director of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy in December 2021, she was forced to focus not on the stars, but on the electric bill. ASTRON operates the Low-Frequency Array , which relies on large computer clusters to process radio astronomy data. They consume about 2000 megawatt-hours per year—the equivalent of 800 households.
Early science casualties came in January, even before the Ukraine war, when Lumius, an energy contractor in the Czech Republic, declared bankruptcy, forcing many of the country’s universities and research facilities to buy energy at much higher prices from the region’s main supplier.
Leemans says DESY is exploring options to run its machines at lower energies. For example, it might turn down its synchrotron, a circular particle accelerator that produces bright x-rays for imaging proteins and materials, so that it generates only lower energy “soft” x-rays. That way it could continue to serve some users, he says. However, DESY’s two large linear accelerators, used to produce laserlike pulses of x-ray light, would need to be shut down completely if the restrictions are severe.
CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, in Switzerland, is also nervously watching the energy crisis unfold. The organization purchases energy from the French grid years in advance, but now the concern is supply. “For this autumn, it is not a price issue, it’s an availability issue,” says Serge Claudet, CERN’s energy coordinator.
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