How green is my cloud?
dankolbert
| Posted in Energy Efficiency and Durability on
I can’t verify, but I read sometime recently that there’s less embodied energy in buying a CD than in storing it on-line. Which got me to thinking about these monster servers that must be sprouting like mushrooms. I have a vision of us all living in lovely net zero homes, served by our own individual off-site servers consuming a Fukushima’s worth of juice.
No real question. Just wanted to share my cheerful thought before the weekend.
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Yes, here we sit frantically discussing how to save energy, and they are building data centers to store our every last word. How green can it be?
Americans are not only exporting our pollution to China (since we closed all our factories, and now buy all our stuff from WalMart), we are also hiding our energy consumption (by displacing it to "monster servers" that deliver us streaming movies).
Well, the only thing worse than storing and saving your data is losing it. FWIW, there is a big push in the high tech industry to make data centers more efficient. Servers burn electricity when they are running, but they also generate quite a bit of heat. Data center operators are intensely interested in making those devices more efficient. Here is an interesting article on using natural cooling to lower data center energy usage: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/facebook-nc/.
Plenty of data I wouldn't mind losing. Most of 7th grade, for instance.
Dan,
Don't you remember what your principal told you that day when you were called into his office? "This will be part of your permanent record." That data never goes away.
Google has taken energy use by server farms very seriously as do most larger web-operators- it's a primary cost in their biz model that they're ALL working to constantly improve upon, be it on-site fuel-cell & PV power generation or siting the server facility itself next to a lower cost (often lower-carbon) power generator.
But the greenhouse hit of a NetFlix download (even counting the standby loss of the server) is on average pretty small compared to the greenhouse hit from driving a few miles to & from the video store. It all just depend, how much data vs. how much extra drive-time, etc.
I guess that's one advantage of the fabulous amount of energy these places consume - there's a huge and immediate pay-off for efficiency improvements. Hopefully they're coming up with some good ideas that will trickle down.
Apple - Environment - Renewable Energy
http://www.apple.com/environment/renewable-energy/