Data Centers Expected to Pollute More Than Airlines by 2020

Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, writes with a link to a New York Times story on a source of pollution that doesn't leave contrails: "The world's data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Co. ... [C]omputer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities as a whole are used at 56 percent of peak performance." Data centers, though, might have more options for going green than airlines do, given present technology.

Comments

Re:Anyone else remember...

[evanbd]

Some of us define pollution as "anything that causes severe enough damage to our environment to make life difficult for us humans." And guess what, low-level ozone, ozone layer depleting compounds, acid rain precursors, CO2, volatile hydrocarbons, fertilizer runoff, and a variety of other things all count under that definition.

I can be really selfish and even somewhat short-sighted and still come to the conclusion that there is a problem on a massive scale. I have no particular need for us to not create any CO2, but it should be obvious to anyone who bothers to look at the data and the studies that we can't continue on our current pace.

Re:Nuclear power plants

[blind biker]

France is predominantly nuclear, but Germany? That can't be right. The green party in Germany got all nuclear plants shot down (or scheduled to shut down) and the main energy source now is... wait for it... the much more polluting COAL! Good job, german green party: did you know that a coal plant will discharge into the environmnent twice as much radioactive pollutants per kilowatt-hour, than a nuclear plant? And we haven't even mentioned various other toxic materials, principally sulphur. And of course, CO2, in droves.

Re:Nuclear Powered Aircraft

[Watson Ladd]

It was originally designed to deliver nuclear weapons. But then they realized the radioactive fallout from the exhaust would be much more damaging. The air passed through the core and so was exposed to neutron radiation, making it chock-full of nasty isotopes. The xenon from the reactor would also exit in the exhaust stream, adding to the radioactivity hazard. There are good reasons why that technology died.