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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.
Data centers need electricity, not jet fuel. There are many semi-environmental ways to generate electricity. At some point companies will do that purely out of cost saving.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
let me ask you this - what resources would be consumed if we DIDN'T use computers for these jobs? how many forests would we cut down to store the data in the worlds data centers?
i think people who write this kind of dribble lack any perspective. computers are energy savers, not wasters.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I went to a seminar on building new data centers. There we a part about location of new data center. The favorite places in Europe were France and Germany, because of cheap power generated by non-polluting nuclear power plant.
I am aware of the end-of-life problem surrounding nuclear power, but you got to admit that if your goal is to avoid burning stuff, you cannot get any better than this. Especially in crowded, not-so-sunny Europe, where you cannot even make a "what if we paved the desert with solar cells" hypothesis.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Anyone else remember when "pollution" was stuff like sulfuric acid, low-level ozone, toxic chemicals, and stuff like that? Carbon di-oxy-ide, who'da thunk, eh?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
At least when it comes to my customers, the stuff that lives in datacenters is there - at least in part - to support distributed workers. In droves, they are shifting towards working from home, avoiding a lot of transportation-intensive face time, and learning to take advantage of not having to have their same back-office systems humming in a closet in a rented office where nobody shows up any more, except to reset the router so they can go back home and get some damn work done.
Some newly used rack space in datacenters actually offsets other daily fuel burning - sometimes a lot of it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
People that make such sweeping claims as this crap just light my fuse. They want to complain, and it seems their only point is to offer compromised solutions... Its like they fell like they're being helpful by getting in the way. If people would just start thinking realistically about these problems and allow the building of Nuclear Power plants, this problem would be solved. But it seems that these people don't want solutions, they want to complain about something. All they can do is point to a NEAR catastrophe, which was a mere accident at 3 mile island 30 years ago. Give. Me. A. Break!
You get more radiation from eating a BANANA than you do from living next door to a nuclear power plant. And while on the subject, I used to think that these people were simply "NIMBY's", the age old Not In My Back Yard type of folks. But these people aren't NIMBY's, These people are BANANAS! Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. They are flat out anti-progress and they do it in the nicest way "we're trying to help".
I say BULLSHIT! You have three choices: Nuclear Power, Agrarian Society, Global Warming. Pick one.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
I may just be ignorant, but...is there something specific about the airline industry that makes it a bad thing to surpass it? I haven't seen actual numbers on emissions for airliners, but it seems like we could drum up some other things that burn more fuel. Like, oh, I don't know, the *auto industry*? What about manufacturing plants? Chemical/pharmaceutical facilities? Any class of facilities that process raw materials?
But of course the randomly selected slashdotter has some vested interest in data centers, so we're all for any solution that doesn't involve taking away our servers. What? We are. We seem pretty ready to jump all over people who say global warming isn't real or isn't man-made. We're eager to denounce big energy corporations for milking fossil fuels for all they're worth. But as soon as someone talks about regulating *our* stuff because of energy consumption or emissions, we want to pursue other options.
Until they move the large cross-Pacific network connections to the Hoover Dam, it's going to make sense to keep data centers near network lines.
For those of you who are keeping score on who's talking the talk and who's walking the walk I offer this:
A tale of two houses
For a long time Bush has been downplaying or denying the effects of global warming. But behind the American People's backs he went ahead and built a geo-disaster proof bunker in 2001.I need to change my pants.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Economy is about resources. Money is merely one storage medium, and an imperfect one at that.
Data centres emit absolutely no carbon. Zero.
Electricity generation *can*, but it doesn't need to. The simple fact is that we can generate electricity without any carbon emissions with hydroelectric where available and nuclear where not. There's no justifiable reason to attribute carbon emissions from a coal fired plant to it's clients; alternatives are available, but regulators have dropped the ball in allowing coal to be used.
I think you have made some interesting points.
However, I think the major issue is this: The people who design datacenters are some of the smartest people in the world. They've certainly thought about the issues. They know the cost of electricity.
They know that Intel is delivering 45 nanometer CPU designs. They know that Intel is working on 32 nanometer CPUs, and that there will eventually be 22 nanometer processors, for delivery in 8 years. Each new processor architecture uses less power. So, the problem will solve itself, to some degree.
The article in the New York Times is ignorant, meant for ignorant readers who don't know any better. Maybe someone took money; maybe the NYT article is really a public relations stunt, a way for McKinsey & Company to attract as clients managers who have little technical experience.
A lot of people who talk about being "green", are people who are green in the sense of having little experience.
With a properly designed power supply, it can be done with over 90% efficiency, possibly even more.
Furthermore, newer data centers tend to be wired with DC power, so that there is only AC/DC conversion at the UPS. DC/DC conversion can be made even more efficient.
Contrast this with running a gasoline engine, which is about 20% efficient.
"By the way, just what IS the ideal average temperature of the Earth, and when was the Earth ever stable at this magical temperature for any appreciable amount of time?"
that's not what is worrisome. what is worrisome is that in the antarctic, the concentration of CO2 gas has NEVER gone above 300 PPM in the past 650,000 years of antarctic ice. As of this year, at the mauna loa observatory (middle of the pacific ocean, as far away from civilization as one can get) we hit 385 PPM of CO2 gas
It's getting about time to start cloning those dinosaurs, because at the rate we're going only cold blooded reptiles will be able to survive the heat without central air.
True, the concentrations in the peak of dinosaur era are estimated as 20 times higher than they are now, but at the current rate of expansion in another 80 years we will have halved the distance to the goal of 'dinosaur CO2 levels' and another 50 years from then and we'll be at the goal line, and you can be assured that any mammal larger than a mouse is going to find itself dead from heat exhaustion, while reptiles come to rule the earth again.
the fact that humans can in 3 generations of their lifespans undo 300 million years of natural changes to the environment is frightening.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
That option alone should have shut you up about "it only works when the sun shines and the wind blows." Also, you forgot geothermal energy, which is far more consistent a source than solar or wind, and (like the other renewable options) has the potential to eventually become major producers at "cheaper than coal" prices.
An 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 is a reasonable goal, without drastic cuts to our standard of living. I haven't heard anything out of your mouth to indicate otherwise; just a bunch of "No We Can't!" All the things you claim we will have to give up (other than airplanes) could be run off electricity from renewable sources. There is plenty of sun, plenty of wind, and the technology for harvesting it is getting rapidly cheaper. When it comes to computers specifically, my OLPC pulls about 5 watts, and is more than adequate for most tasks. So it seems likely that we could provide a lot of the value we derive from computers even in an energy-starved world.
An 80% reduction in CO2 emissions isn't the same as an 80% reduction in energy usage, and neither of the two necessarily equates to an 80% reduction in economic activity, and none of the preceding things requires an 80% reduction in our well-being. You could argue the last point, but hedonic studies seem to indicate that, beyond $10K/year of income, additional income does very little to make us happy. It just gets swamped by the things that money can't buy. So even if we have to reduce our consumption drastically, it may not make us feel noticeably worse off, if we go about it in the right way.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!