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

That seems unlikely

[pembo13]

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.

false economies

[timmarhy]

I love it when they trot out these old war horses.

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.

Re:false economies

[jd]

Well, I agree that the statistics are useless in and of themselves, but to be fair, how many data centres are actually doing useful work? Point-to-point streaming of broadcasts, for example, is a horrible waste of CPU power and bandwidth, but it is the dominant method used by webcam services. OS overheads are often unnecessarily high, due to the running of excess services or inefficient code. Server rooms are often run far too hot and cooling methods are often inefficent.

If we measure greenhouse gas production, not as an absolute but as a percentage relative to what is actually required to do the useful component of the work, my guess would be that data centres do not work out to be that green.

Which only makes sense

[Ralph Spoilsport]

given that there isn't going to be much of an airline industry in 2020. By then, fuel will be so expensive, air travel will revert to what it was prior to the 1970s: something the rich did.

RS

Nuclear power plants

[ericferris]

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.

Re:Nuclear power plants

[khallow]

Ah but nuclear power is polluting.

Not a useful observation to make. Human activity is polluting. If you're not polluting, you're either dead or not doing anything.

Anyone else remember...

[FooAtWFU]

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?

I say STFU, until....

[JRHelgeson]

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.

Re:More Options?

[WaltBusterkeys]

It's not just the building and server hardware, but local infrastructure, too. More importantly, it's where the big network connections intersect. A big data center in the middle of nowhere (with only 1 route to the outside world) is slow and vulnerable to backhoes. A data center near a major network interconnect (think west side of NY, or One Wilshire in LA) is somewhere useful -- data is close to the major lines and can be routed redundantly.

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.

Flat out wrong

[Rix]

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.

In 8 years, CPUs will use far less power. Ad?

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Re:In 8 years, CPUs will use far less power. Ad?

[Bert64]

Each new architecture does use less power, but that's not the way things are heading...
New CPUs may have much better performance/watt, but the overall performance is increased too, thus the amount of actual power used stays the same or even increases.
There's also increasingly bloated software, all this managed high level language code etc, which uses far more energy to do the same work. And modern powerful servers which sit idle for the most part.
You could easily make lower performing servers using modern techniques, and reduce power consumption hugely... Modern embedded processors are faster than high end server processors from a few years ago, and yet use a small fraction of the power, but they wouldn't be good running modern bloated apps in high level languages.

AC/DC conversion is not that wasteful

[Nicolas MONNET]

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.