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Data Centers Expected to Pollute More Than Airlines by 2020

Posted by timothy on from the it's-all-that-smut-in-the-wires dept.

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.

7 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. That seems unlikely by pembo13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  2. false economies by timmarhy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
  3. Nuclear power plants by ericferris · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
    1. Re:Nuclear power plants by khallow · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  4. I say STFU, until.... by JRHelgeson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:More Options? by WaltBusterkeys · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  6. AC/DC conversion is not that wasteful by Nicolas+MONNET · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.