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

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: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.