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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.
Hardly.
Most datacenters are contracted out. The companies hiring the datacenters do so based on price. And clean fuels have an enormous amount of catching up to do if they ever want to compete with coal. But let's say that a carbon tax is applied. Then these datacenter contractors will simply move their operations to somewhere that doesn't have these taxes. Heck, why do you think there are so many datacenters in the US?
But what if the companies hiring these datacenter contractors decide that they want to be green? Then these datacenter contractors will simply do some half-assed unproven carbon-offset like dumping iron into the oceans or planting trees in a place that can't support them (cheap real estate like tundra or desert wins here--especially if it is done in the 'future' while the offset company is preparing its sites).
The only real solution is the one that applies to the entire electricity grid. Either you need to massively subsidize renewable fuels or slightly subsidize nuclear power to deal with your entire electrical grid carbon problem. You have to do subsidies because you are competing with the energy prices with places like China.
Aiso.net is a smallish hosting provider utilizing ACTUAL SOLAR to power their datacenter,
NONE OF THIS CARBON TRADING MALARKY. And they're super flexible because they're not huge yet.
Located in San Diego I believe. Phil, their big tech cheese, is VERY generous with his time.
Vote with your feet, clean with your wallet, live by your choices.
At the late 19th century steam engines were well established technology for shipping, trains and factories but they were very inefficient. Somewhere in the range of 15%. By the early 20th century steam power was at least twice as efficient (maybe more). Today most servers in data centers run around 15% utilization, doubling the utilization will slow the increased need for power. Virtualization, efficient parallel programming, thin client and network centric computing all have potential to double the efficiency of data centers. What would really be a breakthrough is a hybrid plane. Maybe with wireless power from space.
Or we could go back to trying to do nuclear powered aircraft. This image depicts a single prototype engine--its resting place is in southern Idaho.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Or, you could install virtualization on that super-fast machine end consolidate all your servers onto it.
Modern datacenters sell either tiles (to place a rack), rackspace (for a few servers) or virtual computing power.
The cost of each is reflected in the price so smart customers will move away from discrete hardware and towards virtual servers.
That way you can literally run hundreds of low-power servers on one high-power machine.
Low-power servers are nice, but they're not failure-resistant and the sheer number of them means even a small percentage of failure leads to high maintenance cost.
AMD are in an efficiency race for the hearts and minds of datacenter operators.
Just wait and see what's coming in the future...
"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. It's the one thing I am indebted to her for."
There is no technology in existance that can provide all of the USA's electricity without carbon, except for nuclear. Things like wind and solar can only provide about 10-15% of the USA's current demand because they only work when the sun shines and the wind blows.
Anyway, 80% emission reductions by 2050 would require that the USA give up a bunch of things, like cars, air conditioning, TV, hair dryers, air planes, buses, and computers. That is because the presidential candidate likes to toss out pleasant figures like 80 by 50 without consideration of reality.
Population growth makes 80 by 50 impossible without a transforming technology like a nuclear powered economy with hydrogen transportation and storage of energy. It's not impossible to achieve, but politicians only like to talk about happy, fuzzy goals absent concrete plans to achieve them or admiting that they are extremely expensive.
You are either woefully underinformed to the point where you are completely unqualified to contribute to this conversation, stupid, or an astroturfer.
There are currently two biofuel technologies which are far superior to any topsoil-based biofuel. One of them is Butanol. The other is Algae-based biofuels which can include Ethanol and Biodiesel (mostly the latter.) You can also make biodiesel out of animal fat, and Tyson chicken is building a test plant to do this in Germany.
The USDOE did a test project in which they determined that it is possible to capture around 80% of the CO2 output of coal or oil-burning plants and feed it to algae in inexpensive raceway ponds. The water in these ponds is approximately one foot deep and is circulated by paddlewheel - a job best done using PV solar. The water needs the most circulation during the periods of most intense sunlight. You could also tent the pools and use them for distillation; the process can be done with fresh or salt water, so it can also provide desalination.
Butanol is made from a bacteria first used to produce the ingredients for TNT. This bacteria produces ethanol, butanol, and acetone, all of which can be burned in a typical gasoline-powered car. In fact, Butanol is a direct, 1:1 replacement for gasoline, and it is the most voluminous product of the reaction - which can consume any organic matter.
There are also numerous other options for producing biofuels which should be considered. For example, we currently use extremely inefficient methods for processing sewage. By using a system of ponds which are filled from below, and which utilize a subaquatic plastic tent to capture methane gas using this efficient and attractive (since it is cheap and mostly invisible) method. Methane can be used most places in which we use propane or natural gas, and most especially for cooking. Just to prove the simplicity of the concept, consider that you can get cooking gas by raising pigs, shoveling their shit into a hole, and running a hose from the (covered) hole to a BBQ burner. This scheme also fixes heavy metals.
It is true that biofuels based on topsoil are retarded. In fact, our current large-scale methods of agriculture are simply unsustainable. The crop waste must be returned to the soil, not burned as we commonly do today! Otherwise, the soil will be depleted over time, no matter what you do to it. It will simply be depleted of more specific things.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"