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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.

3 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. More Options? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Which is why a GOOD hosting business uses SOLAR by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Nuclear Powered Aircraft by Chabil+Ha' · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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