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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.
Excellent, the faster this planet's resources are used up the faster we start using other planets resources.
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.
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
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....
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
The average X86 server running a single app utilizes about 5% - 10% of it's resources. The average server running VMware utilizes 80% - 120% of it's resources (due to CPU scheduling, transparent page sharing, etc.) It's no wonder that every major datacenter is switching to VMware as the default x86 platform. Buy up that VMware stock, kiddies - it's the next Google!!!
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?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
At least when it comes to my customers, the stuff that lives in datacenters is there - at least in part - to support distributed workers. In droves, they are shifting towards working from home, avoiding a lot of transportation-intensive face time, and learning to take advantage of not having to have their same back-office systems humming in a closet in a rented office where nobody shows up any more, except to reset the router so they can go back home and get some damn work done.
Some newly used rack space in datacenters actually offsets other daily fuel burning - sometimes a lot of it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
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
I may just be ignorant, but...is there something specific about the airline industry that makes it a bad thing to surpass it? I haven't seen actual numbers on emissions for airliners, but it seems like we could drum up some other things that burn more fuel. Like, oh, I don't know, the *auto industry*? What about manufacturing plants? Chemical/pharmaceutical facilities? Any class of facilities that process raw materials?
But of course the randomly selected slashdotter has some vested interest in data centers, so we're all for any solution that doesn't involve taking away our servers. What? We are. We seem pretty ready to jump all over people who say global warming isn't real or isn't man-made. We're eager to denounce big energy corporations for milking fossil fuels for all they're worth. But as soon as someone talks about regulating *our* stuff because of energy consumption or emissions, we want to pursue other options.
What percentage of the power consumption of running a data center is cooling? If they were to build a data center in a really cold environment, I wonder if they could pump the resulting heat under the ground in the immediate area, warming it up enough to plant trees...
Although the other thing typical of tundra environments is the lack of sunlight, which may be more of a problem than the cold.
For those of you who are keeping score on who's talking the talk and who's walking the walk I offer this:
A tale of two houses
For a long time Bush has been downplaying or denying the effects of global warming. But behind the American People's backs he went ahead and built a geo-disaster proof bunker in 2001.I need to change my pants.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Economy is about resources. Money is merely one storage medium, and an imperfect one at that.
Transmission loss over long distances is only a problem with AC. Transmitting electricity as DC at high voltages reduces the loss. Here's a page on using DC in Data centers: Edison's Revenge: Will DC power rise again?.
FalconShould there be a Law?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nuclear Power is subsidized by the U.S. Government in an interesting way.
In order for the first and any subsequent private nuclear reactors to even be built,
the Congress passed a law capping the amount nuclear reactor operators could be held liable. The operators are required to obtain $300 million per plant in insurance. If claims go beyond that, the industry is on the hook to provide a pool of money to pay claims beyond that $300 million. They are not required to provide this money until an accident occurs and even then, the payments per operator are capped at $15 million per year up to a maximum of $95.8 million. Any amount after that $395 million is to be picked up by the federal government and eventually the taxpayers.
It was felt by Congress that the private nuclear power industry would never get off the ground otherwise because private insurance would never cover potential liability. In addition, GE threatened to get out of the nuclear power business if this law was not passed.
(Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Hearings Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on Governmental Indemnity and Reactor Safety, 85th Cong., 1st sess., 1957, p. 148.)
Also, the government has agreed to ultimately take all spent nuclear waste. That is another function you would have a hard time having private industry take on.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
"By the way, just what IS the ideal average temperature of the Earth, and when was the Earth ever stable at this magical temperature for any appreciable amount of time?"
that's not what is worrisome. what is worrisome is that in the antarctic, the concentration of CO2 gas has NEVER gone above 300 PPM in the past 650,000 years of antarctic ice. As of this year, at the mauna loa observatory (middle of the pacific ocean, as far away from civilization as one can get) we hit 385 PPM of CO2 gas
It's getting about time to start cloning those dinosaurs, because at the rate we're going only cold blooded reptiles will be able to survive the heat without central air.
True, the concentrations in the peak of dinosaur era are estimated as 20 times higher than they are now, but at the current rate of expansion in another 80 years we will have halved the distance to the goal of 'dinosaur CO2 levels' and another 50 years from then and we'll be at the goal line, and you can be assured that any mammal larger than a mouse is going to find itself dead from heat exhaustion, while reptiles come to rule the earth again.
the fact that humans can in 3 generations of their lifespans undo 300 million years of natural changes to the environment is frightening.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
"Hmmm... i guess we'd better let the permafrost stay frozen then :)"
Yes.
And so you go into why really is global warm so worrying. It is not the "pure" situation that average temperature grows 5 C degrees. It's not even that large amounts of people living near the seaside will need to migrate but the "collateral" effects: if permafrost "defrosts" it will reduce albedo and will rise CO2 levels by itself; if polar ices go backwards albedo reduces again and more of the Sun heat will be retained. And some global ocean fluxes will change and so will do the ability for C3 crops to grow and the cascade effect while certainly not affecting life as a whole will indeed affect human life worldwide *very* greatly.
It even doesn't really matter if it is human-caused or not but if we will be able to survive as a civilization on a climate and an atmosphere like that of the Jurassic (hint: not currently, not without paying a tremendously high price).