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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/
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.
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
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.