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Data Center Managers Weary of Whittling Cooling Costs
Nerval's Lobster writes that a survey from the Uptime Institute "suggests something it calls 'green fatigue' is setting in when it comes to making data centers greener. 'Green fatigue' is exactly as it sounds: managers are getting tired of the increasingly difficult race to chop their PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness. The PUE is a measure of a data center's efficiency. The lower the PUE, the better — and Microsoft and Google, with nearly limitless resources, have set the bar so high (or low, depending on your perspective) that it's making less-capitalized firms frustrated. Just a few years ago, the Uptime Institute estimated that the average PUE of a data center was around 2.4, which meant for every dollar of electricity to power a data center, $1.4 dollars were spent to cool it. That dropped to 1.8 recently, an improvement to be sure. But then you have companies such as Google and Microsoft building data centers next to rivers for cheap hydroelectric power in remote parts of the Pacific Northwest and reporting insanely low PUEs (below 1.1 in some cases). The Institute latest survey of data center operators shows only 50 percent of respondents in North America said they considered energy efficiency to be very important to their companies, down from 52 percent last year and 58 percent in 2011."
The difference between historical design and best practice is somewhere in the vicinity of being able to power 6 million US households.
Not to mention the strawman you have made there. This isn't an either-or choice. Why can't we improve energy efficiency AND make an effort to rely less on bottled water?
Trollish troll, I rebuke thee with a Citationing of Statisticals:
Country / CO2 (ktonnes) / % of world emissions / source China (ex.Macau, Hong Kong) 7,031,916 23.5% UN Estimate[6] United States 5,461,014 18.27% UN Estimate[6]
Except that the population of China is 1.3 billion, and the population of the US is 315 million, so the statistics you supplied basically state that the US is polluting over 4 times as much per person than China is.
Good argument you have there.
Why is there so much China bashing in this thread? The GP didn't mention them at all, and as I mentioned in an earlier comment, they aren't relevant to the conversation.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
True. Those things are almost exact opposites. You will never waste money by cutting costs, if you are accounting correctly.
There's talk of removing a few Dams and with them the cheap power.
The Washington state Indians have a treaty to fish salmon they way they used to (with nets)
that they then sale to make a living. The salmon are in decline which is blamed in part to the Dams. All of
the Dams have fish ladders that help the Salmon migrate but they are asking for the lower (last) four Snake river Dams to be removed.
http://www.americanrivers.org/initiatives/dams/projects/snake-dam-removal-economics.html
It's much more than just the Indians, but they seem to be the loudest.
From the link: ...Replace the dams' energy in an affordable and carbon neutral manner..."
"Before the dams are removed, there must be a plan in place to:
I don't see how that can be accomplished unless wind power can be considered carbon neutral.
What have you and your countrymen done for the world? I'd seriously like to know what country you even come from. For all the stupid shit we americans do, have you ever looked at the amount of financial aid we give to countries that have absolutely no strategic value?
Yes, I have. It's embarrassingly low. A little less than what Greece gives, about half of what Germany gives, about 1/5th of what Sweden gives.
There's some stats over at http://www.statisticbrain.com/countries-that-give-the-most-in-foreign-aid-statistics/
The US has a lot of good points. Foreign aid isn't one of them, and neither is consumption patterns.
(Oh, and I live in the US and am originally from Norway, if that makes a difference.)
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Neither does it care about international borders. The fact is that if people in China live their lives like people in the US then their pollution levels and energy spending would only be much, much higher. If you take countries instead of human beings as your base units this way, you would well come to the conclusion that the Chinese should starve because they eat more food than the Americans.