Data Centers Expected to Pollute More Than Airlines by 2020 322
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.
Re:More Options? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:More Options? (Score:3, Informative)
It's very expensive to move a datacenter. It's not just the building and server hardware, but local infrastructure, too. The biggest datacenters are in California for a reason.
Therefore, the carbon tax need only be enough that taking the premium on greener energy tech is cheeper than taking the tax + moving and rebuilding infrastructure.
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Anyone else remember... (Score:5, Informative)
Some of us define pollution as "anything that causes severe enough damage to our environment to make life difficult for us humans." And guess what, low-level ozone, ozone layer depleting compounds, acid rain precursors, CO2, volatile hydrocarbons, fertilizer runoff, and a variety of other things all count under that definition.
I can be really selfish and even somewhat short-sighted and still come to the conclusion that there is a problem on a massive scale. I have no particular need for us to not create any CO2, but it should be obvious to anyone who bothers to look at the data and the studies that we can't continue on our current pace.
Re:Anyone else remember... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Excellent (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Anyone else remember... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Informative)
And hyrdocarbon is an organic compound isn't it?
So is plastic
Plastic was originally made from carbohydrates, specifically cellulose, and thus plants such as trees. Kodak [si.edu] the camera company used a method of making Cellulose acetate, a type of plastic, in 1908. If you're old enough you may recall Cellophane [wikipedia.org], the plastic wrap for sandwiches and such, it got it's name from what it was made from, cellulose. Today there's renewed interest in bioplastic [wikipedia.org].
FalconRe:Nuclear power plants (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Ah but nuclear power is polluting. Nuclear power pollutes from the ground to the ground, cradle to cradle.
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.
It's not just the end-of-life, mining the uranium itself pollutes as does refining. Then there's the construction of the power plant. Nuclear power plants require prodigious amounts of steel and concrete, both of which are energy intensive and require a of mining as well.
not-so-sunny Europe
Europe [gwec.net] has some pretty good wind sites though, as it does geothermal [europa.eu].
Falconnever mind the transmission loss. (Score:4, Informative)
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? [computerworld.com].
FalconRe:Nuclear power plants (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nuclear power plants (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Which is why a GOOD hosting business uses SOLAR (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.solarhost.com/ [solarhost.com] looks like it is extremely unreliable.
It is sort of nice to have an option to http://www.aiso.net/ [aiso.net].
Re:In 8 years, CPUs will use far less power. Ad? (Score:2, Informative)
But it can seriously reduce maintenance, power and cooling cost.
Most of the heavy programming I run is actually CPU-bound (simulation and prediction on a national scale).
Those servers are not consolidated, but are parked in a separate High-Power Cluster.
Aside from that, I/O architecture is still changing as we speak. SANs can deliver I/O at speeds local disks can only dream of.
Some Blade architectures allow you to plug a seperate fibrechannel interface into the blade itself, giving you all the I/O you can use
(set-up is a pain in the *ss, though).
The other half of the servers in my server room were put there because someone needed a 'special server', to run a particular set of programs.
Naturally, most of them are EOL because they were never handed over to a Sysadmin group.
Part of my job is to find a way to either consolidate or replace the machines.
Security-wise, you might not want to put your DMZ servers in your internal VMWare farm, but you can also make a DMZ VMWare farm.
(Yes, we have one of those as well).
Re:Nuclear power plants (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Nuclear Powered Aircraft (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More Options? (Score:3, Informative)
didn't see that the first go round.. That isn't really true, China has a notorious reputation for producing sub standard products. It's a reputation well earned, it's true that producing a higher quality product costs more, and even companies known for their quality are sub contracting parts of their businesses to china to stay cost competitive.. but you don't have to compete with china for cost of energy.
why? right now china has the cheapest energy, followed by America, followed by Europe, i don't off hand know where japan falls into the mix, but
even though energy prices are higher in Europe (coal has been mined there for a lot longer than anywhere else) they still have manufacturing companies, and the like.
Europe and the USA have better reputations for quality, and so people who want quality products buy from American and European companies. This is enough to keep their production from moving entirely to china, but a lot of production especially products purchased by clueless consumers are still made in china, because they don't research purchases other than cost.
If America switches to local energy sources, it doesn't matter if they cost 20% more than importing foreign energy, Because all that money is Going directly back into the US economy, rather than creating a trade deficit for energy imported. If 200 billion dollars A YEAR go to local algae farmers, and local algae processors, it's going to cause a massive economic recovery in the united states beyond what any politician so far could ever have hoped for, EVEN IF THE COST OF DOING THIS IS DOUBLING THE COST OF ELECTRICITY.
because instead of sending 200 billion dollars to the mideast where it only costs them $1 a barrel to pump the stuff out of the ground and refine it, that means to the mid east they're making $20 profit a barrel, and they've got an elite billionaire class created by American stupidity.
Lawmakers could have forced the electric or other industries to take the burden of cost to build wide scale algae biofuel production and refining when they first realized it was feasible in the 1970's but instead we chose to import energy, and drain the American coffers until we all became a nation of debtors.
Just ten years of forcing say the electric utilities to put money into algae production, would be enough to have shifted enough money for the feds to start worrying about how fast our economy was growing as a result of relying on local bioenergy... even if every aluminum smelting plant in the country went overseas, dropping our trade deficit by 25-30% by using locally grown bioenergy would be worth it.
almost 1/3 of our trade deficit is from oil imports. we could fix this withing 5 years with strong legislation. the rest of the trade deficit is harder to tackle, but i believe that as America's economy grows to be profitable again, that our status as debtors will reduce quickly. even if the cost is higher, it's actually massively better for the USA to spend all their energy dollars on US grown energy.
"America's current petroleum demand, which continues to rise steadily, poses ever growing environmental problems, and dependence on foreign petroleum. U.S. oil consumption is approximately 21 million barrels/day, yet production is only 6 million barrels per day (950,000 mÂ/d). Cost to import oil is approximately $200 billion dollars a year"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
Re:More Options? (Score:3, Informative)
Or use power from renewable energy sources, use energy efficient power supplies and switch to cooling via normal air when the temperature is low enough. Incidently, this is the gist of this page (in German) [1und1.de], it is from 1&1 the biggest hoster in Germany. Germany incidently has a carbon tax and companies pay taxes based on the power they consume (very simplified). The last sentence is "Auch die 1&1 Rechenzentren in den USA sollen im nächsten Jahr auf klima-neutralen Strom umgestellt werden." and translates to "Also the 1&1 data centers in the USA are intended to be switched to climate-neutral power next year.". Incidently the number 2 here Strato (page in German) [strato.de] does something similar. They also use power from renewable sources and reduced power consumption within 2 years by 30%.
Using less power obviously is in their best interest and has the added benefit of being very easy to advertise.