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.
More Options? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Which is why a GOOD hosting business uses SOLAR (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Hooray for virtualization (Score:2, Interesting)
data centers are like steam engines (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Which only makes sense (Score:1, Interesting)
Nuclear Powered Aircraft (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Data centers in tundra environments (Score:3, Interesting)
Although the other thing typical of tundra environments is the lack of sunlight, which may be more of a problem than the cold.
Re:That seems unlikely (Score:3, Interesting)
2500 servers all converting from AC to DC = sizable loss of juice. Poorly designed data center rackspace using 10-30% (straight from my ass) more A/C than they would with efficient installations. I'm talking about force air systems that are misused etc.
Installing passive heat exchange systems will also help when they become available.
The point is that there are MANY things that can be done to cut down on the power that is used without regard to where it came from.
Re:That seems unlikely (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Which only makes sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Which is why a GOOD hosting business uses SOLAR (Score:5, Interesting)
Aiso.net is a smallish hosting provider utilizing ACTUAL SOLAR to power their datacenter,
Another one is Solarhost.co.uk [solarhost.co.uk] in the UK and SolarHost [webhostingstuff.com] in Florida.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:In 8 years, CPUs will use far less power. Ad? (Score:3, Interesting)
Modern datacenters sell either tiles (to place a rack), rackspace (for a few servers) or virtual computing power.
The cost of each is reflected in the price so smart customers will move away from discrete hardware and towards virtual servers.
That way you can literally run hundreds of low-power servers on one high-power machine.
Low-power servers are nice, but they're not failure-resistant and the sheer number of them means even a small percentage of failure leads to high maintenance cost.
AMD are in an efficiency race for the hearts and minds of datacenter operators.
Just wait and see what's coming in the future...
No Internet by 2050 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:More Options? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why apply a carbon tax, when most coal fired power plants are located in locations where an algae based carbon recovery system (and combo pollution scrubbing system) can create not only vast amounts of vegetable oil, but even larger quantities of vegetable matter that can be feed to livestock, or combusted for energy, or converted to ethanol.
If you required all coal fired plants to use an algae based carbon recovery system, you would instantly create a massive system capable of producing enough biofuel to permanently kill our oil addiction.
I mean permanently. In order to sequester the carbon completely then the same quantity of fuel as burned in the coal plants is created, mostly from the energy of sunlight. while the bulk of this is as vegetable mass, and only about 20-25% of it is recoverable vegetable oil, it's still vastly more than we use.
no need to even convert it to biodiesel if we mandate that every coal fired plant sequester it's CO emissions with algae, because it will be cheaper to kit existing diesel engined to SVO compatible parts, and change the specs on all new diesel engines to be SVO engines. and a SVO engine, can still burn diesel, but not as efficiently. but if we're producing enough SVO to switch every diesel vehicle in America to a SVO vehicle, well, it's worth it.
True, this switches the burden of cost to electric companies, but electricity is way cheap, and forcing them by law to create a fuel stream of 'cheap bioenergy' to kill off the oil and gas markets, well, that doesn't strike me as bad.
Although market forces for oil prices are now sufficiently high that biofuel from algae has suddenly become a realistic enterprise that could be profitable for an energy company, or at least one oil and gas company in texas thinks they're going to make money creating biofuel from algae.
http://gas2.org/2008/03/29/first-algae-biodiesel-plant-goes-online-april-1-2008/ [gas2.org]
so it is entirely possible that coal power plants might want to create algae based CO sequestering even without pressure from the government, to create an alternative energy revenue stream to boost their bottom lines.
At least, if diesel stays above $4 a gallon, and gasoline stays above $3.50 a gallon, they will..
if the prices trend higher then energy companies would have to be crazy not to consider algae production as an alternative to oil and gas.
Nuclear Power Insurance Subsidy (Score:3, Interesting)
In order for the first and any subsequent private nuclear reactors to even be built,
the Congress passed a law [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Which only makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
You are either woefully underinformed to the point where you are completely unqualified to contribute to this conversation, stupid, or an astroturfer.
There are currently two biofuel technologies which are far superior to any topsoil-based biofuel. One of them is Butanol. The other is Algae-based biofuels which can include Ethanol and Biodiesel (mostly the latter.) You can also make biodiesel out of animal fat, and Tyson chicken is building a test plant to do this in Germany.
The USDOE did a test project in which they determined that it is possible to capture around 80% of the CO2 output of coal or oil-burning plants and feed it to algae in inexpensive raceway ponds. The water in these ponds is approximately one foot deep and is circulated by paddlewheel - a job best done using PV solar. The water needs the most circulation during the periods of most intense sunlight. You could also tent the pools and use them for distillation; the process can be done with fresh or salt water, so it can also provide desalination.
Butanol is made from a bacteria first used to produce the ingredients for TNT. This bacteria produces ethanol, butanol, and acetone, all of which can be burned in a typical gasoline-powered car. In fact, Butanol is a direct, 1:1 replacement for gasoline, and it is the most voluminous product of the reaction - which can consume any organic matter.
There are also numerous other options for producing biofuels which should be considered. For example, we currently use extremely inefficient methods for processing sewage. By using a system of ponds which are filled from below, and which utilize a subaquatic plastic tent to capture methane gas using this efficient and attractive (since it is cheap and mostly invisible) method. Methane can be used most places in which we use propane or natural gas, and most especially for cooking. Just to prove the simplicity of the concept, consider that you can get cooking gas by raising pigs, shoveling their shit into a hole, and running a hose from the (covered) hole to a BBQ burner. This scheme also fixes heavy metals.
It is true that biofuels based on topsoil are retarded. In fact, our current large-scale methods of agriculture are simply unsustainable. The crop waste must be returned to the soil, not burned as we commonly do today! Otherwise, the soil will be depleted over time, no matter what you do to it. It will simply be depleted of more specific things.
Re:Data centers in tundra environments (Score:3, Interesting)
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).