While most of us are perfectly happy using cloud services from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook, and grateful when new services come on-line or extra storage is offered, there’s an underlying cost to all of this that we often overlook, the carbon footprint and the power usage of the massive data centres required to power all of this.
Some companies, such as Google, have begun moving their huge warehouse operations into the arctic circle where cooling is, fairly obviously, much cheaper, and countries such as Greenland have been investing heavily in recent years in next generation fibre-optic networks, that can handle the bandwidth from these enormous computer termini.
However this still leaves a great many data centres around the world using power that’s generated by ‘traditional’ methods including coal and nuclear.
Today environmental lobby group Greenpeace are calling on the data giants to power their data centres from renewable energy.They estimate that these data centres will consume 1,963 billion kilowatts of power by 2020. That’s more than the combined power requirements of Canada, Germany, France and Brazil, all so you can check your email and play Mafia Wars.
It’s been reported that some companies such as Microsoft are adding as many as 10,000 servers to their data centres every single month, and somewhere along the lines something is going to have to give.
In January, Facebook announced it was opening a new data centre in Oregon that, while it would be powered by electricity produced using coal, you be cooled by “fresh air”. The company admits that’s it’s a start and says the new system will cut it’s energy consumption by 12%.
Microsoft on the other hand have a data centre in Quincy, Washington which is powered by "100% hydropower" from the Columbia River.
Greenpeace plan to issue a full report later in the year.
Source : BBC
