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Plugging the Internet into clean power
Ben Arnoldy, The Christian Science Monitor
Google said this week it would invest $100 million in renewable energy sources.
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They are the factories of the Internet economy. US data centers and servers now consume more electricity each year than the entire state of Colorado. In five years, they could require nearly twice as much juice.
And while these data centers don’t have smokestacks, many are spewing out greenhouse gases through the electricity they burn. Sensing high-voltage perils to both their public image and bottom line, Google announced Tuesday it will plow $100 million into the research and development of alternative energies.
The move is part of a broader high-tech industry scramble to secure reliable sources of electricity and to use it more efficiently. While worries about global warming factor in the equation, some analysts say major companies are also concerned that electricity could become a limiting factor on their growth.
“What Google has been doing over the past couple of years reflects a concern in the larger IT industry. 2007 is probably going to be looked back on as one of the greener years in data center history,” says Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, Inc. in Hayward, Calif.
By 2010, up to half of all data centers will be located in places where supplying the needed power will be a problem, says Mr. King. “There’s a recognition that availability of electricity does have its limits.”
But the demand for data centers – and by extension more electricity to power them – is only going up.
(29 November 2007)
Green Computing Is Not An Oxymoron
Jeremy Faludi, WorldChanging
Green Computing Update, Part 4: Computers As Green Tools
This is the last installment in our green computing update. Part 1 dealt with data centers, Part 2 was about components, Part 3 covered whole machines, and what happens to machines at the ends of their lives. In Part 4, I examine how the use of computers helps to create a brighter, greener future, from telecommuting and teleconferencing, to e-commerce, paperless offices, and computer-aided design for sustainability.
The Australian research group Climate Risk has produced Towards a High-Bandwidth, Low-Carbon Future, assessing communication technology’s current and potential impacts. It’s the most comprehansive study I’ve seen: CR cites data not just from Australia, but from the UK, US, and other countries. In this series, I’ve noted how much environmental impact computers have; but as Climate Risk quotes the UK’s Forum for the Future, “An increase in transport intensity is ten times more significant for CO2 emissions than all primary broadband impacts.” Furthermore, “[T]he estimated abatement opportunity calculated herein is almost 5% (4.9) of Australia’s total national emissions, making the use of telecommunication networks one of the most significant opportunities to reduce the national carbon footprint.”
…According to the TIAX study, the environmental benefits and costs of e-commerce vs. driving to brick-and-mortar stores are complicated to assess. On the one hand, e-commerce saves a shopper from driving, thus reducing automobile-generated air pollution. But e-commerce often causes products to be shipped by air, which is vastly more damaging to the atmosphere than shipping by ground or boat. Depending on how much air travel was involved in the shipping, energy use for e-commerce varied from a 29% reduction from going to the store, to a 15% increase. (So when you’re buying online, have items shipped by ground.)
Further, even though e-commerce has more efficient centralized distribution, it also uses more packaging.
So, which is better? In the end, wrote TIAX, “it depends.” For some shoppers, especially those in sparsely populated areas necessitating long-distance drives, e-commerce can be a real improvement. However, it’s also beneficial when retail stores have “significant floor space dedicated to the storage and display of the products,” and when shipping does not require much additional packaging.
The one instance in which e-commerce unequivocally wins is when goods are dematerialized — for instance, buying music over iTunes, streaming movies online rather than renting from a physical store, or downloading documents rather than having them printed and mailed.
…Perhaps the biggest impact of computers is their ability to help designers and manufacturers make things better. Already, many generations of products are prototyped virtually rather than physically using CAD, saving materials, energy, and waste in the development process. This may not have a hugely significant impact by itself, since a few dozen prototypes pale in comparison to a million units shipped, but the increased speed of the development process helps companies do more iterations and work out more bugs before going into production, resulting in leaner designs.
…Conclusion: Green Computing Is Not An Oxymoron
In the end, computers and the internet are not eco-neutral. Some of their impacts are negative, such as energy-intensive server farms, mining and processing of rare minerals for components, and mountains of e-waste exposing recyclers to carcinogens and leaching heavy metals into ground water.
But much of their impact is positive: enabling us to leave our cars at home, streamlining power demand, faciliating renewable energy supply through smart grids, dematerializing commerce, providing tools for eco-design, and improving the energy-intensity of national economies.
(29 November 2007)
U.S. report warns of brownouts on overloaded Net
Vancouver Sun
YouTube videos, Skype calls and file sharing may slow the online experience to a crawl in two years, a U.S. report warns.
Unless $137 billion US is invested to upgrade networks, demand will outstrip capacity. The result, the report from Nemertes Research says, will be regular brownouts in service.
(21 November 2007)
