The Dark Side Of The Internet
By Greg Berry
Filed Under The Big Picture |
There was a day, back in the good ‘ol dot com era (and before, when computers were still new and offered unlimited promise) when we used to talk about the paperless office, and ultimately, a paperless life. One of the big promises of this paperless life was how many trees would be spared. And we felt good. Later we realized computers and the Internet enabled us to print many more pages than we ever could before, when it was just us creating our own documents. Good thing the Canadian Boreal Forests are so close. (Joking.)
Fast forward 15 years, now more things run on the Internet than ever. Facebook, Salesforce, iTunes, YouTube, Maps, xBox, Skype. And on and on and on. Since most of us don’t immediately equate the bits and bytes with moving electrons, and moving electrons with burning coal, it’s easy to feel that this web-based lifestyle is pretty green. It turns out it’s actually not. Each and every move we make, the windows we keep open, the programs we run simultaneously-they add up…to a whole lot of electricity and hence, CO2 emissions.
According to The Economist, which quotes tier one researchers McKinsey And Company and the Uptime Institute, the data centers that host and serve the world’s registered web services, accounted for 1.2% of the world’s electricity in 2005. This amount of electricity was emitting more carbon dioxide than Argentina or The Netherlands, and this was before many of the biggest web services came online.
At the end of 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report that details the impact of data centers on the environment. Like any complex report, varying conclusions can be drawn, so feel free to check it out and draw your own. Nonetheless, these analysts, who project data center growth and related carbon emissions, predict that data centers could become worse polluters than the airline transportation industry by 2020. That’s just 12 years from now. Wow.
So, even though your computer and cell phone seem to be these innocuous tools that appear to draw very little energy, it turns out that every time you send a virtual beer to your Facebook buddies, you’re not only polluting their virtual kidney, but also the atmosphere-not to mention their profile page. That’s the bad news. Well, not really all the bad news, as the manufacture and disposal of all the nasty heavy metals that go into the computers, phones and batteries is a whole other story we’ll cover later.
The good news is that there’s some good news…
Renewably powered data centers are popping up. Many of these centers will still need to run be tied to the grid to guarantee performance. (Do you want iTunes to work only when the wind is blowing? Didn’t think so.) They’re not 100% perfect, but it’s a good start. Green House Data is shifting to wind power and IBM opened it’s “greenest” data center, which will be partially powered by more than 1 million kilowatt hours of wind energy.
Servers are getting greener. The industry has banded together to create The Green Grid. The companies who make the servers and other hardware for data centers are working on initiatives to reduce power consumption in each unit, which can have a huge impact overall. (Look out for some of the greenwashing by these companies, they’re a long way from total sustainability.)
Software is slowly getting more efficient. It’s still early on this one, but there are efforts to write very clean code that will use fewer computing cycles, and ultimately less power to achieve the same outcome. Google has always been about very lightweight applications, but it’s going to take a long time for YouTube, World of Warcraft, Netflix and others to figure out how to reduce the impact of those high-bandwidth products. Microsoft’s legendary spaghetti code may be the worst offender of all, if measured in terms of overall relative impact. Local firm Rally Software is doing a good job helping many of the web services companies develop cleaner code. Rally is leading the industry by striving to be a zero emissions company, although they’re the first to admit they’re facing some big hurdles along the way.
So, the question is, what can you do about it?
- Use solar web hosting for your own websites
- Send feedback to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or whatever major online services you use and ask them what they are doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
- Share their replies with everyone you know (like all your friends on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook)
- If you want to totally geek out, check out this “Google Tech Talk” by Jonathan Koomey on this topic (that’s right, on YouTube)
Greg Berry wears many hats. He is the CXO of Business Catapult, which matches investors and entrepreneurs and the founder and Partner at nuance intelligence, a digital media consultancy. He blogs regularly at nuance about how a broad set of changes, from globalization to digital media and sustainability are changing the rules of doing business right under our feet. Greg is a partner or associate in many virtual teams, and is connected to lots of fascinating cutting-edge projects.
Posted on June 26, 2008 |
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6 Responses to “The Dark Side Of The Internet”
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Greg, any idea how difficult it would be to charge a laptop from a solar panel mounted to the back of my bike? Wondering how big of a panel/battery set up I would need….obviously this is no help to the server farm energy drain, but at least I’m thinking this morning…which is a remarkable feat given the leaf blower guy standing next to me pointing his death machine at the same leaf for the past 2 minutes….it’s man vs. leaf on the mean streets of Boulder this morning.
A note for the Business Catapult:
….Tech Talk reported earlier this year that although the overall level venture funding in the IT industry dropped in 2007, green technologies were the exception.
Mathew,
I know people who use those thin-film solar chargers for cell phones and iPods. Don’t know about computers. Certainly something to look into, and I think that if there’s not a solution out there today, there will be tomorrow.
Thank you for this article. Finally someone who wants to discuss how not eco-friendly all these electronics are. Plus, I think there’s just something sad in the way these devices are helping us to lose touch with physical reality.
Mathew, you might want to check out ReWare, and ask if they have such a thing, or have the resources to develop it. It’s a great idea. If not ReWare, or you don’t find it elsewhere, I bet you Sustainable Village would be able to source and build it!
Jilian, I’ve been having this discussion with friends and colleagues now for the better part of a decade.
I think you need to separate the physical devices from the way people use them. Because of a laptop and a cell phone, I can work from my home, live in Boulder, collaborate with people around the world and not drive my car very much. Without them, I would tied to an office, and all of the suburban sprawl that goes with it.
That’s not to disagree with you — I think the paradox is more nuanced than that. It’s clear that the prevailing (dying?) culture is increasingly detached from the natural rhythms that support life on the planet. At a personal level, I spend a lot of time connected to nature, which is the most fulfilling time of my day, week, life.
These are challenging times. At least we’re having the discussion. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
[...] wrote a piece over at eCo Times which ran last week that looks into the carbon footprint of data centers. Here’s an excerpt: According to The Economist, which quotes tier one researchers McKinsey [...]