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.
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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:More Options? (Score:5, Insightful)
Until they move the large cross-Pacific network connections to the Hoover Dam, it's going to make sense to keep data centers near network lines.
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.
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What percentage of the power consumption of running a data center is cooling? If they were to build a data center in a really cold environment, I wonder if they could pump the resulting heat under the ground in the immediate area, warming it up enough to plant trees...
Planting trees in cold climates would increase warming not decrease or slow it. That's because darker colors adsorb heat. This is happening in the Arctic, ice reflects light but as it melts into liquid water the water adsorbs the light an
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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 glo
In 8 years, CPUs will use far less power. Ad? (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I think the major issue is this: The people who design datacenters are some of the smartest people in the world. They've certainly thought about the issues. They know the cost of electricity.
They know that Intel is delivering 45 nanometer CPU designs. They know that Intel is working on 32 nanometer CPUs, and that there will eventually be 22 nanometer processors, for delivery in 8 years. Each new processor architecture uses less power. So, the problem will solve itself, to some degree.
The article in the New York Times is ignorant, meant for ignorant readers who don't know any better. Maybe someone took money; maybe the NYT article is really a public relations stunt, a way for McKinsey & Company [wikipedia.org] to attract as clients managers who have little technical experience.
A lot of people who talk about being "green", are people who are green in the sense of having little experience.
Re:In 8 years, CPUs will use far less power. Ad? (Score:4, Insightful)
New CPUs may have much better performance/watt, but the overall performance is increased too, thus the amount of actual power used stays the same or even increases.
There's also increasingly bloated software, all this managed high level language code etc, which uses far more energy to do the same work. And modern powerful servers which sit idle for the most part.
You could easily make lower performing servers using modern techniques, and reduce power consumption hugely... Modern embedded processors are faster than high end server processors from a few years ago, and yet use a small fraction of the power, but they wouldn't be good running modern bloated apps in high level languages.
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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 num
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My response was directed at this:
SANs can deliver I/O at speeds local disks can only dream of.
The point being that to get a SAN to deliver "I/O at speeds local disks can only dream of" you need to spend a very, very large amount of money - far more than most companies can afford to and in great disproportion to the benefits they would see.
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I my experience designing buildings, including call centers, data centers, and server rooms, the specifications for the equipment to be used typcially isn't finalized until after the construction of the building is complete.
To guess that evident continuing improvements in computer efficiencies will cause your data center to u
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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 s
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 oc
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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.
w
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Or use power from renewable energy sources, use energy efficient power supplies and switch to coo
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that's not what is worrisome. what is worrisome is that in the antarctic, the concentration of CO2 gas has NEVER gone above 300 PPM in the past 650,000 years of antarctic ice. As of this year, at the mauna loa observatory (middle of the pacific ocean, as far away from civilization as one can get) we hit 385 PPM of CO2 gas
It's getting about
Excellent (Score:5, Funny)
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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].
Falcon
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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.
Mod Up (Score:2)
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.
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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].
That seems unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
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Certainly a best effort is important, but comparing polution output without considering value is worse than useless as a data point.
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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 d
AC/DC conversion is not that wasteful (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, newer data centers tend to be wired with DC power, so that there is only AC/DC conversion at the UPS. DC/DC conversion can be made even more efficient.
Contrast this with running a gasoline engine, which is about 20% efficient.
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false economies (Score:5, Insightful)
let me ask you this - what resources would be consumed if we DIDN'T use computers for these jobs? how many forests would we cut down to store the data in the worlds data centers?
i think people who write this kind of dribble lack any perspective. computers are energy savers, not wasters.
Re:false economies (Score:4, Insightful)
If we measure greenhouse gas production, not as an absolute but as a percentage relative to what is actually required to do the useful component of the work, my guess would be that data centres do not work out to be that green.
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Your post makes absolute sense. I have at least 500 pictures of my son saved on my computer/backed up. I only printed a few of them to create a calendar that I sent to my parents. (not have albums upon albums saved up like my parents did).
I mainly shop online, meaning I don't drive my car to get to "the mall" and waste gas (and dodge all the flyers they try to hand out)!
Two weak examples, but I'm pretty sure you can easily count the things done with computers vs. wi
Which only makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
RS
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Nuclear Powered Aircraft (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nuclear Powered Aircraft (Score:5, Informative)
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Ditto for going by sea, unless you can row!
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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.
Nuclear power plants (Score:5, Insightful)
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. Especially in crowded, not-so-sunny Europe, where you cannot even make a "what if we paved the desert with solar cells" hypothesis.
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Why not? Africa isn't too far south of Europe. It's not any further than the Eastern USA is from the deserts of the USA, mostly in the southwest. The reason that doesn't matter is because we have a national p
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That's a great bit of flamebait, but in case some people buy it..
I'm an electrical engineering student - I'm well aware of the transmission loss. "As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for electricity was 4,000 miles (7,000 km), although all present transmission lines are considerably shorter." [wikipedia.org]
That's at 1980 prices. Just how far across the Mediterannean do you think Africa is, anyway?
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never 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: (Score:2)
I hope they mentioned that Germany decided in 2000 to phase out all of its nuclear reactors with the last one going off the grid in 2020 or 2021
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4536203.stm [bbc.co.uk]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany [wikipedia.org]
The wikipedia article points out that there's a lot of discussion/argument/fighting over the shutdown, due to the increasing costs of fossil fuels. I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention that a significant minority of Germany's power now comes from Wind, but it is in NO means anywhere near enough to cover the total needs (it would need t
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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
Re:Nuclear power plants (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a useful observation to make. Human activity is polluting. If you're not polluting, you're either dead or not doing anything.
Re:Nuclear power plants (Score:5, Informative)
Hooray for virtualization (Score:2, Interesting)
Mod up please (Score:2)
AC has a very good point. Go virtual. Less hardware = less power consumed.
Anyone else remember... (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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If the people doing archaeological dating have to worry about it, I'd say it's major.
Re:Anyone else remember... (Score:4, Informative)
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Got a reference? A peer-reviewed, relatively up to date one? That actually says anthropogenic CO2 is irrelevant, not just that some other study overstates the matter?
Of course, it's harder to troll if you have to post references, so I'm guessing you won't bother.
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data centers are like steam engines (Score:5, Interesting)
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The trend-line fallacy (Score:2)
A little more to it, here (Score:3, Insightful)
Some newly used rack space in datacenters actually offsets other daily fuel burning - sometimes a lot of it.
I say STFU, until.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You get more radiation from eating a BANANA than you do from living next door to a nuclear power plant. And while on the subject, I used to think that these people were simply "NIMBY's", the age old Not In My Back Yard type of folks. But these people aren't NIMBY's, These people are BANANAS! Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. They are flat out anti-progress and they do it in the nicest way "we're trying to help".
I say BULLSHIT! You have three choices: Nuclear Power, Agrarian Society, Global Warming. Pick one.
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All in all, its disingenuous to rail against NIMBY-ism when the above people call the economic shots and have a deregulated industry to boot. Problem is, their nuclear people and their insurance people (darlings though they are) don't want
Consider the source..... (Score:2)
While it's true that cost savings aren't being seen because data center/NOC design is state-of-the-art 1995, there's lots being done to achieve better savings. Virtualization (while not green, still a good performance/watt idea) works wonders. SaaS is in its infancy. Higher storage/watt is here, today, as well. Until we find the end of Moore's Law, we'll continue to be more efficient, if only because energy==m
Why are we comparing to the airline industry? (Score:2, Insightful)
But of course the randomly selected slashdotter has some vested interest in data centers,
So you want to green up the planet? (Score:2)
The reason we have the impact we do on the environment is that there are just too damn many of us, and not many are volunteering to leave the party. Instead, they're inviting their kids over.
And I'm no one to talk, either. I've procreated a little more than my fair share, and my wife won't let me redress the balance. But still, global warming proves that we finally have reached the point where our numbers are detrimental to humanity's welfare. And eating less meat, driving less ofte
Two questions (Score:2)
Second, what idiot is predicting the relative growths and advancements of two industries twelve years from now?
Let me guess, airlines won't pollute as much because most of us will be in our flying cars.
Shut up.
Gore V. Bush dogfood (Score:2)
For those of you who are keeping score on who's talking the talk and who's walking the walk I offer this:
A tale of two houses [snopes.com]
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For those of you who are keeping score on who's talking the talk and who's walking the walk I offer this:
A tale of two houses [snopes.com]
I need to change my pants.
User load is variable, and upgrades are expensive (Score:2)
* User load/demand is variable. A lot of the capacity sizing is not for average demand but for peak demand. For example, mail servers see a lot more use at 1pm on Monday than at 5am on Sunday. Mail servers need enough capacity to deliver an all-company email from the CEO in a timely manner. If you reduce capacity to "even it out", big spikes in email, such as that all-company email from the CEO, cause mail delivery to be delayed many hours. The same
Wouldn't going green be easy for most... (Score:2)
Already have tons of batteries and infrastructure to be able to work off the grid. Diesel generators could be powered by bio-diesel.
Really this is kinda stupid. Data Centers don't emit anything. If the electrical power generators were green, Data Centers would be by default.
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The generators installed at datacenter facilities are backup generators. Their duty cycle is not full-time. Also, that biodiesel needs to come from somewhere, trucked by a vehicle burning biodiesel, etc.
Electricity is the most efficient energy delivery method, we just need to improve the energy generation method.
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Flat out wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Electricity generation *can*, but it doesn't need to. The simple fact is that we can generate electricity without any carbon emissions with hydroelectric where available and nuclear where not. There's no justifiable reason to attribute carbon emissions from a coal fired plant to it's clients; alternatives are available, but regulators have dropped the ball in allowing coal to be used.
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.
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This is such a pernicious, pervasive non-point that I'm physically compelled to respond. Concentrating solar power doesn't stop when the sun goes down. While it's getting sunlight, it fills a heat reservoir that can be drained during the night.
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That's true, but is that view useful in practice?
In practice, professional "Carers" end up driving everyone into a frenzy about the latest fad issue. Tilting at these windmills skews the economy (in the sense that you mean it) much more than simply looking at the dollars does.
Re:Oh no! (how wrong can you be) (Score:2)
economy is not about money. Money is merely a score-keeper.
The Economy IS ALL about money.
However the problem is that significantly more than "5 nines" of people cannot think far enough ahead to factor in the *real long-term economic impact" of what they're doing.
Seriously, if you could factor in *all* the really really really long-term implications (ie "costs") of most things people do today "in modern society" you'd be truly horrified.
So let me repeat myself, in order to be *really* clear about this -
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Economy is about resources. Money is merely one storage medium, and an imperfect one at that.
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Some people insist on using money as the final quantification/valuation of all things, despite the fact that there are many things that it cannot measure responsibly. So regulation steps into the market to make money fundamentalists take notice of the problem, and curbing G
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Well, I would say that carbon caps and trading would fall under category a) above. Such policies would be government artificially and arbitrarily adding costs, according to the political winds.
Some people insist on using whatever environmentalists say as the final quantification of all things, despite the fact that there are many things they cannot measure responsibly.
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Some people insist on using whatever environmentalists say as the final quantification of all things, despite the fact that there are many things they cannot measure responsibly.
Just throwing it back in people's faces doesn't make your argument any more convincing. For one thing, ecologists don't have any single, one-dimensional measurement to which all analysis must eventually be reduced. I also haven't met any reasonable person who would put the "science" of economics on par with ecology. So I don't see what the r
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a) because a government forces them to
b) because an activist forces them to
c) because they think it'll be a selling point
d) because they believe its the Right Thing (tm)
a) The Government frequently steps in and create (dis)incentives or regulations to push individual/business behavior in a direction that they think is proper. The actual argument is a bit more complex, but suffice it to say that you are surrounded every day by government enforced requirements.
b) Free Market at work
c) Free Market at work
d) Not your business
The ONLY reason that I want my datacenter to switch to "Green" power is if and when it is CHEAPER to do so.
Any other reason will make data more expensive, slowing down the economy. It will be rife with unintended consequences. It will be more feel-good, accomplish-nothing "Green" activism.
We're going to have to diversify energy sources sooner or later.
The domestic energy market is going to undergo a "correction" within my lifetime, much l
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In a datacenter thats unacceptable.