Where is all that data that we click into every day stored? All the Google searches and Wikipedia hits? Using the internet and remote data sources and storage seems weightless -and geeks refer to virtual data storage as 'the cloud' - suggesting a fluffy and seemingly innocuous 'never-never' place. The reality is somewhat different - our hunger for remotely sourced data and entertainment is giving rise to huge data processing warehouses the size of football fields - where banks of servers, strung together by fat cables, need constant air conditioning. Jim Thomas paints a different picture in November's Ecologist: "Far from being weightless, the expanding digital cloud is really an enormous necklace of steel silicon and concrete. That necklace is now growing heavy as a global building bonanza in now underway". Google alone spent $2.4 Bn on data centres in 2007 and the demand for power from data centres in the San Francisco region increased from 70 MW to 500 MW in just eighteen months. It is estimated that a single search query to Google uses 11 Watts of energy- equivalent to keeping a fluorescent bulb switched on for an hour. If I think about how many hits I do in a week I am ashamed. Major date processors are looking at ways of reducing their carbon footprint (and electricity bills!) by using sustainable sources of energy - locating their facilities near cold and fast flowing rives. Google is even looking at putting them out to (cold) seas. Even if / when they manage to reduce their CO2 emissions, the data centres also generate vast amounts of e-waste - in the circuit boards and in the coolants used in the air-conditioning. I thought we were moving to a lighter post-industrial, information society. These findings suggest that we may once again just be dumping our wastes in someone else’s backyard. The moral is to think before you search for data that you might already have.
P.S. Thanks to Nick at Nick Here and Now - whose one liner on this topic reminded me that I had planned a blog on this some weeks ago
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4 comments:
Thanks for that. Not being a techie, I was ignorant of all the facts and figures. The scale of energy use, carbon production and e-waste is alarming. But we've all got so dependent on the internet in so many ways - searches, blogs, facebook, news updates, paying bills, purchases etc - how can we make anything but minor cutbacks? We're all hugely addicted and there are now big businesses dependent on our continued addiction.
Thanks for that thought-provoking post. I mentioned it to my ten-year-old daughter, who told me "each time you send an email you use two pieces of coal". I am now feeling really stupid about my online activities - not just working but reading news, playing scrabble, chatting on facebook... Time to rethink.
The kids today may have a better grip of reality than their elders (or at least yours do). But I'm surprised she knows what a lump of coal is! Has she ever held one or smelt it burn and felt the face-tingling heat it gives off?
She certainly has - her grandparents have a coal fire. In fact all my children are pyromaniacs and given to making bonfires in the garden at any opportunity.
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