Submitted: The Two Sides Team September 24, 2012

Perhaps we can finally say goodbye to those simplistic “Go green, go paperless” promotional campaigns. There’s nothing particularly green about the massive data centers that store the internet’s data, The New York Times revealed this past weekend after in-depth investigation. Data centers waste electricity and spew pollutants in a way that “is sharply at
odds with its [the information industry’s] image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness,” the lengthy but clearly written “Power, Pollution, and the Internet” says.
September 21 2012

Dead Tree Edition

Perhaps we can finally say goodbye to those simplistic “Go green, go paperless” promotional campaigns.

There’s nothing particularly green about the massive data centers that store the internet’s data,
The New York Times
revealed this past weekend after in-depth investigation. Data centers
waste electricity and spew pollutants in a way that “is sharply at odds
with its [the information industry’s] image of sleek efficiency and
environmental friendliness,” the lengthy but clearly written “Power,
Pollution, and the Internet” says.

“The industry has long argued that computerizing business transactions
and everyday tasks like banking and reading library books has the net
effect of saving energy and resources.” But data centers use more electricity than the paper industry, according to the
The Times.

Among other highlights of the article:

“Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an
incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online
companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the
clock, whatever the demand.”

“The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the
authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In
Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic
Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel
polluters.”

Data centers use “only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity
powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially
used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity
that could slow or crash their operations.”

Most of the data are created by consumers. “With no sense that data
is physical or that storing it uses up space and energy, those consumers
have developed the habit of sending huge data files back and forth,
like videos and mass e-mails with photo attachments.”

Share this story