Category: Data Center Energy
- How much energy does cryptocurrency use? ()
Is cryptocurrency / Bitcoin bad for the environment? In 2019 crypto consumed 70-90 TWh of electricity globally, with 60-70 TWh of that from Bitcoin mining. What that means for carbon emissions depends on where the mining happens.
- Cloud emissions transparency stage 1 completed – what next? ()
Customers should now be asking their suppliers for the carbon footprint of the software services they buy.
- Paper Notes – The overlooked environmental footprint of increasing Internet use ()
The methodology is invalid, which the authors acknowledge but ignore. This means the results of this article aren’t particularly useful.
- Clean energy buying incentives for data centers ()
Using a marginal emissions-based sustainability score incentivizes migrating workloads to a region with a lower marginal emissions factor. The emissions factor for that workload would reduce, but does it incentivize the deployment of new clean energy?
- Paper Notes – Assessing anthropogenic heat flux of public cloud data centers: current and future trends ()
Data centers are not 100% efficient, so they generate waste heat, which causes anthroprogenic heat flux, and can therefore be linked to global warming. But how much? And should we be concerned?
- Dirty data? Carbon footprint of photo storage ()
An example of poor quality research with flawed assumptions designed as click-bait to get news coverage timed to land during COP26. Deleting a few photos will have zero impact on your carbon footprint.
- Extrapolation of data center energy estimates ()
There are currently only two credible estimates for global data center energy consumption: 196 TWh to 400 TWh for 2020. Why do we see vastly higher reports?
- What is sustainable computing? ()
Sustainable computing concerns the consumption of computing resources in a way that means such usage has a net zero impact on the environment.
- Paper notes – A systematic review of the costs and impacts of integrating variable renewables into power grids ()
My notes on the paper: Heptonstall, P.J. & Gross, R.J.K. (2021) A systematic review of the costs and impacts of integrating variable renewables into power grids. Nature Energy. 6 (1), 72–83.
- How energy efficient is application streaming? ()
As more applications are run through a web browser, even that is beginning to be streamed from the cloud. Is that the best use of our now highly efficient computers? How energy efficient is application streaming?