Category: Data Center Energy
- Is carbon the right metric for developers to optimize? ()
Developers need metrics that are consistent and easy to optimize, but carbon intensity varies in time and space. So when is it a useful metric for developers to consider?
- Paper notes – Mitigating Curtailment and Carbon Emissions through Load Migration between Data Centers ()
This is a good paper that makes valid points about the possibilities of migrating flexible IT workloads, however it makes classic assumptions I see in most papers that discuss this topic.
- Sources of data center energy estimates: A comprehensive review ()
The scientific journal, Joule, has published a paper I’ve co-authored reviewing data center energy estimates between 2007-2021.
- Approaches to calculating network / website energy and carbon ()
Website carbon calculators are not very accurate, especially if they only use data transfer as the metric.
- 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.