Category: Data Center Energy
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.