Category: Environment
- 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.
- Carbon aware workloads – current status, limitations, and opportunities ()
Why isn’t carbon aware workload scheduling more common? Data center level scheduling is infeasible, so what are the opportunities for developers to implement more granular functionality?
- 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.
- 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?
- Useful calculations – energy vs carbon ()
The ultimate goal is a reduction in emissions, but we can’t analyze improvements without reporting energy per unit of work done.
- 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.
- We are ignoring the true cost of water-guzzling data centres ()
Most data centre owners have received the message about reducing their carbon footprint and the transition to renewable energy. We regularly see new projects announced with net-zero carbon goals. They now need to do something similar for water.
- 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.