Category: Environment
- 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.
- Paper notes – What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law? ()
What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law? Will programmers need to focus on performance or can ARM chips and the cloud save us?
- Standardizing carbon accounting ()
It is currently impossible to properly compare how “sustainable” one product is vs another. Pictures of wind farms look nice, but how do you choose which cloud region to deploy (or move) your resources if there is no way to compare them?
- Zero water in our data centers by 2030: mission impossible? ()
My remarks from a panel discussion on data center water consumption: Zero water in our data centers by 2030: mission impossible?