This blog post was written for Blog Action Day, http://www.blogactionday.org/
Our climate is changing. Probably even more than we know. Many of us know we have to do something about it. The country I live in, The Netherlands, is already making some laws to “help” us, by, for example, prohibiting sale of the old-style light bulbs, in favor of LED lights. Which is good.
But it is not our lights that use a lot of energy. It’s the big companies, who use most of it. And, with computers usually generating the worst energy consumption, it is the IT sector which should change.
Computers in homes and companies: People have them active even when they don’t need them. Each morning they get turned on to check the e-mails, to be turned off when people go to bed. And with a total of about 1.6 billion internet users (source), this uses a lot more than is necessary.
In data-centers, the same happens. Servers are active all the time. However, that is the idea of a server, so it is acceptable. The energy consumption of these may be reduced, but that is not the main issue. The temperature of the average data-center is kept at about 20 degrees Celsius. This is not needed: Servers will perform just as well if they raise this temperature to 30 degrees Celsius. System admins will not like that, which is why it is currently 20 degrees Celsius. But wouldn’t 25 degrees be a better option? It could save lots of energy, because data-centers would have to be cooled less.
Also an option, which I decided to do, is put the servers in “green” data-centers. While everyone knows this doesn’t mean the data-centers are green-c0lored, and it doesn’t mean that it’s 100% climate-neutral, it’s better than the average data-center. The data-center the server of this blog is in, for example, cools the data-center from air from the outside. Since it is a Dutch data-center, it means that the air compressor can be turned off 40% of the time. Also, the power to the data-center is “green”: Produced only with sustainable energy such as wind, sun and biomass.
There are still a lot of things that need to be changed. Now would be a good time.
#1 by Madison Brown on August 12, 2010 - 18:20
it is very evident that climate change is already taking effect in this decade’::