Update on my power awareness presentation
I've had quite a few comments by mail on my BarcampBrussels presentation about power and ecoawareness in recent datacenters. I've done some additional research, and I'll comment on a few of the most frequent remarks here.No way power costs 70 - 80 eur per A per month
Actually, it does. Belgium's two largest datacenters have increased their prices, and power now costs 70 - 80 eur per A per month in both. In the UK, prices are going up as well, and they are at the same pricing level, if not more expensive already. Please note that I assume 230V, so if you live in a country where you get 110-120V, divide the prices by 2. Note however, that this involves everything that's powerrelated. So not only power-usage, but investments in Diesel generators, UPSes, airco units, cabling etc.
How much tons of CO2 does a datacenter use? How much CO2 emissions can I save by reducing the powerusage of my servers?
This was a tough one, as the numbers I found weren't consistent. My fiancee works at the Bond Beter Leefmilieu, a mother-organisation of all environment organisations in Flanders. They gave me accurate information about the situation in Belgium. In our country, a lot of the electrical power is generated by nuclear power plants which (of course) don't emit any CO2. So if we look at the average power-consumption, 1 kWh of electricity produces 310 g CO2. This means that if your server consumes 1 A on average, it is responsible for 625 kg of CO2 per year.
However, if we are talking about reducing power, we should look about the CO2 emissions of the marginal electrical production. These emissions come from plants that are used to cope with the fluctuating demand of electricity, and are mostly "STEG" power (charcoal and gas) powerplants, which emit a lot more CO2 per kWh: 760 g CO2. This means that if you manage to reduce the power-needs of your infrastructure with 1A, you are saving 1530 kg of CO2 a year! Now imagine you have a big server-park and manage to reduce your powerusage with an average of 100 A. You are then responsible for 153 tons of CO2 emission reduction. That's not bad :)
The whole Kyoto-protocol thing is crap. Being CO2-neutral makes no sense at all. You are naive to believe it does ...
My presentation used the fact that Easynet is CO2-neutral as an example of how larger ISPs become eco-awareness. I don't say it's a good thing, I don't say it's a bad thing. I just used it as an example. I am an engineer, I don't have a PhD in physics or in biology. barcampbrussels
, power
Thank you for this informative post a lot
book reports () (URL) - 11 06 11 - 16:52
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