Comments on: How Green is The Cloud?

By: Dave Johnson

Dave Johnson — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:34:07 +0000

James there has got to be some implications for pricing of cloud computing as we move to a low carbon economy as well - I think that cloud providers will likely become energy traders. I wrote up some initial thoughts on the subject a few months back: http://nullisnotanobject.com/2008/11/cloud-computing-smart-grids-smart-clouds/

By: Ludovic

Ludovic — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:06:32 +0000

James,

Interesting post… There would be much to say indeed on:
- the footprint of using commodity hardware at low utilisation % and with low recycling rates
- The benefits of dematerialisation

By: Preposterous Stories Make for Good BS Indicators « SmoothSpan Blog

Preposterous Stories Make for Good BS Indicators « SmoothSpan Blog — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:56:18 +0000

[...] Governor, “How Green is the Cloud?”: James cuts to the heart of the matter, which is that a lot of entities want to use the Green Banner [...]

By: James Governor

James Governor — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:14:50 +0000

very interesting alan. at the moment it seems like everyone else is taking heat, but Google doth seem to protest rather more than I would expect.

By: alan p

alan p — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:04:23 +0000

James – left this on Greenmonk as well – a bit of top-level analysis I did on my blog using kWh, which are less, umm, “flexible” than CO” grams. The Times article gives Google the energy needs of a 500,000 person city, the Google figures give the energy needs of a village.

Google’s infrastructure is far closer in scale to that required by a moderate sized city than a village. So, if not search, something is eating up all the power.

(See here http://broadstuff.com/archives/1494-Google-searching-not-eco-friendly.html)