The Cloud Will Get Dirtier
There’s a new report out from a very well-respected environmental authority, Greenpeace, that paints a dark picture for cloud computing pollution. I thought it was so interesting because when a lot of people talk about cloud computing they can make erroneous assumptions that the cloud is carbon-free. This comes from the notion that by not having to run and maintain a slew of internal servers, companies reduce their energy consumption – and thus emissions.
Well, the Greenpeace study, “Make it Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change,” says quite the opposite. The study, which dubs 2010 as “The Year of the Cloud” due to the growth of new cloud innovations such as e-readers Kindle and the iPad (not to mention the rising number of enterprises migrating to the cloud to do business), says cloud computing GHG emissions are set to triple by 2020. As more people buy and use Kindle and iPad, there’ll be more need for cloud data centers, and thus more power needed to run them.
Specifically, the report finds that, “at current growth rates, data centers and telecommunication networks, the two key components of the cloud, will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatts hours of electricity in 2020, more than triple their current consumption and over half the current electricity consumption of the United States. That’s more than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined.
Further, Greenpeace urges the IT industry to convert to renewable energy when possible, for example, solar or wind-powered energy. In a move in the opposite direction, Facebook earlier this year opened a new data center in Oregon, powered by a coal plant in Idaho.
To me, it’s kind of a “Catch-22″ situation when you talk about carbon emissions from the cloud. Yes, there’s definitely a need to explore and adopt alternative energy sources to run data centers, but think of all the trees we’re not cutting down by more people reading books on Kindle. Or, what about all those planes grounded because people are now meeting via SaaS virtual meetings programs? And, yes, companies, especially large ones, are saving by not running cooling systems to keep their servers maintained.
Interested in how much your enterprise is contributing to cloud computing pollution? Well, cloud monitoring reports, for example, number of instances and performance trends, can give you some idea of the resources cloud platforms and services are using to support your business.