[LINK] It's big, expanding and has a carbon footprint to match

[Richard Chirgwin]

...which includes the day's favourite howler:
> Consider that the amount of raw data 
> in the world - balance sheets, recipes, form guides, the novels that 
> Google is gradually digitising - doubles every four years. Consider, 
> further, that only 2 per cent of that data is digital, an amount that 
> doubles every 16 months.
RC

Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
> It's big, expanding and has a carbon footprint to match
> Fairfax
> GERARD WRIGHT
> http://busselton.yourguide.com.au/news/national/national/general/its-big-expanding-and-has-a-carbon-footprint-to-match/1415341.aspx?storypage=0
> 23/01/2009 11:00:01 PM
>
> A riddle. It's invisible but ubiquitous, and growing exponentially. Even 
> as it provides the capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, its own 
> carbon footprint is ever larger. It is the fuel of clouds and the stuff 
> that races through fibre optic cables at the speed of light.
>
> It is, of course, the internet, or more specifically, Information and 
> Communication Technology (ICT). At institutions as diverse as Melbourne 
> University, and its counterparts in the University of California (UC) 
> system in San Diego and Irvine, it frames the next generation of virtual 
> meetings, with instantaneous transmission of image and sound, from near 
> or far.
>
> Larry Smarr is 54, and has lived through what amounts to multiple 
> generations of the life of the worldwide web, from conception in the 
> mid-1980s, when he fostered the network of connected computers known as 
> the National Science Foundation Net, to the ultra high-speed present.
>
> As Smarr explained it at the West Coast Leadership Dialogue conference 
> here in Palo Alto, California, the future of the internet can be viewed 
> in two dimensions. The first is to be faster, using fibre-optic lines to 
> transfer large volumes of information almost instantaneously - no longer 
> just as pictures or text on a screen, but ultra high-definition, skin 
> tone-perfect live images, at 10,000 megabytes per second. The second is 
> to be both clean and be cleaner, reversing its current position, as a 
> significant and growing contributor to the carbon dioxide production 
> that the vast majority of scientists believe is the principal cause of 
> global climate change.
>
> In the United States, the power consumed by computer data centres 
> exceeded the demand of the nation's TV sets three years ago. In 
> Australia, 200 million tonnes of its annual emission of 576 million 
> tonnes of carbon dioxide is caused by electricity, gas and water, with 
> information and communication technology accounting for 20 per cent of 
> those emissions. Globally, this technology produces roughly the same 
> volume of emissions as the aviation industry.
>
> But that is the very least of it. Consider that the amount of raw data 
> in the world - balance sheets, recipes, form guides, the novels that 
> Google is gradually digitising - doubles every four years. Consider, 
> further, that only 2 per cent of that data is digital, an amount that 
> doubles every 16 months. This is the staggering volume of stuff that 
> another speaker at the Stanford University conference, a leading 
> software and hardware executive, explained, must be "processed, stored, 
> moved, visualised and shared".
>
> The power demand works in two ways, with every watt of electricity used 
> in processing requiring a compensatory half watt in cooling, the result, 
> Smarr explained, of silicon chips that have become smaller, faster and 
> infinitely more complex, but also hotter.
>
> This equation is sending the biggest companies if not off the grid, 
> certainly further afield. Consider Google, with its headquarters a short 
> drive south of here, on Silicon Valley's El Camino Real.
>
> The search engine monolith owns hundreds of thousands of servers, and is 
> building a massive new data processing centre in suburban Portland to 
> house them. There it will draw on the 85-megawatt line that once 
> serviced a nearby aluminium smelter (now decommissioned) to power the 
> servers, and the waters from the dammed Columbia River, to cool them.
>
> That line will barely cover Google's needs. An article in Harper's 
> magazine suggested that within three years, the Portland data centre 
> would need 103 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 82,000 homes.
>
> Another data centre, in Canada, is being built next to a 
> hydro-electricity plant. Smarr said the CSIRO is looking to do the same 
> thing in Australia. It is co-owner with Australian tertiary institutions 
> of a fibre-optic network that can move information at the rate of 1 
> gigabit per second, or 250 times faster than the standard Sydney 
> broadband connection.
>
> "There's not a hydro site in the world that hasn't been visited by 
> Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, to see if they can set up a data centre 
> there," Smarr said. The data centres are the physical manifestation of 
> the internet and ICT. They are also the places where the carbon 
> footprint of the web will grow or shrink, if, instead of electricity, 
> they can be run off alternate sources of energy such as solar, hydro or 
> biofuel. The sense of urgency at the conference about addressing the 
> internet's carbon footprint and its associated data storage, was real 
> but had less to do with altruism about the planet's future and much more 
> to do with the financial bottom line.
>
>