Datacenters cause as much CO2 as aviation

[Glade]

Item on BBC news about the CO2 caused by electricity used in datacenters... apparently our mass usage of Netflix, YouTube and the like is as bad as the aviation industry... no stats on how much CO2 per episode of Breaking bad watched vs smashing it up in the bar on an A380 to Dubai.

Interesting, because I imagine a lot of right on preachy types are not thinking about the effect of streaming the flavour of the month... but I also cant imagine that watching Picard on Amazon prime is as bad as mincing over to China on a business ticket.

[Hoofy]

I read somewhere that if you use your phone for an hour a day for a year it was the equivalent of 4 flights.

[Roofless Toothless]

The cultivation of rice in paddyfields produces as much methane as the farming of ruminants.

[Gargamel]

Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is huge. One BC transaction uses enough electricity to supply a normal family house for two months.

[PositronicRay]

Hoofy said:

I read somewhere that if you use your phone for an hour a day for a year it was the equivalent of 4 flights.

Think about that one for a moment. How much power does a smart phone consume?

[mr_spock]

PositronicRay said:

Hoofy said:

I read somewhere that if you use your phone for an hour a day for a year it was the equivalent of 4 flights.

Think about that one for a moment. How much power does a smart phone consume?

I suspect they're also including a portion of the servers and network it takes to run the back end stuff like iCloud, AWS, app servers, mail servers, web servers you access and so on. And the 3G/4G network. And wifi.

[Agammemnon]

Fractionally off topic, I was involved in the installation of back-up generators for a pair of datacentres; there were four 20-litre quad turbo V16s each.

I suspect their carbon footprint would be significant.

[DaveCWK]

Gargamel said:

Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is huge. One BC transaction uses enough electricity to supply a normal family house for two months.

It's ridiculous isn't it - I'm surprised it doesn't get more coverage.

[Gecko1978]

mr_spock said:

PositronicRay said:

Hoofy said:

I read somewhere that if you use your phone for an hour a day for a year it was the equivalent of 4 flights.

Think about that one for a moment. How much power does a smart phone consume?

I suspect they're also including a portion of the servers and network it takes to run the back end stuff like iCloud, AWS, app servers, mail servers, web servers you access and so on. And the 3G/4G network. And wifi.

Why not just say using stuff that needs energy uses as much energy as other stuff. Its total bks.

I bet if we looked up the energy used by say the Peleton on line bikes and extrapolate the results we could say in 1 day 4m Peleton users produced more C02 than a coal power station did in north North Korea on a mild day in August

[Teddy Lop]

PositronicRay said:

Hoofy said:

I read somewhere that if you use your phone for an hour a day for a year it was the equivalent of 4 flights.

Think about that one for a moment. How much power does a smart phone consume?

most smartphones seem to hold around 3000mAh.

For comparison the battery in a PHEV/BEV car can be 4000-35,000 times that and a Boeing 777 can take off carrying around 670million times more in fuel energy capacity.

As for datacentres I'm not sure the comparison is all that valid, as its millions of people using tiny bits each for an enormous range of tasks, from essential to frivilous, many of which are more energy efficient than how you'd do the task traditionally ie pre mass internet.

[biggles330d]

No idea of the numbers but it doesn't surprise me. Data centres use a lot of processing power, are processing an exponentially growing demand from all of us taking advantage of faster comms connections, exploding social media, personal connectivity and content being generated by each of us and more 'formal' producers.

Processing power generates heat, data centres need cooling - a lot of it, so masses of air conditioning. Up here in Scotland one of the big tech companies has started experimenting dropping data centres into the sea off the north coast as a means of reducing their need for air con and using cold sea temperatures to keep things cool.

Its like power generation I suppose - few end users (until relatively recently) really connected our individual use to smoke belching out of a coal fired power station as we all gorge on the output and availability of electricity. Out of sight, out of mind.

I was surprised at the news of 'hundreds of thousands' of data centres around the world, but the enormous power they consume doesn't surprise me at all.

[Murph7355]

Gecko1978 said:

Why not just say using stuff that needs energy uses as much energy as other stuff. Its total bks.
....

That IS what these factoids are saying

Without wishing to get all Chris Packham about it, what is bks is whining about our impact on our environment without dealing with his elephant in the room.

It's the typical approach of the "right on". Tinker with the edges making no bloody difference other than irritating large swathes of the populous in an effort to make them feel better about themselves.

It'll end badly.

Pragmatism seems to be in short supply.

[MrOrange]

I suspect a bit of a non-topic. Two of the top three providers of cloud services (AWS, Google & Azure) are mostly carbon neutral. The relentless greening of the ‘leccy grid will remove this as an issue this decade, I suspect. FYI, the average CO2 emissions of a single page view on the Internet is somewhere around 1-2g.

Swapping planes over to ‘leccy is a much tougher proposition.

[rscott]

MrOrange said:

I suspect a bit of a non-topic. Two of the top three providers of cloud services (AWS, Google & Azure) are mostly carbon neutral. The relentless greening of the ‘leccy grid will remove this as an issue this decade, I suspect. FYI, the average CO2 emissions of a single page view on the Internet is somewhere around 1-2g.

Swapping planes over to ‘leccy is a much tougher proposition.

And the likes of Google are taking innovative steps to minimise their footprint, eg this repurposed paper mill - https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations...

[Megaflow]

Agammemnon said:

Fractionally off topic, I was involved in the installation of back-up generators for a pair of datacentres; there were four 20-litre quad turbo V16s each.

I suspect their carbon footprint would be significant.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they were a lot bigger than 20l. I saw a V16 genset once, that was 64l...

[ellroy]

You can add the Chinese coal mine fires to the issue, roughly 1% of global CO2 by some accounts, little bit more than the total for the U.K.

So best that we go back to the dark ages.

[NGRhodes]

Our team looks after some research HPC clusters, over 10000 cores high density + last gen still power d as currently still being retired. We are finding it very hard to calculate our energy usage or carbon footprint by any useful metric; shared data centre, but we use liquid cooled cabs, mixed energy sources make it ambiguous at any point in time. It is something we are wanting to monitor for our next gen of HPC and a can be used as a factor in future research project proposals.
We are very aware that we are the big elephant in the room when it comes to our University's sustainability desires.

Edited by NGRhodes on Thursday 5th March 09:16

[bigandclever]

Streaming grumble flicks generates as much CO2 per year as is emitted by countries such as Belgium, Bangladesh and Nigeria. So, ban Belgium.

[FunkyNige]

The BBC stats podcast More or Less spoke a bit about this when there was some stat announced that an hour of Netflix was the same as driving 5 miles (or something like that, it turns out to be nonsense). From memory it's the same as driving 30 metres, or something like that. It's here if you want a listen (30 mins, I think the Netflix bit is about 10 minutes)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0819sc4

Similarly, the Radio 4 podcast The Digital Human had an episode exploring a town in America that has dirt cheap electricity that was swamped by people coming in and setting up BitCoin mining operations, from the sounds of it every vacant building was rented and a bunch of bitcoin mining rigs(?) put in. So much so that the council banned bitcoin mining operations for a while https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Plattsburgh-lift...
Link to the podcast here (30 mins)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fpnk

[turbobloke]

Here's a perspective to consider. Grasses, shrubs, crops, trees, phytoplankton, cyanobacteria and photosynthesising algae will be very grateful (to datacentres) and as they underpin the global food chain, so should we.

Global net ecosystem production increased by > 117 TgC per year between 1995 and 2014 with the vast majority of that increase (90%) due to 'aerial fertilization effects' from increased CO2 levels, see Fernández-Martínez et al. This hasn't stopped because Greta.