Cloud Computing’s Hidden ‘Green’ Benefits

Cloud computing energy consumption is a source of much debate. On one side, some see a massive new form of industrialization gobbling up resources; with large cloud and social networking sites consuming megawatts of power to feed insatiable computing needs.

Greenpeace called attention to the growing, power-hungry data center footprint, citing estimates that cloud computer sites could consume up to 622.6 billion kWh (kilowatts per hour) of power.  Jonathan Koomey, Ph.D., consulting professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, estimates that the cloud is already responsible for 1-2% of the world’s electricity use…


On the other hand, there is also a view that cloud adoption, by moving companies to share pooled resources and facilities, is helping to contain what could be relentless, viral growth of duplicate data centers across every enterprise. Two recent industry-funded studies make the case for cloud as energy-saver.

A report issued this summer by the Carbon Disclosure Project, supported by AT&T, finds that a company that adopts cloud computing can reduce its energy consumption, lower its carbon emissions and decrease its capital expenditure on IT resources while improving operational efficiency. By 2020, the group estimates, large US companies that use cloud computing can achieve annual energy savings of $12.3 billion and annual carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil.

In another study released at the end of last year, Accenture, Microsoft and WSP Environment and Energy estimated that that a 100-person company with applications deployed in the cloud can reduce energy consumption and emissions by more than 90 percent.

Koomey also recently observed that computer energy efficiency appears to be doubling every 18 months, much in the fashion of Moore’s Law, in which raw computing power increases every 18 months.

Efforts to green up data centers and cut consumption – especially at the larger cloud and social networking facilities – are the right things to do. However, I have to agree with my friend Dave Linthicum, author of the seminal work Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise, who points out that IT managers and companies don’t necessarily put green first on the top of their IT strategy agendas. Cost savings and competitiveness drive decision making about resource consumption.

Perhaps there’s a broader perspective that needs to be taken as well. As a result of our move to an online economy, it’s possible that we’re saving more resources than we give ourselves credit for.  As many businesses are now digital, and operate virtually versus physically, there’s a potentially a significant degree of resource consumption that no longer takes place, that hasn’t been tracked. Perhaps, we’ll realize, for every kWh computers and data centers consume, they give back x number of kWhs.

Consider e-commerce, something that has been around in force for well over a decade now. How many physical retail stores have not been built, and do not operate, due to e-commerce? (For purposes of this argument, I’m using the term “online economy” fairly broadly, to cover all types of computing that invokes services from someone else’ servers, including cloud computing, e-commerce, Internet computing, and social networking.)

Or consider other potential hidden benefits of the online economy. How many automobile trips and additional office space is no longer necessary due to telecommuting and remote work? How much travel is no longer necessary because of online college courses?  How many trees are no longer cut down because of electronic documents, PDFs, and collaborative solutions?  How much drilling and digging is no longer required to find resources, due to better data on seismic formations and simulations?  How much travel among insurance claims adjusters has been saved because of mobile and Internet technologies? The list could go on and on.

Part of the challenge is the complexity of measuring all this. I spoke with John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, to get his take on this question. He points out that sometimes, consumption is shifted, rather than moderated. “If you’re just looking at overall power consumption, in some ways cloud computing has pushed consumption up overall, on a per-unit-of-valuable-work basis,” he says. “We’re much more efficient than we were five, 10, or 20 years ago, but we’re doing more computing.” Engates also points out that e-commerce has shifted patterns as well – individual deliveries are shipped directly to consumers, requiring courier services, versus bulk deliveries to stores.

Still, Engates believes that many of the groups that are warning about data center power consumption may be taking too narrow of a view and the efficiencies and innovation that computing has delivered back to the economy. “They’re not really looking what what’s being done in data centers necessarily; they’re just saying, power is power,” he points out. “But I don’t think that’s fair, because there’s a lot of innovation, things we couldn’t do before that are only possible because of IT and computers.”  For example, he illustrates, computing has delivered significant productivity increases in the agricultural sector. There are Rackspace customers who are employing online monitoring solutions to address energy management across facilities, he adds.